Why Do So Many European Leaders Now Seem Proud To Side With Hamas?

Fifteen of the European Union’s 27 member states—around 55%—have now publicly recognised the imaginary state of Palestine. So has the United Kingdom. These European leaders are openly rewarding the Islamist terrorists of Hamas for their genocidal war against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and the only Jewish state on earth.

No wonder Hamas hailed the recent wave of recognitions as a “victory” for its “just cause.” That cause is not the West’s dreamed-of two-state-solution; Hamas supports no such thing. Its avowed cause is a jihad to wipe the Israeli state off the map altogether and drive the Jews into the Mediterranean—the real meaning of the “From the river to the sea” chant so beloved by the Islamo-left in the West. 

The only ‘justice’ Hamas seeks for Israelis is the sort of summary executions it handed down on October 7th, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust that the Islamist death cult has vowed to repeat “again and again” if it survives the war in Gaza.

To end up on the same side as Hamas should be a cause of great shame for European leaders. Latest polls show that almost 90% of voters in the UK and 70% in France do not support their governments’ policies of unconditionally endorsing a Palestinian state. 

Recognising a fantasy state with no agreed borders or system of government does not even comply with the rules of international law, which the EU elites normally insist must take preference over national sovereignty.

Yet instead of being embarrassed, leaders such as President Macron of France, Prime Minister Sanchez of Spain and UK Prime Minister Starmer now proudly stand on the world stage of the UN and loudly boast about their recognition of ‘Palestine.’

It seems a truly extraordinary situation. Why would already-deeply unpopular governments be so keen to champion a policy that most European voters disavow but Middle Eastern terrorists cheer?

Why are these apparently sane European statesmen so willing to swallow the Hamas version of events in Gaza? Europe’s political and media elites parrot the notion that Israel is committing “genocide” by waging war on truly genocidal Jew-haters, and repeat propaganda from Hamas (aka “the Gaza health ministry”) as if it were gospel truth.  

So why do they accept such a Gaza-through-the looking-glass distortion of the truth? Are they simply too stupid to know any better? That might be true of some—‘Palestine’ fan David Lammy, for example, the UK deputy prime minister, also believes that a man can grow a cervix and become a biological woman. But lack of intelligence hardly seems an adequate explanation for more than half of the EU taking such a dangerously deluded view of the Middle East.

The truth is even worse. This international display by Europe’s peacock leaders has little or nothing to do with the realities of what is happening on the ground over there, where Israel is fighting a war for its survival on at least seven fronts. It is all about political posturing and the culture war over here, in Europe.

Europe’s ‘pro-Palestinian’ elites are now drunk on a toxic cocktail of Western self-loathing and leftist identity politics. They are putting their own short-term political survival above the interests of our democracies. The results could be devastating—not for Israel, which will carry on fighting regardless, but for the future of Western civilisation.

For decades, the political and cultural elites of Europe and America have sought to trash the history and values of Western civilisation. As some of us first noted more than 20 years ago, this self-loathing has encouraged a hard turn against Israel, because it still stands as a champion of the historic principles of national sovereignty and democracy which our globalist elites now despise. 

Add to that the culture war being fought by the West’s liberal-left ideologues of identity politics. According to this modern racial dogma, Jews are the prime benefactors of ‘white privilege,’ who must always be the oppressors, however they are attacked. Whereas Palestinian Arabs are non-white, and therefore must always be the victims, whatever they do to the Jews.

This contemporary form of antisemitism has formed an unholy alliance with old-fashioned Islamist Jew-hatred. Theirs is an uneasy coalition, as evidenced by recent tensions between woke leftists and Islamists on Greta Thunberg’s Gaza ‘flotilla’ and in Jeremy Corbyn’s new party of the UK left. But the one thing they can all agree on is their hatred of the Jewish state of Israel.

(There are those of course who still try to claim that anti-Zionism is not the same thing as antisemitism. In response we might simply observe that, when you single out the world’s only Jewish state as the worst war criminal on earth, but ignore all the wars and massacres being perpetrated by other—often Islamic—regimes: then yes, your double standards anti-Zionism looks exactly the same as antisemitism.)

Imbued with Western self-loathing and discriminatory identitarian politics, ‘pro-Palestine’ European leaders have now reached a new low. They are shamelessly trying to exploit the life-and-death struggle in the Middle East to aid their own political survival, posturing on the international stage to try to compensate for their domestic crises. 

Hence, the more unpopular Macron or Starmer become at home, the keener they are to shout about ‘Palestine.’ In this, they are seeking to placate the leftists for whom, at a time when they are in retreat across Europe and the West, Israel-bashing has become woke’s last stand.

This lowlife politicking over ‘Palestine’ will not save Europe’s despairing centrist leaders. Nor will it make the impotent EU appear powerful in the world. But it is risking grave consequences for the rest of us.

Forget about recognising a fantasy Palestinian state. It is time Europe as a whole publicly recognised Israel as our vital ally, fighting on the front lines of a global war for democracy. 

This is, as we have said from the start, not a conventional fight about territory. It is a conflict between civilisation and barbarism. European leaders who have effectively sided with Islamists against the Israelis would sign us up to the armies of barbarism in that existential struggle. They are surrendering to the anti-civilisation forces on the home front, too.

Instead, let all of us who stand for European civilisation now stand foursquare with the democratic state of Israel and its right to defend its people. No surrender.