Lawmaker at center of bribery scandal has echoed Israel's lies

Fulvio Martusciello is at the center of a major new controversy.
Mathieu Cugnot European Parliament

The European Parliament’s main building in Brussels resembles a giant glasshouse.

Though the Italian lawmaker Fulvio Martusciello has worked there for more than a decade, he may not yet have learned the most important rule for people in glasshouses: Don’t throw stones.

Martusciello is embroiled in a new scandal centered on suspicions that the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei was paying bribes to contest how its 5G equipment was being shunned in Europe.

One assistant and one associate of Martusciello have been arrested amid the controversy. In an apparently separate probe, Martusciello is accused of using a fake signature to claim parliamentary allowances.

There is a delicious irony in how Martusciello faces claims – so far unproven – of actual fraud. When it has suited him, the same Martusciello has amplified bogus allegations that the European Union’s aid to the Palestinians was being misspent.

For several years, Martusciello chaired the European Parliament’s committee (“delegation” as it is formally called) for relations with Israel.

In that capacity, he indulged those lobbyists who kept on imagining that the EU was financing what they called “terror tunnels.”

After Israel caused immense destruction in Gaza during a 2014 offensive, Martusciello sought to obstruct the provision of urgently needed aid. Masquerading as a champion of financial prudence, he tried to sound the alarm about “EU taxpayers’ money” assisting “activities other than reconstruction.”

NGO Monitor – an especially repugnant pro-Israel group – has credited certain lawmakers with being sufficiently “inspired” by its “research” to echo that outfit’s smears. Martusciello was included on a list of the “inspired” which was compiled in 2017.

His inclusion was based on how he and a few other colleagues submitted a parliamentary question which contained a claim that the EU was financing a Palestinian organization that “honors terrorists.”

A European Union official responded by pointing out that they had not funded an event to which Martusciello and his colleagues took umbrage. Besides, the real purpose of the event was to collect money for people whose homes had been demolished by Israel.

Such demolitions “could amount to collective punishment,” the European Union official stated.

Even though he is no longer the lead lawmaker for the European Parliament’s relations with Israel, Martusciello has continued spreading the falsehoods that are much loved by Israel’s advocates. In 2022, he signed a letter objecting to the EU’s “passivity” over Palestinian school books that allegedly incite children to “hate Jews.”

The EU has not been passive on this subject.

It had commissioned an analysis of 156 Palestinian schoolbooks which concluded that one contained “anti-Semitic motifs.” That book – used in teaching religion to Muslim children – was amended ahead of the 2020-21 academic year.

Shoddy behavior

Another delicious irony is that while Martusciello was waging war on imagined abuses of aid, he was engaging in quite shoddy behavior.

As chair of the committee for relations with Israel, he was aided considerably by Nuno Wahnon Martins.

Wahnon was acting as Martusciello’s official adviser, without the permission of the European Parliament’s administration. As Wahnon was then a staff member with the European Jewish Congress, his conduct raised serious questions about how a pro-Israel lobby group had parachuted one of its representatives into an unauthorized position within a key Brussels institution.

The same Wahnon was recently arrested over his alleged involvement in Huaweigate, as the new scandal has been dubbed.

The European Parliament’s committee for relations with Israel has not exactly become a paragon of transparency since Martusciello ceased steering it.

The latest chair of that committee, Hildegard Bentele, took up her post soon after she was brought to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem by the European Leadership Network, another pro-Israel lobby group. Bentele, a German lawmaker, has still not declared that trip on the European Parliament’s website – as she is obligated to do.

That committee doesn’t have a monopoly on opacity.

Roberta Metsola – as president of the European Parliament – responded to a previous scandal known as Qatargate by promising greater openness. She is not leading by example.

Via freedom of information requests, I have established that Metsola received numerous letters from the Israeli government amid the genocidal war against Gaza. Her office has refused to disclose the contents of those letters.

“Justifying” its refusal, the European Parliament cited an exemption covering international relations in the freedom of information law applying to it. The European Parliament stated that the exemption is “an absolute one and does not require the identification, and subsequent weighing up, of an overriding public interest.”

I have filed an appeal against that abhorrent reasoning.

The European Parliament is supposed to act in the public interest at all times. Preventing scrutiny of its relations with a state carrying out a genocide is an affront to the democratic principles it purports to uphold.