Union Communities-Associations-Palestinian personalities in the Diaspora - Europe

Presidency

His Excellency Mr. Javier Solana

Secretary-General of the Council of the EU and

EU High Representative for the CFSP

15th May, 2008

Dear Sir,

550.000 Palestinians live in the different countries of the European Union. We are not voluntary emigrants, consequence of the search for a better life that the one it was offered by our land of origin to us and to our parents. Neither it is possible to define us as refugees, consequence of a catastrophe. Not even temporary displaced people of a war as it happened with so many people in the past tragedy of the Ex-Yugoslavia.

We are the victims, or the children of the victims, from an implacable ethnic cleansing. Since the Palestinian / Israeli war from 1947-49 was not only a military episode with defeated and victorious.

The Israeli aim was not only the victory, was our land … without their inhabitants.

And that place, Palestine, emptied by force, by the terror and violence against the civil population, was progressively re-inhabited by other people whose unique requirement was to belong to the Jewish religion.

All the conflicts cause the displacement of population, always momentary, that flee from the war. In Palestine also this exodus took placed… but Israel had decided it was permanent. And, once the combats were concluded, the military Jewish forces proceeded to expel systematically to whom they did not leave before, hundreds of thousands of people who did not understand the reason for which they were exceeding, they were turned out, of their lands and houses for the supreme crime of being Moslem or Christian. Of not being Jews.

535 towns were eliminated from the map. Emptying its people and devastating its houses, churches and mosques.

United Nations in the resolution nº 194 established the imperative bond for Israel's government to restore into their houses and lands the hundreds of thousands of victims of its ethnic cleansing. U.N. recognized the basic principle to the return of the displaced people, to our return.

But the same Israel, created by a resolution of United Nations, had promised in its Founding Charter to fulfil all the mandates of the International Community (Resolution 273 of the General Assembly of United Nations), but Israel decided to break so irrefutable mandate and, still worse, to colonize and expel other Palestinians in the territories occupied in 1967.

The determinant fact of this criminal policy is the religious adscription: if you are Jewish (although you come the previous day from Argentina or Russia) you have right to residence and land, if you are Arab (Christian or Muslim), your destiny is the exile or the repression.

That aberration is of such magnitude that all the Palestinian exiled whose right to the return is implacably denied by Israel, might return to Palestine … if they were turning to the Judaism … and it would be not for the right to their land of origin for the mentioned resolution of United Nations, but for the Law of the return to the Earth Promised by Yahweh.

Is it compatible with Europe’s standard minimums to define the constitutional laws in consideration of the religion? Is it possible to consider as democratic a State that admits or rejects a person for being or not Jewish?

Might the supposedly democratic State of Israel be admitted into the European Union under such discriminatory parameters?

This disquisition has not the aim of disqualification of the State of Israel but the examination and consideration of this State, which the European Union maintains privileged bonds, with the basic, elementary right to the return of the expelled ones, be or not determinable as members of “ the chosen people by Yahweh ".

Mr. Solana, the people of Palestine has been and still is a victim of the European bad conscience towards the Jewish communities, object of extermination during the II World War. It does not exist in the contemporary history such situation of equal tolerance to the one that receives the State of Israel from the international community after the repeated condemnations in the Security Council, in the General Assembly of United Nations and in this European Parliament, to the practices contrary to the international legality, the violation of the IV Convention of Geneva in not occasional, but systematic practices: Forced displacements of population (Article 49), creation of colonies in occupied lands transferring its own population (Article 49), systematic destructions of housings (Article 53), arrests and arbitrary detentions (Article 71), precariousness of population’s way of living in nourishment and medicines (Article 23), collective punishments (Article 33), work and displacement prevention (Article 39), absence of guarantees in the jurisdictional action (Article 67), …

These facts that commit an outrage against the most basic rights of the Palestinian people under the occupation (" protected population " for the IV Convention of Geneva), are typified as a crime in the Penal Code of your country, the Kingdom of Spain, as " crimes against the people and goods protected in case of an armed conflict ", Articles 608 to 616. We do not speak, in consequence, about political criteria but about criminal acts.

How much time can still wait the Palestinian people of the International Community, of the democratic Europe, beyond so many declarations so correct as useless?

Since the words face with the effective reality of the progressive usurpation of the rest of the rest of what was our native country Palestine in due time.

Thereby, the occupation of the rest of Palestine by Israel in June 1967 turned the territory into an immense prison. Its economy, destroyed, forced to their inhabitants to be a docile and cheap workforce for the occupant.

But if West Bank is a prison, Gaza is a "guetto" submitted to an inhuman and cruel fence. One million and a half people isolated in the biggest jail of the planet for the most serious sin of having voted in the sense not wished by Israel and The United States!. A fence approved by the European Union itself.

Should be tolerated to any member country similar behaviour to the one that does Israel, with the silence accomplice of the “international community "?

The European Union is the immediate neighbour of Palestine. Europe is today our mother land of welcome. And Europe is the freedom and democracy headlight in our turbulent world.

Europe borders on an area of instability, of violence outbreaks as consequence of a peace that never arrives. A peace that we wish but it turns out to be impossible for the systematic Israeli policy of repression, colonization and prohibition of the return of the expelled people.

The European Union can not be a rhetorician referring to our tragedy. Their today members voted for the creation of the State of Israel, Great Britain signed the Balfour declaration... and also they were who approved in the General Assembly of United Nations the resolution number 194 demanding to Israel our return.

The capacity of influence of the European Union in the resolution of our tragedy must not stay within the rhetoric. The Europe/Israel Association Treaty demands in its Article 2:

"The relations between the parts, just as all the dispositions in the present agreement, are based on the respect to the rights of the Human Being and the democratic principles, that inspire their internal and international policies and that it constitutes an essential element of the present agreement ".

For that reason and in several occasions the European Parliament has voted for the suspension of this Treaty, given the flagrant violations by Israel of the most basic democratic principles. Thus, among others, the resolutions of 10 of April of 2002 (point 8) and 9 of October of 2003 (point 65).

Can the European Union keep on conciliating this Agreement with the systematic and unpunished violation of the international legality by Israel, who is self-named, for major derision, the unique democracy of Middle East?

Why was the European Union more coherent under presumptions that were understood opposite to the democratic principles of not discrimination which reign in the European Union with a State member - Austria of George Haider - with an associated - Israel -, and under facts of infinite greater graveness?

Mr. Solana, the hope of the Palestinian people in the European Union is wearing away with the passing of time. And what it does not have to happen it is that the hope replaces to the desperation. By then all the sentences will be as rhetorical as ineffective.

In the desire, in the necessity of everyone, that in Palestine it is reached without delay an effective peace, this is the final to the occupation and the right to our return, and with the expression of our consideration.

Yours faithfully,

Dr. Radi. M. Shuaibi

Barcelona