Yanis Varoufakis on Israel-Gaza: 'We Europeans have created this' | UpFront

6 weeks after hamas's attacks on October 7th Israel continues its bombardment and Siege of Gaza while Israel's response has had the full support of the majority of European countries some dissenting voices are making themselves heard and calling for a ceasefire so what role is Europe playing in the Israel Gaza war and how has its support for Israel changed over time I'll ask renowned Economist and former Greek Finance Minister jannis veracis in an upfront special Janis vacas thank you so much for joining me on upfront uh it has been six weeks since hamas's attack on October 7th uh and the start of Israel's bombardment of Gaza uh the vast majority of European governments were unequivocally supportive of Israel uh as well as its response uh but in recent days Belgium's Deputy Prime Minister has called for sanctions against Israel and French president Emanuel macron has called to quote work towards a ceasefire are we seeing a shift in the positions of European governments tragically it has taken more than 11,000 deaths to see a minute shift a shift which is so late coming and so small that as Europeans we should hang our heads in shame hang our heads in shame what do you think should have been the initial response like on October 8th what should the European uh Union which European states have been saying the thing that logic dictates which is beyond condemnations we all condemn war crimes we all condemn horrible horrible things that have been done to Israeli citizens to um Thai citizens by Hamas to Palestinians by settlers in the West Bank but you know let's move on Beyond contamination because we Europeans have created this problem we we've created centuries of anti-Semitism pgms against the people uh that came originally from that land the Jews then we subjected them to the Holocaust then we supported the vile Dogma or dictum of a land without a people for a people without a land as if Palestine was empty of people this is settler white supremacist language the British use this in Australia to declare Australia Teran Ulus an empty land empty of people in order to justify the genocide of uh the Aborigines in Australia and not just in Australia they did in Kenya they did in South Africa uh and you know in the 1920s and 30s the process began by which Europe was trying to get rid of its guilt over the pgms against the Jews maybe get rid of the Jews from Europe by supporting uh a genocidal against the Palestinians this time dictum narrative this has been going on for 80 years so what should have happened at the beginning of October it's really very simple we should have demanded the end of the state of apide which creates two different legal systems on the same small patch of land between two different peoples that is the source of all violence violence for decades uh we we have a prime minister in Israel who reson D the whole point of his existence was to destroy the peace process Netanyahu has one objective in life to make sure that there is never a two-state solution the solution that Joe Biden Advocates Emanuel macron Advocates so this is what we should have done condemn all acts of violence and at the same time say to both sides to both extremes we are not going to tolerate this there's going to be a peace process under the United Nations there's going to be a complete clamp down on all kinds of violence whether it's settler violence of the West Bank by Israelis or Hamas violence against Israelis and we're going to sort this mess out once and for all well European commission president Ursula uh vanderlan proposed a kind of vision of moving forward that engages some of the ideas that you just mentioned uh she offered five principles to guide the future of the Gaza Strip uh those include no safe Haven for terrorists no hamas-led government no long-term Israeli security presence no forced displacement of Palestinians and no sustained blockade uh what do you make of the proposal and does it fully represent uh what the European people want well Mrs Ula felan represents no one she essentially violated all principles of European Democratic process by flying to Israel and effectively cheerleading the war crimes of Israel in the Gaza Street as for the precise proposal which comes I have to say that we we have a duty not to take Mrs for Lian seriously dm25 the movement that I'm part of we have a campaign and a petition for her removal and dismissal she's an embarrassment to Europeans she doesn't speak for Europeans she shouldn't be there we should get rid of her as quickly as possible having said that let's take the Five Points you mentioned essentially what she's doing is she's playing the game of Netanyahu of destroying the two- State Solution by isolating Gaza from the broader problem of how to have two states living side by side or if we want to be more humanist and more ambitious to talk about a single state that is secular and does not discriminate between Jews and and Palestinians she doesn't do that she separates Gaza and says let's find a solution Sol for Gaza not a solution for the apide state in West Bank because you see allow me to ask a rhetorical question what if Hamas were to just disappear you know surrender to the IDF today what happens then what happens in the West Bank where we have settlers as we speak uh throwing out terrorizing