Mr President, Mr High Representative, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the information presented today by the High Representative gives us hope despite the gravity of the situation. It is true that attacks are still taking place and it is also true that there are still summary executions, but there has been a change over the last month: there is the Mukata Agreement, the issue of the solution to the problem of the Church of the Nativity, and there are other important issues. One of them, which has been mentioned by the High Representative, is the vote in the Likud Congress. We must remember that Mr Netanyahu, who makes Mr Sharon look like a moderate, and Mr Sharon signed the Wye Plantation Agreements as executives of the State of Israel and that brings responsibilities. Something else has happened, and that is the demonstration by more than one hundred thousand people in Tel Aviv asking for immediate peace and, finally, a fact that is not usually mentioned, and that is that the Israeli Government has demobilised the reservists it had called up to punish Gaza, which I believe to be an important shift in approach. Knowing as we do that our action, the action of the High Representative and of our representatives in the region, is more effective in terms of its content than in terms of publicity – where the United States are ahead of us – I believe we must encourage them to continue along this road even if they do not appear in the European Parliament. I believe that the absence of Mr Solana on 24 April was fully justified; we have not asked him to explain it. Secondly, I believe we agree that we must speed up the creation of a Palestinian State, and I refer to the resolutions which began in 1948, at the time of the creation of the State of Israel. The High Representative said during his last appearance that, surely, on the basis of the Mitchell and Tenet plans, what we had to do was speed up and create a Palestinian State. And as he has said that we must ensure that the Palestinian State – or the Palestinian Authority – increasingly comes to resemble a State, I believe that the process needs to be speeded up, because one of the consequences of what is happening is that the identity and sense of responsibility of the Palestinian people has been strengthened enormously. I therefore believe that we must try to ensure that this process is as quick as possible. Turning now to the possible Peace Conference, Mr President, I believe that it must take place under the auspices of the UN – we must never forget that Israel was born as a result of a UN decision. On behalf of my group, I regret that there has been no follow-up to what happened in Jenin and that the International Commission of the United Nations has not been allowed to investigate events; if there has not really been a genocide, I believe that that investigation would even have helped Israel to present and justify its action. In any event, I believe we have to continue working with the Quartet and with the Arab League in order to stage this Conference without excluding anybody. I believe that the Israeli Prime Minister’s insistence that he wants to decide who to negotiate with is completely unacceptable: everybody has to represent themselves. Finally, Mr President, with regard to the accusations which have been made in certain sections of the media in the United States and also in the US congress – and we have just approved our resolution on transatlantic relations – branding us as anti-Semites, I would like to refer to the resolution we approved last month which reiterates our condemnation of anti-Jewish attacks in Europe. But I believe we should also tell those sections of the media and congressmen that they should reread the Bible and that both peoples are Semitic, they descend from Shem, son of Noah, and they also have a common ancestor in Abraham; both Arabs and Israelis are therefore Semitic. I am speaking on the basis of one fact, and that is that I feel more Semitic than anything else since, as I said in the Knesset, we Spaniards say that we have traces of Moorish and of Jewish blood. Therefore in reality the anti-Semites are the ones who really want to monopolise this issue. We believe that we have to try to ensure that these two peoples who have been brothers for five thousand years find a solution which allows them to live together, and therefore I believe that to make this type of accusation is not only unjustified, but also it makes absolutely no contribution to the necessary peace process in the Middle East.

Political group: PSE