Proposition 53K1160

Proposition de résolution relative à la libération du sergent Gilad Shalit.

General information ¶

Author

MR Corinne De Permentier

Submission date

Feb. 2, 2011

Official page

Visit

Status

Adopted

Requirement

Simple

Subjects

Israel Palestine question foreign policy peacekeeping resolution of parliament illegal restraint

Voting ¶

Voted to adopt

CD&V Vooruit LE PS | SP ∉ Open Vld N-VA MR VB

Abstained from voting

Groen Ecolo LDD

Contact form ¶

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Discussion ¶

May 12, 2011 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

Christiane Vienne, the rapporteur, refers to her written report. He will speak for his group.

On June 25, 2006, Israeli military officer Gilad Shalit was taken prisoner by Palestinian fighters on Israeli soil. Since then, this young soldier has been detained in Gaza. Several attempts to exchange or release were considered and negotiated, but they all failed, with Hamas rejecting in December 2009 Israel's latest proposals to lead to the release of young Palestinian prisoners against that of Sergeant Gilad Shalit.

This abduction remains worrying since the last image of Sergeant Shalit alive dates from late 2009 and that neither his family nor the French or Israeli authorities have been able to obtain information about his health status.

My group can only condemn hostage-taking in general. These detentions constitute a denial of human rights. However, beyond the detention of this Israeli soldier, we cannot ignore the difficult context in which it takes place or the various conflicts that emulate the relations between the parties present. Unfortunately, this context has not been peacefully settled since 2006. That is why we share the concerns at the root of the resolution and it seemed indispensable for us to reach a more balanced text that takes context into account.

This text asks our government to support all mediation efforts aimed at facilitating the release of Sergeant Gilad Shalit, but it goes further. Indeed, it takes into account the regional context but also the importance of acting towards a lasting and peaceful solution for Israelis and Palestinians. In this context, the text adopted in the Committee on Foreign Relations refers to the balanced resolution of the European Parliament of 11 March 2010. Rather than simply highlighting certain shortcomings in the basic text, we amended it to highlight the importance of establishing trust between Israelis and Palestinians as an essential component of an indispensable peace process.

This peace process includes, without questioning blood crimes or the detention of Gilad Shalit, calming gestures from both sides present. This process must therefore lead to the peaceful coexistence and security of two equal states, as required by the resolution voted by the European Parliament. Our amendments are precisely intended to integrate all the elements of the resolution into the process.

It will therefore be for our government to support measures from all parties in order to create favorable conditions to finally lead to the release of Sergeant Shalit.

This example shows us, once again, that only negotiation in a climate of trust and respect will overcome hostilities to lead to a lasting peaceful solution.

I would like to thank Mrs De Permentier for her courageous initiative. My party was not present in the committee but we will support this resolution. If we had a proposal here today on the imprisonment of a Palestinian young man whose life is shared to release other prisoners, we would support it in the same way.

I have been to Sidirot, the village from which the boy comes. We talked with the family. We have seen how horrific and totally irresponsible it is to involve a civilian population in a conflict. I hope that the man will be released quickly and that there should be no compensation or exchange with other lives. It is a very courageous proposal and I am pleased that we can vote on it in the plenary session.

Mr. Speaker, dear colleagues, Parliament will vote this afternoon on a resolution calling for the release of Sergeant Gilad Shalit, as if we had the possibility of putting a face and a name on a human suffering that is that of a prisoner but also that of members of a family that lives in expectation, fear and uncertainty. Of course, we give all our support and solidarity to the family of Gilad Shalit, but this constant suffering must also allow us to expand our empathy to the situation of all prisoners.

Thousands of Palestinian prisoners suffer from serious non-compliance with their conditions of detention in Israeli jails. If we denounce this scandalous hostage-taking of an Israeli soldier by Hamas or groups close to it, we cannot remain silent about the thousands of Palestinian civilians who crumble in Israeli prisons. These civilians are imprisoned after a often unfair trial administered by a military court.

As a democracy attentive to the standards of international law, we must partner with the many NGOs, associations of lawyers, judges, but also citizens from around the world and continue to work to ensure that Israel respects the rights of detainees in Israel or in the occupied territories.

As of September 2010, the figures are as follows: 6,257 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, 190 administrative detention, i.e. imprisonment without trial, and ⁇ 300 prisoners who are children and adolescents. These minors are often considered adult by the Israeli authorities and are therefore judged as such.

Dear colleagues, we believe that this text is not sufficiently focused on the general situation of prisoners in this region, which prompts us to formulate the comments already stated here, as well as in commission by my colleague Eva Brems.

