ABSTRACT: In a letter addressed to the members of the Knesset, Marco Pannella, confirming his position on the State of Israel ("an island of a state based on the guarantee of rights, of political democracy, of majority democratic culture"), denounces the extremely serious responsibilities of the Shamir government, requesting its dismissal: "he is succeeding in the difficult task of appearing like the expression of a violent and anti-democratic society and State. And, like all those who are mediocre, tries to win by doubling the amount of violence".

(Notizie Radicali n. 51 of 11 March 1988 taken from L'Avanti of 17 February 1988)

If I were a member of the Knesset, above all a member of the majority, if I were a deputy agreeing on the strategies of the government or with the most extremist among those present in the governmental area, I would claim by all means the dismissal of the Shamir government. The State of Israel represents an island of irrelevant proportions in a double ocean: that of the countries of the Middle East and that of the South Mediterranean countries, including African countries.

This double ocean, this immense area of territories has a unique, if complex, characteristic: almost everywhere there are single party regimes, dictatorships, where human, political, social and economic rights are radically refused. These dictatorships can be more or less tolerant, more or less "civilized", but they remain dictatorships. In many cases, in almost all cases, in the Middle East these are ferocious, bloody, barbarian regimes: in certain countries wealth covers up this reality, in others misery underlines it even more. Dictatorships are violence, ideology and practice of violence. They are regimes of civil war, of oppression, of war, quite plainly, which is necessary for the maintenance of power. Militarism, intolerance, fanaticism, despair, reactionary lobbies are a reality or a pending threat everywhere. And often, as in Iran, the "revolutions" prepare and establish regimes which are much worse than those that have been abated.

Populations are oppressed everywhere, and everywhere tens of thousands of people are destroyed at the roots, expelled, those who could make up a moderate and democratic leadership in these countries.

There are tens of thousands of Syrians, Lebanese, citizens of the Emirates or of the countries ruled by the terrible "revolutionary" factions of Ba'ath, Iranians, who exert their professions or their trade or even administrative public functions in the West, in Europe, or in Northern America, up to the Far East, forced to integrate in these countries by the political, civil and social situation of their home country. Others, tens of thousands, have been murdered, often by means of real massacres, in Syria, in Iran, in Iraq and everywhere in the Middle East, because of their ideas or their belonging to this or that political faction. And the victims of the war between Khomeini and Saddam Hussein, joined by the "revolutionary" Iranian "people's modjahedin", are millions by now.

The State of Israel, therefore, is an island within this ideological, human, historical and political reality. An island of a state on rights and law, an island of political democracy and of majority democratic culture.

A democratic state cannot ignore the weapon of repression, in the maintenance of public order and security, in the administration of justice. It must use it according to the law, in the full respect of rights and law, and the means it uses must be homogeneous and suited to the democratic aims and values to be achieved. This state is at war, or considers itself war, or others consider it as being at war or in a very serious conflict, with almost all its neighbours. With all except Egypt, for a long time condemned by our "pacifists" as well for having accepted the agreements of Camp David, agreements which cost the life - of course - to its main author, Egyptian President Sadat.

This state of war is not fought with traditional means, except in certain circumstances. It is expressed also by the occupation of certain Palestinian territories and by exceptional war legislations. This occupation has then assumed the form of an administration: but it has succeeded in this only for a certain period, and only partly, refusing to grant even a limited "autonomy" to the occupied territories and people, a mistake for which Shamir recently made indirect but clear amends, when he announced that he wanted to grant the autonomy. This situation has been going on for twenty years.

To the comprehensible popular reactions, based on objective conditions of tragedy and misery, as well as on the political and war context, the State of Israel, under responsibility of its government, has replied in these weeks and months with an incapacity and a senseless violence which has been and still is the worst and most serious weapon used against Israel, its policies and its image, in the present conflict.

The government is succeeding in the difficult task of appearing like the expression of a violent society and state. And like all fools, it is attempting to win by doubling in violence.

If I were a member of the Knesset, I would have claimed for a debate not on the strategy of the government and the majority (for this is a continued, eternal and daily debate), but on the incapacity of enforcing it, the incapacity of ruling and making the administration and its different sections function. But how? Demonstrations and popular turmoils explode in certain circumscribed areas - and it is a wonder that they haven't exploded before and more frequently. And the whole world sees the Israeli soldiers, not the policemen or other forces trained for these tasks, with no plastic shields, no visors, no suitable "weapons", that is water tanks to disperse the demonstrators with jets of water, for example, but forced to shun the stones and the Molotov bottles, or to fight body to body, encountering especially the weaker individuals, women, children, elderly...

The conflict claims its first victims, the victims of the unpreparedness, of the incapacity and of the short-sightedness of the government and of the administration, and Shamir, Rabin and others warn that they will use bludgeons, that heads will be smashed, and it is repeated in a base and idiotic manner that those children, those youngsters are brain-washed, just as the platoons of children sent to the front by the Nazi Khomeini are, who were then gasified by his friend Hussein.

But if the debate, inside the Knesset or elsewhere, in the squares of the world, is extended to the great topics, then the events to be discussed and overcome are mistaken with the supreme values at comparison, be they real or not.

This way it is the government that creates the conditions for that blending of despair and action to occur between the OLP, the external forces, the terrorist groups, and the "administered" Palestinians and the "pacifist" world public opinion. It is the government once again which creates and spreads in Israel, among the youth, the same despair, the tragedy of the schizophrenia between obedience and conscience.

As regards justice and administrative measures, they have been dealt with in the same way. Behaviours that are worthy of people with a bad conscience, effective "occupants" with the will to occupy and to oppress, to consider all the populations and the "administered" people potential and almost necessary enemies.

The wrongdoings of the government, therefore, are the main cause for the evil and the difficulties we must presently deal with. It is the government which today is succeeding in making the condemnation of a strategy - which in its essential part is correct - coincide with that of its incapacity to ensure a policy of public order and of security, of prestige and of hope.

Even the just defense of the conference of peace, lead by Peres, is in itself incorrect and elusive, weak, if it is not accompanied by the condemnation of the incapacity of Minister Rabin and of his consistent responsibilities: it cannot be excluded, as a matter of fact, that precisely in the course of the conference, many are trying to exacerbate the conflicts in the administered and so badly occupied territories.

The situation is at present so serious precisely because this aspect of the life of a population of a country and of its institutions has been neglected.

There is the risk of throwing away the baby as well as the dirty water, as is occurring in a vast part of the democratic majority opinion in the Diaspora, especially in the West.

In the European Parliament, as in the Italian Parliament, we Radicals have found ourselves alone, absolutely alone, in spite of the usual mentions by the official pro-Israel lobbies, in refusing to "condemn" the policy of Israel, its strategy and its doings. We fiercely deny, if necessary, the very right of expressing an opinion on that which is happening to those who systematically ignore the problems of life and death, of fundamental human and political rights, of the Arabs and the inhabitants of the Middle East, to those who are the accomplices of their fiercest persecutors of every day and of all that half century, and who then claim to be the champions of it against Israel, at all times, even when Israel has no faults, and not only when it does.

I am determined to continue on this line. But to do so, I also have the right to attack all that which makes it all the more

difficult to defend, or even impossible to defend. If Israel is not to collapse, then an incapable government must be made to collapse.