To save Jews from the soldiers and Palestinians from the Middle Ages.

“Marco Pannella’s mission to Jerusalem, with the relaunch of the proposal to let Israel become one of the member states of the European Union, and not only to pay the large historical debt of the Christian, Catholic and Protestant Europe with the Jewish people, and maybe to stop the resurging anti-Semitism in the “pro-Arab” Europe, is politically very wise and follows the best radical, militant and secular tradition. But it is also, and above all, a historical turning point, a possible strategic solution to the terrible problem that now puts the life of the entire Western world at serious risk. I believe that Pannella’s idea can be summarized as follows: europeizing Israel and israelizing the Middle East.

Now, europeizing Israel would destroy the military option, that is the occupation of the territories, and not only because Europe, becoming a jointly responsible party, certainly could not accept a military republic or a militarized democracy like the present Israel, where all great political leaders are generals. The point is that there is no country in Europe suffering from the same anguishes as Israel, which occupies territories not for imperialistic cravings but for the purpose of keeping the Arab threat at bay. Well, this strategy was, and would still be, logical in a traditional situation only. Terrorism, the one involving kamikazes, in fact has overcome the territoriality problem. So, in the long run, the military occupation increases and brings the terrorism closer, which it would like to limit and keep far away. Europe, on the contrary, can free the Israeli politics from the obsession and the military paradox, make it an outpost of the full democracy and start spreading the infection to the Middle East.

In summary, those people are right who think that the epoch-making turn in the Middle East, the only possible epoch-making turn, is democracy, a slow, strong and unstoppable process towards the rights, the dialectics among social classes, economic opportunities, and then free elections, free press, religious freedom, ultimately towards Europe, the West, or if you like, Israel, which is the outpost of Western Europe in the Middle East.

On the other hand, Palestinians are not like American Indians, who lived in a rich place and were forced to live in reservations by the white people’s barbarity. Palestinians were poor, underemployed in resourceless lands, which the Jewish colonists have modernized, transforming dry areas into citrus fruit orchards, settling factories, building large hydraulic works, and so on.

From underemployed people, Palestinians have become employed people, urban working-class, angry and convinced that the Jews who kicked them out are rich because they are Jews while they are poor because they are Palestinians. Instead, any people, even the Palestinian people, could do what the Jews did. Who said that Islam is incompatible with modernity, and that Islam cannot reach the refined form of modernization, that is democracy?

It is true that the most advanced countries in the Islamic world, like Tunisia or Morocco, have low democracy indexes. But this only happens because they are facing modernization, which, as shown by the bloody history of the West, is a terrible beast that requires long periods of time. Only strong structures and authoritarian regimes can flatter themselves on expediting modernization. Only dictators can face the terrible crises of identity arising from, for example, the sedentarization of the nomadic people or the disappearance of camels. These are very violent social upheavals, which can be compared, in the West, to the urbanization or the disappearance of horses. How can the West be surprised by the late arrival of democracy in Islamic countries, considering that the West achieved democracy after many trials and tribulations, from the Doric invasion to the United States of America, after a very long process dotted with blood, civil wars, massacres, theocratic projects? Democracy is neither a secondary feature of the Western anthropology nor Christ’s word. It is, instead, a long run-up among mad tyrants, illuminated dictatorships, revolutions, ethnic cleanups, religious wars, inquisitions and lagers.

Democracy as a future, therefore, is not a stroke of genius, a demagogic trick like, perhaps, the independent Palestinian State. In fact, how can poor and desperate people like Palestinians be interested in the perspective of a small national state, another oppressive and detestable dictatorship? And what type of State is in Sharon’s mind? And in Arafat’s? Sharon’s idea is, substantially, that of a Palestinian police State that sends Palestinians to jail, a sort of institutionalized refugee camp that is managed by Palestinians against Palestinians. Arafat, instead, would like a State focused on the war with Israel, a sort of Iraq without resources. Neither state like the above mentioned ones would free the Palestinian people from their resentful underdevelopment and terrorist desperation. On the contrary, the European democracy could make it possible. Bringing Israel into Europe, then, is one of those radical battles that seems lost at first glance, but just because they are ahead, a little more ahead then the habits, the mentality, the commonplace”.