Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-06-Speech-3-152"
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"en.20060906.21.3-152"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, what a lot of inaccuracies and intellectual dishonesty has been printed in a good many columns on the Middle East crisis in August and uttered by a great many politicians! The attacker has often been confused with the attacked, and the real motivation behind the provocation unleashed by Hizbollah, with its launching of missiles against Israel and kidnapping of two of their soldiers, has hardly ever been spelt out. It is in fact the same goal that the President of Iran has declared more than once: ‘to wipe Israel off the map’.
If that is the aim of certain governments and of the terrorist fundamentalism that they maintain, we need to have the courage and the loyalty to say that Europe’s primary task is to support and defend the existence of the State of Israel and its people and to demand its recognition by those who still refuse to grant it out of short-sighted folly. It is only on these conditions and by returning to the roadmap that we shall be able to have a Palestinian State that is itself recognised, free and safe, as well as peace in the Middle East.
These are the objectives that we must achieve by means of every possible effort and consensus. They are very different from Hizbollah’s objectives, which are to destroy a democratic state that is recognised by the international community and a member of the United Nations.
Hizbollah is a religious ideological movement represented in the parliament of a neighbouring state, albeit by a minority, but it also has an armed autonomous wing outside the state structure that is supplied with arms and money by two other states in the region, both of which have the destruction of Israel as their primary aim.
How can we maintain equally close relations with these two sides, which are so opposed and different in their objectives? One side is defending its legitimate survival as a democratic state, while the other is the armed wing of the fight against democracy and the West!
We support the UNIFIL force, which must do everything it can to guarantee disarmament and to support the legitimate Lebanese Government, in the hope that the Lebanese authorities will no longer adopt their ambiguous positions of recent weeks. UNIFIL’s only interlocutors must be the Israeli and Lebanese Governments.
The European Union, which is at last acting in unison, must enforce the UN resolutions and commit all its efforts to providing humanitarian aid, restarting the talks and promoting a culture of mutual respect. I still believe that, if Israel were part of the European Union, peace in the Middle East would be assured to a greater extent. Here and now I reiterate my call for the Council to declare that the embassies of EU countries throughout the world will from now on recognise Israeli citizens as European citizens."@en1
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