TIRANA, Jan 26 /ATA/ In his historic address to the Knesset, Prime Minister Edi Rama underscored Albania’s solidarity with Israel, condemning Hamas as ‘the jailer of Gaza’ and stressing that lasting peace cannot be achieved unless the group is completely dismantled.
Rama went on saying that Albania has become a Founding Member of the Board of Peace, an initiative supported by U.S. President Donald Trump, aimed at achieving peace and resolving conflicts in war‑torn countries.
No one else in Europe can claim such a historical clean sheet, with not a single Jew handed over to the Nazis. No one better than Albania can bear witness to a simple truth, that being Muslim and being antisemitic are not bound together by faith in God, but by its abhorrent betrayal.
And no greater honour, and heavier responsibility, than to bear witness to this truth here, in the heart of Israel, at a moment when the heartbreaking war in Gaza, through the unbearable suffering of innocent families, both Israeli and Palestinian, has opened a new window of opportunity for peace-building efforts to succeed.
There is no doubt that part of this great honour for me is to come here a few days after the Albanian Parliament ratified the decision to join President Trump in his efforts for peace and conflict resolution, and to make Albania a founding member of his Board of Peace, humbly contributing to the monumental task of turning that window into a new horizon of hope and prosperity for the people of Gaza and for the region.
There is a tunnel beneath its heart.
It was built to torture enemies of the people and ultimately to withstand an attack from the United States or the Soviet Union, a paranoia poured into concrete by a regime that feared every light of freedom and held its own people hostage in an open-air prison. This vivid memory has always made me feel sorry for respected and well-meaning internationals who rightly described Gaza as an open-air prison, but failed to identify the true jailer of the people of Gaza.
They mistook the finger for what it was pointing at and, in doing so, failed to recognize that the jailer of Gaza is Hamas, no one else but Hamas: its ideology of terror against its own people and toward the Jewish nation, its totalitarian dogma that no Palestinian life is worth living until the State of Israel is annihilated and the last Jew is driven from the Holy Land. Therefore, until Hamas is fully dismantled, its two million prisoners will not be free, and no peace will endure.
Today, that tunnel in Tirana has been transformed into a space dedicated to the victims of those who originally constructed it. And I wish with all my heart that a few of the countless tunnels of terror Hamas built, where the hostages taken on 7 October were killed, raped, tortured, and reduced to twenty-first-century human replicas of the prisoners in Nazi Germany’s extermination camps, will be preserved as part of the new Gaza reconstruction plan and later as defining testimony in favour of lasting peace among the Two States.
They should stand as tunnels of collective memory and healing, where both the hellish suffering of the hostages and the enormous loss of Palestinian lives, who were turned into the most terrifying defence infrastructure made of human flesh, may serve as eternally lit candles of forgiveness without forgetting and as a permanent call to all that such horrors which must never happen again.
As you descend the stairs of the Tirana tunnel, a sentence in neon light by Primo Levi watches over you: Those who forget their past are condemned to relive it.
We engraved this very familiar name in light on the wall, and I invoke him here not to create any impossible parallel between the industrial extermination of the Jewish people, an unparalleled crime in the history of humanity, and the tragic suffering inflicted by our brutal communist regime on countless innocent Albanians branded “enemies of the people.”
I bring Primo Levi together with our own tunnel of memory to reassure you that we Albanians know the pain of history’s grave wounds, and to reassure those in the West who hold a very different view from mine about Gaza as an open-air prison that we Albanians learned, in ways difficult to imagine, what happens when ideology becomes a god, when the state becomes an altar, and when people become sheep to be exploited or individuals stripped of their humanity to instill fear.
There is a profound history that binds our peoples together.
The culminating chapter, of course, is the dark time of the Holocaust.
But our shared legacy stretches back centuries: Jews arriving on our shores after the destruction of the Temple; Sephardim fleeing the Reconquista; families seeking refuge in our land again and again whenever Europe embarked on one of its oldest and darkest journeys of the mind, the impulse to hate Jews.
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