Israel’s Genocide: Perils of European Atonement

‘Nazi’ – Europe’s lasting contribution to political language – remains the prime ascription of evil in political critique. While the vast criminality implied means its usage is usually an excess, Europe’s range of behaviour since October 7 last year has placed it, plausibly, within touching distance of its wartime notoriety.

The deep complicity in Israel’s genocide in Palestine, and an unprecedented misinformation campaign to obscure genocidal invocation by Israelis in Amsterdam, has meant that its post-war identity has been emptied both abroad and on its soil, which briefly turned into a miniature theatre of the conflict. In the past year, Europe has turned a serious corner: it chose to invalidate itself, dismantle a collective moral credo and accelerate a dark relapse – in the name of preventing it.             

There was a telling consequence to recent ICC ( International Criminal Court) arrest warrants against Israel’s top leadership. After the ruling, media began speculating over something outside of speculation: whether European nations will enforce the warrants. Major European nations are members of the ICC, which prosecutes war crimes. It follows that Europe must enforce the ruling and failure therein will undermine agreements – including conceptually – and disable the ‘rules-based order’. It is not an act of choice, or one which merits praise reserved for moral courage.

That this matter – a technical guarantee and aligned with Europe’s famous atonement – required the insight of specialists, is the result of self-invalidation. It shows that Europe has so dramatically abandoned its fervent post-Holocaust tenet – zero tolerance for genocide – that a realistic instinct observed, on the subject of genocide itself, it may go rogue.

These managed expectations have already proven wise. Germany has, with tactical ambivalence, all but stated that it would not enforce the warrants and France has refused to enforce them. Hungary, too, will not honour the ICC, which, after exhaustive technical deliberation, ruled that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ex-defence minister Yoav Gallant are genocidal war criminals.   

Europe has turned legal compliance into a radical idea and is being viewed accordingly. With the Amsterdam misinformation campaign injecting an element of domesticity into a situation where an all-purpose abetment to Israel’s genocide is already underway, only two possibilities separate it from a full reclamation of its Nazi past: a local genocide or European personnel physically committing genocide abroad.

The absence of these events, while allowing European leaders to meet a rather low bar – not being full scale Nazis – is not sufficient to negate the charge that they have junked their ‘Never Again’ and submitted to the other one – the Never Again of Meir Kahane. 

Components of Genocide

The list of verified Israeli atrocities can be examined with the understanding that indirect complicity in them amounts to criminality. This understanding draws from a Western approach: its sanctions on Iran for providing arms to Russia, and its punitive view of Iranian support to regional proxies.

Major European nations have provided weapons or parts to Israel during the genocide and only shown interest in the outcome – an industrial level slaughter of civilians – to the extent of managing its optics. They have provided material aid, diplomatic cover and image management to a state which is visibly obliterating a people.

They have supported Israel knowing it is targeting and torturing civilians, using Lavender and Where’s Daddy – AI tools with alarmingly broad definitions of ‘terrorist’  – to kill people in their homes, destroying civilian infrastructure, burying civilians alive, using chemical weapons, using Palestinians as human shields, using the Dahiyeh doctrine, bombing refugee camps, sniping children in the head, gangraping detainees, engaging in necroviolence, withholding water, food, electricity, medication and other medical services, sharing home invasion pictures and footage aimed at the psychosexual humiliation of Palestinians, carrying out cultural genocide, and scholasticide.

The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) has been stripping, handcuffing and blindfolding large groups of people and carting them off in trucks, with no proof or reason shared with media. It has been using security dogs to maul the elderly, kill the differently-abled and – as per Fadi Bakr’s testimony on bestial torture – rape detainees.   

It has killed a record number of aid workers and journalists, and created ‘the largest cohort of paediatric amputees ever recorded, over 4,000 children’.

On the periphery of these atrocities, another narrative is unfolding. Israel – an occupying power – is conducting its conflict in step with louder calls for Greater Israel. Israel’s coalition cabinet contains supremacist zealots – illegal settlers who have antecedents in the Kahane strain of Zionism. They argue for the total transfer of Palestinians to other Arab countries and see no contradiction in simultaneously wanting – with territorial ambitions which extend up to Saudi Arabia – to annex parts of those countries.

Israel is unlikely to relinquish north Gaza, which some of its most radical communities are mobilising to settle. It has an addict’s temperament toward land and is a passionate opponent of refugees’ right of return. It is waiting for January – for Trump – who had previously sanitised its occupation of Golan Heights and Jerusalem.

This should alarm Europe, since the Nazi genocide also ran parallel to a quest to conquer and settle land, lebensraum – an ordained, militaristic ‘need’ for land to accommodate a Greater Germanic Reich. In Europe’s case, before the Nazis were contained, major tracts of Europe had been smashed and occupied. Part of the European guilt for non-Germans is that, in these overrun countries, the Nazis found political collaborators, ideologically sympathetic sections and too many bystanders. Some of these countries hosted concentration camps.

This experience informs a shared, influential memory. By extending Israel’s right to self-defence to the right to starve, the right to annex and the right to cleanse, Europe has shown loyalty to war criminals, and contempt for memory. It is watching Israeli construction in north Gaza and the violent settler expansion in the West Bank with a ahistorical detachment that includes not only detachment from its experience of Nazi occupation, but also from its own brutal occupations elsewhere.

Since October 7 last year, Israel has invaded two countries, bombed five and attacked UN peacekeepers. By tonnage, its bombing has surpassed World War II. Conservative estimates say it has killed over 44,000 people – a growing figure which could be dwarfed by the looming possibilities of epidemic and starvation.

