Sen. Umberto Terracini, a Jewish Communist member of the Italian Senate, has accused Unita, the Italian Communist Party organ, of deviating from official policy and publishing articles in support of Arab demands for the destruction of Israel. The paper published Sen. Terracini’s attack as an “open letter’ and, with it, a reply by Giorgio Pajetta, Unita’s editor.
To support his contention that the Party line rejects the liquidation of Israel as a matter of policy. Sen. Terracini quoted the remarks of Giovanni Berlinguer, vice secretary of the Italian Communist Party, who said at the recent world Communist Party meeting in Moscow that the rights of the Arab people in Palestine have to be respected “without prejudice to Israel’s right of existence as a sovereign state.” But one writer in Unita has compared the Israelis to “foreign invaders,” like the Americans in Vietnam and another advocated the El Fatah demand that Israel be abolished in favor of a Palestinian bi-national state. Sen Terracini wrote.
He said that “Apart from the underlying fundamental error of such an attitude, it implies a solution of the Mideast conflict by force” whereas “we must act for a political solution of the crisis and that is the well thought-out position of the Party regarding the Middle East.”
Sen. Terracini, an orthodox Communist of the old school, said the creation of the State of Israel was a matter of “auto-determination of those Jews who, for special historic reasons and conditions, were living there and as such received full recognition according to international law.” He said the Israelis today “are united not only by religious ties, but, first of all by a common experience over centuries during which they had been dispersed, but not dissolved, in other national entities, keeping their culture and tradition and, to a certain extent their language,”
Sgr. Pajetta claimed that he too agreed to Israel’s right to exist, but not for the reasons stated by Sen. Terracini. Israel, he wrote, is a reality, “but one cannot speak of its right to statehood without mentioning at the same time the most serious damage caused by Zionism and by the Zionist structure of Israel not only to the Arabs but to Israelis and all Jews In the world.” He claimed that the Arabs represented “an affirmation of a national Palestinian spirit” which, he said, differs from Pan Arabism about which Communists have many doubts because of its religious and xenophobic aspects.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
