The bombs falling on Gaza and Lebanon risk putting the Arab world not just against Israel but also against the West.

Former President de Marco was speaking in an interview to Italian paper Il Tempo.

The right to defend oneself, he said, has become an abuse. It is true that the Bible speaks of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” but here it has become “10 eyes for an eye and 10 teeth for a tooth’.

It is true that Israel must defend itself, and that a soldier captured by the Palestinians and two by the Hizbullah are grave things and must be condemned, but Israel’s reaction was out of proportion. It is also true that the Israeli soldier captured by the Palestinians was intended to serve the freeing of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, but to capture, in retaliation, five democratically elected ministers and to cause so much damage to the Occupied Territories was out of proportion. It is also true that the Hizbullah actions must be condemned, but there is no comparison between what has been bombed in Beirut and the missiles launched at Haifa.

As a solution, Dr de Marco said, there must first be the will to seek peace; then there must be an international conference on the Middle East. The fighting must stop and a United Nations or even a Nato military force must be sent to keep the two sides away from each other.

Dr de Marco concluded: “This conflict is not that distant from us. It is close to home. This situation favours the extremists in the Arab world. The more the Arab world feels humiliated, the more extremists will feel free to propagate their own fundamentalism. If we are not careful, we risk seeing the southern shores of the Mediterranean in the hands of the fundamentalists.”