Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-03-10-Speech-1-041"
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"en.20080310.15.1-041"2
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"Mr President, the situation in Gaza is, first and foremost, a humanitarian disaster. No amount of condemnation of any party to the conflict will solve that.
Gaza has been besieged since June of last year. One and a half million people are trapped with hopelessly insufficient provision of water, electricity, fuel and sewage disposal. Two years ago, three out of every five Gazans depended on UN assistance; it is now four out of every five. Businesses are bankrupt, jobs are almost impossible to find and the situation is worse than at any point since the Israeli annexation of the territory in 1967. The Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, has been held prisoner since June 2006, and I believe some 11 000 Palestinians languish in Israeli jails.
The major condemnation of the European Union in all of this is that we have followed blindly the strategy of the Americans. Marc Otte, the European Union’s Special Representative, speaking to our Delegation for relations with the Palestinian Legislative Council recently, said that, on strategy, the European Union follows the USA. The most obvious result of this is that Palestinian infrastructure, funded by the European taxpayer, is being regularly destroyed by the Israeli army using American weapons. Should we be committing European money in this way, in these circumstances? If ever there was a need for a common foreign and security policy for the European Union, surely this is it!
My group welcomes the informal truce reached at lunchtime today. We wish Egypt success in its mediation talks, but we are convinced that the cycle of violence, which most recently led to 56 deaths in Gaza on 1 March 2008 and eight deaths in Jerusalem on Saturday, cannot be broken by violence.
For peace to succeed, we need dialogue. Annapolis promised peace within 10 months, but many of us believe that, once again, Israel is trying to de-legitimise every interlocutor. Hamas continues to be cynical with its policy of rocket attacks, knowing that the response will be disproportionate.
We condemn violence from all sides. Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself against indiscriminate attacks on civilians, but it has a duty as a democracy to be more just than its disposable power implies. We seem to be getting further away from a two-state solution – whether it is the rocket attacks on Ashkelon or whether it is the 530 new settler homes just announced in Givat Ze’ev, near Ramallah.
The policy of the West has been based on three assumptions: number one, you cannot possibly talk to Hamas; number two, Israel is the only democracy in the region and must be treated as a normal democracy and, number three, Mr Abbas is the voice of the reasonable Palestinians. Many in my group question those three assumptions and believe that our policy needs to be looked at again urgently to find a situation where those communities can live together."@en1
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