BOLOGNA – Flying a Palestinian flag from town hall not a gesture of peace

Bologna’s decision to fly a Palestinian flag from its town hall drew sharp condemnation from Italian Jewish Communities. “Using public property to promote the Palestinian cause in the present conflict in Gaza in a context of increasing violence and increasingly squad-like demonstrations, is not a gesture of peace.” So the Jewish Community of Bologna led by Daniele De Paz regarding Mayor Matteo Leporte initiative to display the Palestian flag on the façade of the city hall.
“An implicit adherence to the slogan ‘From the river to the sea’ and therefore to the genocidal will of Hamas,” read a joint note by the Jewish Community Council and the Jewish Museum. “This is an incitement to antisemitism that greatly endangers the Jewish and Israeli presence in our city and does not benefit the Palestinians either.” The note also states that “as citizens who adhere to European and Western ethical and cultural principles, we consider right to acknowledge the rights of Palestinians to their own state, but within the framework of a path of mutual recognition and willingness for peace.”
Missed opportunities are uncountable. “We should not forget that a state was offered to Palestinians in 1947, 1967, 1979, and that in 2000 at Camp David, in the presence of Bill Clinton, Arafat refused Ehud Barak offer; and that again in 2008 Abu Mazen rejected one of the most advanced plans for peace, offered by Ehud Olmert. Both plans, with different nuances, envisioned the establishment of Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as a capital, with the return of 93% of the West Bank.”
The leadership of Bologna Jewish Community declared itself “saddened in realizing that Bologna municipality automatically reports only the versions of one side (Hamas), without attempting to reconstruct reality also on the basis of Israeli positions.” Likewise, emphasized the Jewish Community and Museum, “we are struck by how public opinion expects that in a war that Israel did not wage the casualties must be ‘balanced’ (which very rarely happens in war) and disregards the fact that Hamas cynically uses Palestinians as human shields and uses the number of casualties as a point in its favor.”