The author of the resolution insisted on her willingness to dedicate the text only to the situation of Sergeant Gilad Shalit, taken hostage on 25 June 2006, in order to mark a strong signal on 25 June 2011, to remind us that this situation is intolerable and inadmissible. It is indeed, but it is equally unacceptable that thousands of Palestinians are arrested arbitrarily and in total violation of international rules by Israel.

Behind each of these people, there is also a family, a family that lives fear, uncertainty, expectation. This resolution does not adequately reflect this.

For this reason, as my colleague Brems said in the committee, it would have been better to take time from a discussion and a traditional treatment of this resolution, i.e. a discussion in a working group, in order to make a revision of the text that would propose a better balance.

Moreover, as some probably know, new discussions, orchestrated by Egypt, are ongoing in view of the release of soldier Shalit. It is fundamental that we can let diplomacy do and we must avoid creating new tensions within one or the other camp. We know how strong these tensions have been in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades.

We must give every chance for a peaceful solution. If we do not return to a two-state solution, we know that the siege of Gaza, the issue of the return of Palestinian refugees, the occupation of Palestinian territories and colonization will never find a favorable outcome.

The amendments made in the committee are a first step towards a more balanced text but do not reflect the difficult situation experienced by thousands of families in Israel and especially in the West Bank.

Our group calls for the release of Gilad Shalit and strongly advocates for respect for the rights of Palestinian prisoners. We therefore ask the government to advocate for the release of Gilad Shalit but to be equally firm in its advocacy for Israel’s respect for international law in the treatment of Palestinian prisoners. That is why we will abstain from this text because it should have gone further and talked about all the families who are experiencing this unacceptable situation. With this resolution, we risk giving the political signal that the suffering of a single Israeli soldier is worth more than the suffering of hundreds of Palestinian civilians.

Israel is a holy land, Palestine is a holy land. When I read the resolution, I had to think of a very sacred proverb: look first at the beam in your own eye before looking for the splinter in someone else’s eye.

I take the word here today and speak from my own experience, I have been in Israel several times and in my previous career in the sport, I was able to teach both peoples. If one has done this six times and if one has been there for several weeks, then one gets a different vision.

I find it a little one-sided, not to use the word hypocrite, to propose here a resolution that applies to a whole country, while a part of the population does not have the same rights. If there is one country that I have experienced as an apartheid country – I even stayed in Gaza, Mr. De Vriendt, I had my passport at the time, I was allowed to enter there – then it is Israel.

We are talking about releasing one soldier, I can support that one hundred percent, it is against human rights. Nevertheless, I will abstain from voting on the resolution. Israel itself holds approximately 11,000 Palestinian prisoners, including at least 6,000 political prisoners. 10% of those prisoners have never been charged. I have seen no resolution here, no one, to say that those 6,000 political prisoners should be released.

In addition to those official prisons – you can visit them, you should actually do it all – there is the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip is the largest open-air prison in the world. The strip is 42 kilometers long and 12 kilometers wide and borders the sea. There are 1 to 1.5 million people living there. The unemployment rate is 90%. For work, one must get up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning if one is allowed to go out through at least one of the two tunnels in order to get some work on the Israeli fields. These are humiliating circumstances.

I would be happy to support the resolution if you, with as much zeal, prepare a resolution for those of others.

I will not discuss it, because the whole debate on the Palestinian and Jewish question is a black-and-white debate.

I would like to read a piece of Johan Anthierens, which was written in 1997. If I read that, you may understand why I abstain.

Anthierens wrote: “The Jews worship and spray, welcomed and gased and so on, have now their land Israel and have greatly expanded it, to the disgrace of the Arabs, to the outspoken anger of the Arabs, who are the bulldozers of history, who must pay the German league, who rise up for the European slaughter and slaughter with Jewish people.

We Europeans have struck the Jewish incubator of horror elements and send Isaak to the Palestinian Treasury for compensation. At the time of the creation of the State of Israel, a new kind of Jew was born, the Palestinian Jew. What remained of the less talented Mohammedan was the non-noble art of terrorism, the Israeli religious state that treats the Palestinian neighbor as evil pests.

Palestine is a crap cat in the narrow, a cat with bald spots in the fur, a lucky desert cat, ugly, false, unreliable, cast out by the worldly opinion. For such a shy beast, I have in my heart a bowl of milk prepared. No one will ever make me so cowardly that I point my finger to the disabled Jew of today, the Palestinian. Jews are not gods, Palestinians are not pigs. I do not believe in good and bad, I do not believe in black and white, I prefer to walk the no-one country between those poles. I like to stumble over the truth, which is in the middle.”

Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, as I pointed out at the beginning of the committee debate on the resolution on the release of Gilad Shalit, I did not intend to open a comprehensive debate on the Middle East, a highly sensitive issue. I only wanted to raise awareness and mobilize the members of this parliament, as others did for the Franco-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt or to obtain the release of Clotilde Reiss.

I hope that by advancing the arguments developed before you, I will be able to put the pendul on time in some, such as Mrs. Boulet or Mr. Boulet. and Dedecker.

Today, Thursday, May 12, 2011, it is 1,782 days since Gilad Shalit is held in the hands of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Abducted in June 2006, he was taken prisoner in a Palestinian attack on a border post south of Israel on the edge of the Gaza Strip, conducted by three Palestinian armed groups.

So it has been ⁇ five years since this 25-year-old young man has been waiting for his prisoners to reach a liberation agreement with Israel. I just want to remind you that this young man was taken prisoner in Israeli territory while he was performing his military service in his country.

At the end of December 2009, negotiations between the two sides were actively conducted through the mediation of Egypt and Germany. Since that date, the Shalit case has given way to the eternal attempt to resume the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Another case, another deadline, and the same uncertain outcomes.

Gilad Shalit was not forgotten, but the diplomatic situation irretrievably led to the postponement of his release to an unknown date.

Certainly, attempts to negotiate took place, according to a recurring scheme. Hamas demands the release of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel against the release of Gilad Shalit.

Israel, Mrs. Boulet, has accepted the principle of the release of these detainees on condition of obtaining the exile of the most dangerous of them, people responsible for blood crimes. The Islamist movement rejected the Israeli proposal. It is good to know. Both sides revert to each other the responsibility for the failure.

Since the last attempts to negotiate, Israel and Hamas have continuously returned the ball. But, in reality, resistance to the immediate release of Gilad Shalit exists between the two camps, whether security, political or ideological.

Throwing the security of Israel in exchange for the release of Gilad Shalit remains a dilemma. The exile of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners with blood on their hands is not a negligible precaution. Furthermore, Hamas’s achievement of the release of a thousand Palestinian prisoners would ⁇ be an important victory. Why give him this satisfaction?

Gilad Shalit is thus both hostage of Hamas, but also of an Israeli-Palestinian negotiation that goes far beyond his personal fate. If, at certain times, one could hope for his acquired liberation, one realizes, in reality, that his life does not depend only on the goodwill of the Israeli government and Hamas, but on a balance of forces that lean, for now, on the side of paralysis.

I would like to emphasize that the International Committee of the Red Cross cannot even verify that the treatment of Gilad Shalit by Hamas is in accordance with the Geneva conventions, that his health and dignity are respected. Those who hold it have the obligation under humanitarian law to protect their life and to treat it with humanity and to allow them to maintain regular and unconditional contacts with their family. Refusing any contact with Mr. Shalit and his family, Hamas, violate international humanitarian law.

Few news were addressed to his family: barely two letters and a record in which he claims he needs medical treatment. On many occasions, the Red Cross has asked to be able to visit him or exchange family messages between him and his own, in vain. The ICRC continues to do everything in its power to be allowed to visit him or at least to be allowed to correspond with his family. Hamas has rejected all of its demands.

It is unacceptable to detain a man arrested in the exercise of his military service, kidnapped in his own country. It is impossible to accept that this young man with the stolen childhood is deprived of contact with his family, as required by international law. The ICRC is unfortunately unable to provide Gilad Shalit’s parents with first-hand information about his health.

Madame Boulet, I would also like to point out that for decades, a program has been put in place by the ICRC that allowed Palestinian families to regularly travel to visit their loved ones detained in Israeli prisons and that the institution has always accepted the security control programs imposed on it.

For now, this program has been suspended for families in the Gaza Strip since Hamas took unilateral control.

For a victim of terrorism, the greatest danger is to be forgotten. Trapped in a world that exists outside the law, a world without rights, without protection, her only remedy is moral resistance. Gilad Shalit can find the strength to resist if he is supported by the voices of those outside. Let us mobilize, let us mobilize, as we have done so well for the Franco-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt, as we have done so well for Clotilde Reiss! This is the meaning of my draft resolution, which is called to be voted this afternoon.

To conclude, I would like to tell you that when I hear that this is a unilateral proposal, know, dear colleagues, that this request for resolution and support has also been voted by the Luxembourg Parliament, by the German Parliament and also by the European Parliament. This is about preventing the stealing of youth from a young man, who had just for fault to perform his military service in his country!

(The applause )