On Israel's right to be the Jewish State

From the 16 November I joined the three day mission to Israel of the EP Israel Delegation, of which I am privileged to serve as the Vice-President.
I have understood the reality of Israel for many years. I was there for the first time in January of 1988 when the first Palestinian Intifada was launched. It was dubbed the "revolt of the stones" due to the common practice of throwing stones at Israelis.
I have dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict since I was born in Egypt in 1952 - four years after the proclamation of the State of Israel (May 15, 1948) and the first armed conflict launched by the Arab armies. Like the majority of Egyptians at the time, I was influenced by Nasser who promoted pan-Arab ideology that preached the extermination of Israel, which was presented as a "worldwide imperialist cancer".
This was inculcated in the heart of the Arab world and the message was that Israel had to be eradicated with force. I was fifteen years old when, in 1967, the Arab armies suffered their most bitter defeat. Egypt paid a very heavy human toll and was left with a bankrupted economy.
It was then that I noticed the level of Nasser’s demagogy which denied the evidence of military defeat and continued to refuse any dialogue with Israel, let alone recognition or peace.
The dominant slogan was: "what has been taken by force can not be returned if not by force.” The idea that peace can be founded only upon the return of territories occupied by Israel in the war of 5 June 1967 was established by UN Resolution 242 of 22, November 1967 creating the principle of "land for peace".
 Since then, international diplomacy has been mobilized to press Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, in the belief that this would automatically lead to peace in the Middle East.
 In reality, the territories occupied by Israel had previously been occupied by Arab countries in order to prevent the birth of an Arab state in Mandate Palestine as was required by UN Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947.
At the same time, this Resolution granted to Israel the right to exist as a Jewish State. But Jordan occupied and annexed the West Bank and the eastern sector of Jerusalem. Egypt occupied and administered the Gaza Strip from 1948 to 1967. If Jordan and Egypt were truly interested in the emergence of a Palestinian state, they could have realized it with absolute tranquility.
 But instead of that, they preferred to keep those territories and to exploit the Palestinian cause with the aim of legitimizing the Arab and Islamic holy war aimed at the physical elimination of Israel.  What I witnessed at first hand during my recent visit to Israel is the final collapse of the ideological myth of peace in exchange for the territories. Yasser Arafat and now the current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have both rejected unequivocally the land for peace proposal.
At Camp David in 2000 Arafat rejected the proposal made by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak that would make Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian State.
After that, Mahmoud Abbas, at the end of 2008, refused a substantially similar proposal made by the then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on the basis of the peace process launched in 2007 in Annapolis.
These unequivocal facts demonstrate that for the Palestinians peace with Israel is not acceptable even in the face of Israeli willingness to give back the occupied territories of 1967's war. And so, Israel has been forced to acknowledge that the conflict is not territorial but a conflict of legitimacy.
However, all people of good will who genuinely care about building peace in the Middle East - and I turn especially to those who are committed to affirming the right of Palestinians to their own State – must recognize that the road to peace passes through the compulsory recognition of the inalienable right of Israel to exist as a State of the Jewish people.
 This right is the political recognition of the right to life of everyone, which is the core of fundamental human rights and the basis of common human civilization. The lesson of history is that the right to life is true for all or for no one.

Magdi Cristiano ALLAM Italian MEP, Vice-Chairman of the Delegation for Relations with Israel