The above, while enough to make full moral assessments of Europe, occurred away from it, unlike the genocidal calls by Israelis in Amsterdam. In an act of underrated significance, the West protected those Israelis at the cost of an already terminal credibility.

Amsterdam

The recent coverage of Israeli hooliganism earlier this month points to new milestone on the arc of European relapse: covering up genocidal calls on its mainland and further endangering the targets of those threats, using a stunning array of fabrications charged with imagery from its own grotesque past.

The genocide in Gaza had not until then presented itself in such bare ways on European streets – within that which is optically European. The communalism and violence it has been content to sustain continents away from its clean topographies, quality of life and cultural polish came back in a way so dramatic, it jerked Europe’s worst latencies into hyperactivity:   

Before and after the football match between Ajax and Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv, travelling Maccabi fans exhibited collective behaviour, which included vandalising homes, assaulting Amsterdam locals, glorifying genocide and actively inciting it. As a foreign mob, they attacked people and property with weapons. The chanting included ‘Death to Arabs’ and – notably – ‘Why is there no school in Gaza? Because no children are left.’ The latter chant can be read with the fact of Israeli conscription: the Maccabi mob, composed of IDF reservists, was chanting about recent exploits.   

This is evidenced by video from multiple, independent sources. It suggests the Israeli mob should have been promptly arrested under Dutch hate crime law, as their slogans make clear. Instead, they were given police protection – not only during the chanting, but during the violence. The Netherlands, formerly occupied by Hitler and signatory to the Genocide Convention, was providing security cover for genocidal intent. When locals mobilised to challenge the Macabbi rhetoric and violence, they faced a crackdown from their police, then demonisation by their elites.

A diverse set of actors – editors, pundits, mayors, US presidents and kings – were part of an exceptional propaganda campaign. Independent video evidence was lifted by mainstream Western media and reproduced with such a crudely mangled narrative – an open inversion of culpability and victimhood – that it was instantly debunked.   

To protect Maccabi fans, the Western narrative reversed the truth and spiked it with loaded, Holocaust-era language. ‘Jew hunt’ and ‘pogrom’ littered the coverage, which suggested that an innocent group of football fans had been brutalised by prowling gangs of anti-semetic, pro-Palestine locals. Wild references to Anne Frank and Ktystalmacht were made. There was nothing coded about the propaganda: Jew-hating Muslims migrants were hunting Israelis.

German, French and British media were identical in this deception. Bild, BBC, The Guardian, Tagesschau and others picked up photographer Annet de Graaf’s video showing Maccabi fans attacking locals. They used the footage with a narration to turn reality on its head, saying it depicted Jews being targeted. They disregarded the signature yellow on the attackers’ Maccabi jerseys and duped their viewership into believing shades of Nazism were on display.

In no time, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen had condemned the ‘anti-semetism’. Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof was speaking of ‘anti-semetic violence’ by people with ‘migration backgrounds’, Geert Wilders suggested deporting north African migrants and Dutch king Willem Alexander lamented that Europe failed the Jewish community. Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema said the events evoked ‘memories of pogroms’ while Joe Biden wrote they echoed ‘dark moments in history’.

The bleakest case concerned Alice Porter, a Sky News journalist. She reported what footage showed: Maccabi hooligans attacking locals and trying to foster murderous sentiment in public. By presenting verifiable truth, she extracted a public confession from Sky News: that it is not a journalistic entity, but theatre scripted by power which, to serve power, will kill its honest reporting if any accidentally occurs. It deleted Porter’s work, released a re-edited version of the report and made her voice a fresh narration liberated from facts. The original report, due to insufficient contempt for truth, did not meet Sky’s ‘standards for balance’.      

After a global fact-check, some publications like The Guardian released ‘revised’ videos saying that Maccabi fans had indeed been provocative and violent. Even in these revisions, they omitted the most sinister part: chants about IDF’s mass pedicide.  

Most US coverage, expectedly, was formulaic Israeli state propaganda, with pieces like ‘The age of the pogrom returns,’ ‘Amsterdam is about Jew hatred – and Gaza,’ ‘Antisemetic attacks prompt emergency flights for Israeli soccer fans’ and ‘A worldwide Jew hunt’ appearing in The New York Times alone. US television channels like CNN, NBC, CBS all reported along the same lines, with varying degrees of outrage over a piece of fiction.

Europe, though, stood more deeply exposed. It had protected a massive gang of foreigners on its streets as they attacked its own citizens and called for genocide. Its politicians, editors and monarchs, instead of being stirred by their postwar lessons to come down exceptionally hard on the perpetrators, redirected those lessons to condemn and endanger their own population.             

Europe’s Confused Moral Circuitry

There is chilling poetry in the European predicament. The fact of militarised Israelis chanting for genocide on its soil from the pointed place of Jewish identity – framed by the full historical causality of that circumstance – is surreal. The establishment response was equally so. Europe has falsely derived that guilt begets loyalty to grouping, not opposition to phenomena. In other words, its Holocaust lesson is to always and mechanically aid Zionism, not be against the broad idea of genocide.

An interaction of two factors underlies this: post-war atonement and colonialism. To help itself deal with the guilt of one dark past, it has deployed the other. It has found that the way to exorcise its demons over exterminating part of its population is to channel its residual imperial racism – to remain unflinching when a disfigured legacy of that extermination does the same to ethnically Asian, ex-European subjects. Europe has twisted itself into knots. The circuitry of its guilt and repentance is confused. It has ended up weaponising its own barbaric past to shelter the barbaric present.       

In making an exception to its post-war resolve in the bloodiest of ways – not only arming genocide but providing diplomatic and propaganda cover to its personnel and cheerleaders – it has shown that European atonement is the same as European sin: an act of blood.

Samar is a writer and musician from New Delhi. The views are personal.