While the vast majority of politicians from across the political spectrum of Europe have denounced Hamas massacres of Israeli civilians, many prominent far-left elected officials have continued to be unequivocally pro-Palestine as the fighting between Israel and Hamas continues.
In Spain, acting Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz, leader of the far-left party Sumar, gave a statement in support of the Palestinians on Wednesday saying she condemned “loud and clear Israeli apartheid and violence against the civilian population wherever it comes from,” during a speech at the closing of a leftist conference in Madrid, the newspaper Público reports.
Díaz was also critical of the European Commission, particularly Neighbourhood Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi, who announced on Monday that the European Union would be cutting off humanitarian aid to Palestine. Díaz called the decision “outrageous” and stated that the EU should be promoting peace instead.
Spain’s acting Minister for Social Rights, Ione Belarra, also had harsh words for Israel, claiming that the country had subjected the Palestinians to “apartheid” for decades and slammed “the complicit silence in the face of Israel’s attacks against the Palestinian people.”
While some countries, like Austria and Germany, have moved to cut off aid to Palestine, Spain was among the few EU countries who rejected cutting aid.
Spain’s Acting Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares clarified his government’s stance on the issue saying, “This cooperation must continue; we cannot confuse Hamas, which is in the list of EU’s terrorist groups, with the Palestinian population, or the Palestinian Authority or the United Nations organisations on the ground.”
Luxembourg’s Acting Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn agreed with his Spanish counterpart saying, “Two million people live in Gaza. They are also hostages of Hamas. With these methods, we push them into the arms of terrorists.”
“We are the largest donor to Gaza. This help is important for young people. This is not money for Hamas. It is for the people of Gaza,” he added.
Others have been more explicit in their support for Hamas, including Sumar MP Tesh Sidi who seemed to defend the use of violence against Israeli civilians.
“With the peoples and their right to self-determination. Today and always with Palestine. There will be a lot of media manipulation, 24-hour tweets, but many of us know that Palestinians are killed day and night and nobody condemns that,” Sidi said.
Meanwhile, members of France’s far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, were slammed for their stance on the conflict after members spoke of the Hamas massacres as an “armed offensive by Palestinian forces,” done in “a context of intensification of the Israeli occupation policy,” despite the fact Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2005.
Even members of other left-wing parties in France condemned the LFI for their statements on the conflict, including Socialist Party Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo who called for her party to end its alliance with the LFI as part of the Nupes coalition.
“It is time to put an end to the misalliance with Jean-Luc Mélenchon,” she said, adding, ”Following Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a dead end. It was true yesterday, it is true today.”
“His stance against Israel and his refusal to condemn the terrorist organization Hamas are untenable. The Socialist Party cannot continue to lose itself,” she continued.
Mélenchon, meanwhile, retorted to the Paris mayor saying, “The disgrace is the clientelism of this type of clientelistic statement. To confuse the Jordan River with the Seine is absurd. A war on LFI rather than the struggle for peace, that’s shameful.”
Mélenchon and the LFI have long been accused of cosying up to Islamists in France, leading to the term “Islamo-Leftist” becoming popularised. A 2021 poll claimed that as many as 7 in 10 members of the French public saw Islamo-Leftism as a problem, a number that dropped to less than half for LFI supporters.
Reconquest! Party leader and former presidential candidate Eric Zemmour described the alliance between far-leftists and Islamists in 2021 saying, “Islamo-leftism is the conviction that Muslims, the Muslim proletariat, will replace the traditional workers’ proletariat, the French, of yesteryear and that it will be the new revolutionary base.”
“The proletariat has been replaced by the ‘prophetariat’,” Zemmour said, adding, “All these Islamo-leftist movements have taken up the methods of the communists.”
In Greece, former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has been one of the most openly pro-Hamas figures, stating this week that his party MeRA25 would never condemn the terrorist group.
“Those who try very hard to extract from people like me and DiEM25 a condemnation of the attack by the Hamas guerillas will never get it,” he said.
He added:
And they will never get it for a very simple reason. Those who care about humans without any discrimination, those who care equally about a Jew and an Arab, must ask themselves a very simple question: what exactly is their idea of the cessation of hostilities? That Palestinians are going to lay down their arms and go back into the largest open-air prison in the world where they are constantly suffocated by the apartheid state?
He went on to claim that Hamas, a recognized terrorist group across Europe, were not the criminals; the Europeans were “for keeping our mouths shut” on the killing of Palestinians.
The comments from the far-left come as the Israeli government has produced evidence of the massacre of civilians by Hamas, including many citizens of European countries. One attack on a music festival alone is believed to have seen the murders of hundreds of people.
