Interview with Antonio Armellini: "Ethnic cleansing in Gaza, urgent need to recognize Palestine"

His cursus honorum speaks for him. Spokesperson for Altiero Spinelli at the Brussels Commission, collaborator of Aldo Moro at the Farnesina and at Palazzo Chigi, Ambassador Antonio Armellini has been in London, Warsaw, Brussels, Addis Ababa, Vienna, and Helsinki. He has been an itinerant ambassador to the CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe), ambassador to Algeria, India, and the OECD in Paris, head of the Italian Mission in Iraq (2003-2004), and advisor for international relations to the city of Venice.

Ambassador Armellini, you are among the more than seventy ambassadors who signed the appeal to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni urging Italy to recognize the State of Palestine . Why today? I answer with what may seem like a tautology: because it was a long time ago. " Two peoples, two states" is not for today, and Palestine is destined to remain for now—and who knows for how long—an intellectual-geographical construct steeped in history and resentment, spanning from the Bible to Deicide, from Herzl to Balfour and King David, all the way to the keys to the lost house hung around the necks of the refugees of the Nakba. So what? Recognition of the State of Palestine is a politically necessary act for the international community—and a duty for Italy—not because it is ethically or ideologically necessary, as some have been claiming, but primarily to make clear the refusal to further condone an imperial desire for aggressive expansion into territories that do not belong to the aggressor, but belong to the population they seek to exterminate. Israel must answer for its crimes, no doubt, but if genocide isn't the right term, ethnic cleansing is, to describe what Netanyahu's government is doing. There's another, more crucial reason for doing so: recognition allows us to shift the discussion to the level of international politics, granting full legitimacy to an entity and a people denied it, yet which is fundamental to any solution (from the two-state solution, to the colonization of "little big Israel," to the specter of Masada hovering in the background) other than mutual destruction, or the constant alternation of war and terrorism, which is essentially the same thing. I can't convince myself that the priority should be to insist on a qualitative leap in humanitarian action, while awaiting a Godot we should be waiting for and instead give up on seeking. Hamas are criminals, there's no doubt about it, but Israel—like all of us—is a democracy bound by the rules of international law, which must be respected towards everyone, lest we feel like the days of retaliation have returned. Even the King David was terrorism, but the international community knew how to manage it politically. It's true that opposition is growing within Israel : the general strike demonstrates its breadth as well as the desperation of its initiators, and the number of defectors in the IDF is increasing, but the fact remains that four out of five Israelis agree to obliterate Gaza and its inhabitants. It was 1971, and I had the opportunity to meet Moshe Dayan, fresh from the war and an acclaimed national hero, in the government kibbutz near Tel Aviv: war (which he had already announced), he told me, is not the path to security for Israel; it must be found in a stable network of collaboration with all neighboring countries. The attractiveness of civil democracy and Israel's technological superiority will make it an area of shared co-prosperity, of which it would be the master, but not the oppressor. It was a prophetic speech that failed to materialize, but why recall it now? To try to explain how different Israel has become: the era of enlightened Zionists like Ben-Gurion and Abba Eban is over, and the country today is made of a completely different stuff, even leaving aside the Biblical fanatics. Believing in Haaretz is good for the conscience, but, alas, it's not reality.

Many have criticized Europe's inertia , and in particular that of the President of the European Commission, regarding Gaza. Attacking von der Leyen is a bit like targeting the Red Cross: she doesn't express a unified political position, like the other protagonists, but represents the difficult mediation between often incompatible national positions. Whatever her personal abilities (perhaps she's not as bad as Salvini claims), her weakness is that of an international entity—Europe—aspiring to a role it is incapable of assuming. Instead, it should do so to maintain the credibility of its members. How, we haven't yet discovered.

Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani maintains that a state that does not exist cannot be recognized. Minister Tajani expresses the government's positions, which respond to political and security considerations within the broader context of the region we are discussing. They deserve the utmost respect, and it is equally legitimate for citizens to disagree. I would like to make a brief comment here, related to the letter from not thirty, but over seventy ambassadors, which you cited. Minister Tajani stated that he has the utmost respect for its signatories, for which I am grateful, and added that he does not recall them making similar requests when in office. I wonder if any of his collaborators ever explained to him the nature of the oath they are required to take. Diplomats collaborate in developing foreign policy guidelines, responsibility for which lies exclusively with political power. They can, and in some cases must, make their assessments, even through debate, but always within a process bound by complete confidentiality. Diplomats advise as their conscience dictates and execute as their duty, but they have their own independent opinion, which, when their responsibilities cease, they can express like any citizen. Is Palestine a fake state? Yes, but a necessary one, and certainly not the only one, as illustrated by other not-so-dissimilar examples of the promotion of "imperfect" states as accelerators of political and institutional processes crucial to long-term international balance, starting with the example of Kosovo. The founding characteristics of a state, as has been said, are a territory and a people, which in the case of Palestine both exist, albeit illegally trampled upon. Recognizing it means allowing it to function as a fully-fledged subject of international law, on an equal footing with Israel and the rest of the international community, in which until now it has at best been given a foothold. It's not so much a matter of acknowledging that more than two-thirds of UN member states now recognize Palestine, but of granting full representation to both peoples in the search for solutions to a crisis that directly concerns them both. There is certainly a problem of democratic legitimacy that must be resolved, and here it is up to the international community—primarily the UN—to exercise its role. It goes without saying that the PA cannot claim any rights, having long since sunk its credibility in a morass of cronyism and corruption. Hamas, whose emergence Netanyahu and Israel encouraged at their peril, is unthinkable: democracy cannot be rebuilt with criminals. Nor are settlers acceptable interlocutors on Israel's side! Pressure from the international community must serve to foster the development of other actors, especially on the Palestinian level (where the shadow of people like Barghouti still looms, Israel should remember that former terrorists can become excellent statesmen...), but not only.

