Summary of the statement by Marco Pannella at the press conference “Israel in the European Union”.


“The problem in the Middle East cannot be solved by another Munich or another Yalta. A new peace founded only on the concession of territories and on a Palestinian State, governed by an anti-democratic, oppressive regime, will inevitably lead back to war. Our position has been and continues to be opposed to the pacifism which has produced war, death and dictatorship in the last seventy years.

It is not a matter of changing dictators and dictatorial regimes, fundamentalist and totalitarian, but of freeing the men and women of the Middle East from such regimes and giving them democracy, as in Italy and Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and in the Soviet empire until a few years ago.

Israel is the bridgehead, the potential virus of democracy and freedom in the Middle East. We must aim for the “Israelisation” of the Middle East for the life and the freedom of all the people of the region. It is up to Europe to defend this hope, this tumour of democracy and freedom, by offering Israel immediate membership of the European Union. It is up to Europe to decide whether Israel can be the harbinger of the democratic revolution of the Middle East, of its liberation from the various types of dictatorship which characterise it. Europe bears the grave responsibility of choosing whether to side with the those in favour of democracy or with those against democracy in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Iran...

We are here, with the Transnational Radical Party and Radicali Italiani, as believers in nonviolence and democracy, to launch this battle with Israel - an international battle that will be difficult to start, but that once started will be won.

Only immediate Israeli membership of the European Union can bring hope to the Middle East: to the men and women of Israel, who belong to a nation where democracy and rights survive despite being under siege, where they are alive and kicking despite fifty years of war; and to the men and women of Palestine and the Middle East, so that they can live in freedom and democracy and not in an oppressive dictatorship.”