Brussels, 31/01/2001 (Agence Europe) - The European MEPs from the Bonino List are in the process of gathering signatures for an initiative through which they are calling on the competent European bodies of the Parliament and the EP delegations for relations with the Knesset to "immediately prepare a study and a draft operational agreement able to ensure the full participation of the Israeli State in the European Union". Italian MEPs and other groups have already signed, including several members of Forza Italia, such as Jas Gavronski and Umberto Scapagnini, or Antonio Di Pietro, member of the Liberal group, or even the Green Reinhold Messner.
In their text,, the Italian Radicals send a "formal and pressing call to the Commission and Council, each in the framework of their competencies, for them to propose, support and achieve" the aims that they target, feeling that: - the State of Israel, "isolated and independent, can in no way, unless at the price of huge dangers, ensure to its own citizens, in the Middle East, to the Mediterranean world of which it is a part (…) law and freedoms in security"; - the European Union itself "cannot live from illusions of living and seeing lived its own ideals and its own aims (…) if it is unable to confront without delay (…) extraordinary historic occasions, as was sadly that case for the tragic and foreseen events in the former Yugoslavia"; - "if the legal, constitutional, political and territorial boundaries of the State of Israel and the European Union should form (…) a close, certain and guaranteed perspective, it should be possible (…) to contribute towards the "achievement of a peace that is strong, long-lasting and fruitful in concessions and denouncements, which would otherwise be problematic and objectively dangerous".