Criticism from the opposite side: recognizing the State of Palestine would not stop Israel's massacre and the occupation of Gaza ordered by Netanyahu. Doesn't recognizing Palestine stop the slaughter? Perhaps not—and the reasons for it often go beyond not only politics, but also reason—but it could at least serve to shift the issue to the level of relationships between sovereign states, governed by international law and the law of war, rather than the fight against terrorist groups lacking any legitimacy whatsoever, giving the international community an additional weapon—this time a weighty one—to counter the ongoing military drift. Would Israel not care? Perhaps, but if so, the violation of international law would be legally, not just politically, evident and should be heavily sanctioned. The same argument, obviously, applies to the Palestinian state and Hamas. Finally, what about the plan to relocate— "voluntarily" or not—someone who legitimately wants to stay where they were born and whom, moreover, no one is prepared to welcome? It's true that Herzl had in mind Uganda and perhaps even Argentina for the new land of the Jews, eliminating the religious motivations that instead underpinned the Biblical hysteria of the settlers and their more or less subservient allies. No one wondered what Ugandans or Argentines thought at the time, but even that said, there's a fundamental difference between Herzl's ideas and today's plans: in that case, the territories were chosen precisely because they were desert, or nearly so. In this case, it's a territory whose inhabitants they want to exterminate have been there legitimately for millennia and have every right to remain. Together with others, of course, but not in exchange for them.

Ambassador Armellini, there's been much discussion and controversy over the use of the term "genocide" in connection with what's happening in Gaza. Regardless of the term, why is it that anyone who dares criticize what Israel is doing in the Strip is immediately branded, by Tel Aviv's supporters, as a pro-Hamas anti-Semite? I've already spoken about genocide: terminologically, it seems to me to be an incorrect definition, because genocide aims at the physical elimination of an entire community or population—as was the case with the Holocaust—while Netanyahu's government seeks to completely empty a territory of its inhabitants, not by systematically killing them all, but by forcibly exiling them (aside from the cruel farce of " voluntary transfer" ). Terminological disputes, however, seem pointless to me. The fundamental point is that what is being attempted here is an unprecedented and unjustified ethnic cleansing, both legally and humanitarianly, because the substance remains unchanged if its stated objective is not total extermination, but rather the deportation of a people belonging to one of the three great religions of the Book, destroying their history, memory, and identity. I continue to believe that those who maintain that accusing Israel represents an unacceptable manifestation of anti-Semitism are not only wrong, but are working against their own interests. Israel is a sovereign state and as such implements policies it deems consistent with the interests of its citizens, who are overwhelmingly Jewish, but also Christian, Arab, and (I presume) non-believers. Whether or not this policy meets the needs of the population and respects the principles of representative democracy is a matter for its own citizens to decide through their vote, just as it is up to the international community to determine whether the state of Israel's behavior is consistent with the law. Many Israeli citizens strongly contest the legitimacy of the Netanyahu government and its policies toward the Palestinian territory and its inhabitants. The vast majority of the international community does the same, in the name of respect for international law and fundamental principles of civilization. To assert that anyone opposed to Israel's policies—note, not the state—in Palestine is automatically anti-Semitic is a resounding own goal that transforms legitimate opponents of a policy into imaginary enemies in the name of a religion, shifting the discourse to a level that, above all, harms those who propose it. Because those who oppose Israel's policies are not necessarily anti-Semitic, while automatically considering them as such ends up giving anti-Semitism a weight and power of attraction that it doesn't possess. A true own goal, I repeat. The history of anti-Semitism is ancient, the persecution of Jews in Europe was the cause of atrocities and tragedies that have not always been resolved, but the Holocaust, in all its horror, allowed everyone to reckon with a past with countless perpetrators and solemnly reaffirm that it could never be repeated. It took us many centuries to arrive at a mutually acceptable relationship between God and Caesar, placing it at the foundation of our modern democracies, and we must be very careful to prevent the demon of fundamentalism—of all fundamentalisms—from gaining ground again. Israel's goals include promoting Jewish interests worldwide. It is entirely legitimate for it to do so as a constitutional state, a member of the community of nations. It is also legitimate to criticize its positions, as attacks not on Judaism, but on the rule of law. I defend my full right to oppose what Netanyahu is doing in Palestine, and I consider it offensive that anyone would accuse me of being anti-Semitic for this, an accusation I don't understand and from which I am culturally and ethically far removed. What is happening is not an expression of the struggle between two faiths, between two tribes that invoke their own God, but rather the aggressive policies of a state, secular in its constitutional structure, pursuing goals of territorial expansion that have no historical or legal justification. Opposing ethnic cleansing and expansionist ambitions is a duty in the name of the rule of law; anti-Semitism has absolutely nothing to do with it.

FROM

Umberto De Giovannangeli