Socialists’ top EU election candidate demands ‘immediate cease-fire’ in Gaza

ROME — The leading center-left candidate for the European election in June kicked off his campaign by calling for an “immediate cease-fire” in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

“Today it’s our duty to urge for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza,” Luxembourg’s EU Commissioner Nicolas Schmit said in his speech, moments after delegates at a congress of Socialist leaders and activists in Rome confirmed his unopposed run to be both the face of their three-month campaign and their candidate to be the next president of the European Commission.

Schmit, a social democrat on the left of his party whose campaign focuses on jobs, welfare and the Green Deal, accused the Israeli government of standing ready to abolish democracy and destroying the prospect of a two-state solution by “killing” Israeli Labor Party leader and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s.

“This government was ready to abolish the Israeli democracy and those who are in this government also killed the peace process in ’95, and I have to say they killed the peace process by first killing our friend Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,” Schmit said.

“I’m a great friend of Israel, but I never forget that this government … is a far-right, extreme-right government,” he said.

“We cannot turn a blind eye [to] the level of violence and destruction for which the citizens pay the highest price,” he said. “We do not forget to free the [Israeli] hostages” in the Gaza Strip, he added, backing calls for an international peace summit.

He compared the “terrible human tragedy” unfolding in Gaza to his own family’s experience of conflict during the Second World War, recounting how his father watched his own father being shot and killed in front of him as Germany invaded Luxembourg in 1940, clashing with French troops.

“What happened to my father, my father’s father, happens every day, every day in Ukraine, every day in Gaza,” Schmit said.

Mideast conflict

Faraj Zayoud, in charge of international relations for the Palestinian group Fatah, hailed Schmit’s words. “We, the Fatah and the Palestinian leadership, welcome and highly appreciate his stance and pledges,” Zayoud said.

At a later press conference, Schmit added that the Hamas militant group was also to blame for the breakdown of the peace process by its killing Israelis.

Earlier at the congress, Party of European Socialists President Stefan Löfven used slightly vaguer language on the Middle East conflict, stating: “We must absolutely support initiatives leading towards a sustainable cease-fire now.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, by far the most powerful center-left leader in Europe and a strong defender of Israel, did not even mention the conflict in the Middle East during his 10-minute speech, which focused on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the need for Europe to engage more with the global south.

Italian Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein delivered one of the strongest condemnation’s of the actions of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza, criticizing the Hamas attacks in October but adding “that brutality does not justify brutality against Palestinian people and civilians.”

“I agree with Nicolas, fighting Hamas cannot mean a collective punishment of the whole population of Gaza,” she said.

At the last congress in November, the stance on Israel’s war against Hamas divided the Socialists’ different national parties, who finally agreed to call for “humanitarian pauses.”