Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-24-Speech-3-039"
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"en.20020424.3.3-039"2
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"Mr President, like the last speaker, I was also in the Jenin refugee camps yesterday. The horror we witnessed has been described by previous speakers.
It is not just a question of Jenin. The Palestinians we spoke to told us that the situation was the same in Nablus, in Ramallah and in all the cities of the West Bank.
The horror is also political. The Palestinian Authority is completely destroyed. They destroyed the ministries, the schools, the infrastructures, the archives; everything. Meanwhile, on the road from Jerusalem to Jenin – on which police vehicles, tanks and jeeps stopped us frequently – we saw colonies of foreigners who arrive on Palestinian land, which looked like residential areas of Paris, London or Madrid, or any European capital. Wealth next to misery. We saw that it is possible for a sovereign State to confine the President of the Authority of a territory which has absolutely nothing to do with it, or a leader such as Barghuti, or how helicopters and tanks carry out terrorism. In fact, there are terrorists who commit suicide out of desperation, but there are also terrorist helicopters. We witnessed this the day before yesterday.
With this in mind, I can only express pessimism if there is no clear intervention by the international community and the UN, the European Union and the United States in particular. Nothing can be done if the UN resolutions are not truly applied. I am aware – like everybody – of the initial Arab opposition to Israel, but this is not the fundamental problem today. The problem is that Sharon, and practically all the others, believe in their historical, moral, cultural and technological superiority. A religious minister who recently entered the government said that all the Palestinians should be thrown into the sea and that those who stayed there would be like the Turks in Germany or the Algerians in France. The progressives themselves do not really want a Palestinian state. In the face of this situation, what can the
do when they are divided by settlements of colonists, by roads which are only used by colonists and the army, and divided by the army itself, in an area which furthermore is small and would lack, for example, the gorgeous Jordan valley?
I believe that the Palestinians are right – the President of the Palestinian Parliament, or the successor in Jerusalem to the late Hussein – when they express their desperation to us. For us the only solution is the intervention of the UN and the European Union in particular. They cannot sort things out amongst themselves because Israel does not want a Palestinian State, it does not conform to their ideology, that is the reality. I believe that we must be aware of this problem in order to resolve it.
I do not believe that Europe can feel guilty in this situation. Many sources in the United States say that Europe must not get involved given their previous experience. We are European citizens of the present, we cannot feel guilty and we cannot fall prey to the blackmail of anti-Semitism: since we are in favour of a Palestinian State, we are anti-Semites. It is not a religious problem but a political problem: a State which is humiliating and destroying a population. The problem is the occupation and how to convince, how to impose a solution on Israel and how to help Palestine. That is the issue for the European Union."@en1
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