| Submit your comments on this article | |
| Israel-Palestine-Jordan | |
| Austrian Amb. bloviates on Israel and the Paleos | |
| 2006-01-01 | |
Noting Europe's role as the leading financial backer of the Palestinians, Hengl described the declaration as "a warning to the Palestinians that they don't chop down the tree on which they're sitting." Having militant groups sitting in governments complicates Europe's efforts on the one hand to discourage violence but on the other hand to continue to have dialogue with Middle Eastern governments, he explained. The issue has been one of the chief factors to keep Hizbullah off Europe's terror list, despite Israeli protestations, Hengl said. "According to what I am looking at from here, it seems to me that Hizbullah is a candidate for being put on Europe's terror list, but I don't have all the insight to which our people in Brussels and our political and security directors have." He also noted that groups aside from Hizbullah often take responsibility for attacks, which complicates the proper assigning of blame, which can also happen after Palestinian attacks. Even so, he said, Palestinians must act against terror. "I think it's impossible to speak of Israel [making] one-sided concessions when a young officer is blown up in Tulkarm." Still, Hengl indicated that Europe questions the security issues Israel has raised in connection with the convoys scheduled to run between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He pointed out that they will be limited to a handful of buses, searched and then accompanied by the IDF. "Let it start," he said. "We could not imagine that there is a real security problem." In any case, the willingness of Israel to have EU monitors stationed at the Rafah border between Gaza and Rafah as part of the same crossing agreement has contributed to a "fantastic improvement" in EU-Israel relations. He also stressed the positive effect of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. "The triggering of this is definitely the disengagement from Gaza. For Europeans, the fact that you hold onto the Gaza Strip, with 1.5 million Arabs who don't want to see you, and for me personally, to see that there are young Israeli soldiers being killed there, just for what, for tomatoes and flowers to be shipped to Europe? It is a difficult position." He recalled being overwhelmed when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told a meeting of European officials that it had been a mistake to settle Gaza. "I said, my God, who is this? Is this our dear prime minister?" The change in Sharon is just one of many evolutions Hengl has observed since his first tour here during the Yom Kippur War, during which he tracked the IDF's advances on a map that still hangs on the wall of his Ramat Gan office. "It was really like an annex of good old Europe. A lot of people were speaking German," he related, though he recounted that at that time his neighbors in Tel Aviv wouldn't speak to him in German because of their association of the Austrian government with the Holocaust. He described Israel now as much more "Mediterranean." But the country has remained European enough to make Israel the only true partner in the EU's neighborhood program to develop stronger ties with non-European Mediterranean countries. Israel, he said, "is the only country with which Europe really wants to have a full-speed approach, in technology, in research, in human rights, in democracy, in all that modern life is. "The contacts and the mutual interests are not only much closer, but [Israel is] the only country in a certain way... which is very much European," he explained. | |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #1 Sanctimonious, condescending and undiplomatic: a perfect represemtative of the country that sent him. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-01-01 22:03 |