killing murdering maming Palestinians and throwing them off their ancestral you have a Palestinian Authority that has been completely humiliated and deprived of any authority over the West Bank and you have a government which clearly says that they are going to Annex the whole thing from The River To The Sea what is Mrs for thean suggestion for that just deal with Gaza that is to become the useful idiot of Benjamin Netanyahu that's who Mrs Ula fan is that's why we Europeans must band together and get rid of her earlier you talked about uh Europe's long history in uh the hatred of Jews the prosecution and persecution of Jews violence against Jews is this Holocaust guilt that leads to this place of sort of not pushing back sufficiently against Israel's policies and practices I'm I'm asking that partly because there's a poll conducted by political in 20121 uh it found that 41% of those poed in Europe agreed that quote against the background of the history of the Holocaust cost Europe Bears a special responsibility for Israel now 39% disagreed but 20% don't know I mean that's a sizable number of people and so it makes me wonder if that informs their decision to not more strongly condemn Israel's actions partly yes look there is a very good reason why we Europeans bear the guilt over the Holocaust it is because we are responsible for it not just the German Nazis the cat na Nazis the Greek Nazis uh the Hungarian Nazis the French Nazis or the collaborators we all played a small part not individually but in terms of our culture in terms of our nations in that uniquely evil event in his in the history of the world of humanity called the Holocaust but the question I put to my fellow Europeans especially to my German friends and I mean that as friends is this how far must Israel's ethnic cleansing of the pales Ians proceed before our Justified guilt over the Holocaust no longer prevents us from challenging Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians or to put it a bit more brutally how much Palestinian blood do we need to wash off the guilt of the Holocaust so it's a it's a provocative question uh a week after hamas's attack on Israeli civilians you refuse to condemn either Hamas or Netanyahu committing atrocities across Israel Palestine instead of condemning either you condemned Europeans and Americans as you're doing very much today as the true villains who have been quote Making Peace impossible in Israel Palestine is it really fair to offset all of these war crimes on to the West uh however guilty we all may be shouldn't Hamas and Israeli government also be held accountable for their actions of course they should be but allow me to say that I am a European if I were Indian or Chinese or South African or Latin American I wouldn't be saying what I said but as a European I am refusing to play the phony game that other Europeans play especially our governments who are condenscending they're looking at the people who now are suffering both Israelis and Palestinians and bedwin and Drews in the land of ancient Palestine think of what we Europeans do you know we look down upon those people say oh you know you um animals you are killing each other we're going to condemn you whether we condemn you know the Hamas people or the settlers or Netanyahu or the PLO in the end we Europeans look down upon them as if we are superior we're not Superior we're infinitely inferior we over centuries have created colonialism we have created anti-Semitism we have created the mentality of imperialism we are behind the massacres that are being uh carried out by both sides so we are the last people on this planet in this universe who have the authority the moral right the high ethical standards that would allow us to look down upon these people and condemn them I'm not going to play this game anymore I condemn every war crime but you know what to those who say to me why are you not condemning H I said to them well you lost your opportunity to to ask me this question the moment you fail to condemn the killing of unarmed journalists Palestinian journalists non-p Palestinian journalists Israeli journalists Israeli Jewish peace activists children women old men you've lost the moment you forgot you neglected to condemn that let's not play this condemnation game anymore let's just the ask the qu the very simple question do we or do you not want to see from The River To The Sea and I use this expression provocatively do we want to see from the river to see I don't care about Israel Palestine or anything do we want to see people who live without the fear of being killed with equal civil and political rights what has happened in the United States in particular have we forgotten the great civil rights marches in the 1960s why can't we have the same mentality about the land of Palestine and start with one assumption that should be common amongst civilized women men transgender whatever we happen to be and that is that there should be no discrimination no apar hide in that land how we're going to work it out whether there will be two states multi-ethnic states sitting side by side or one state for everyone that doesn't discriminate between Jews bedwin Drews Palestinians Arabs and so on I don't care let's begin with this the past few weeks we've seen some of the biggest Pro Palestine marches ever recorded both in Europe and in the United States uh has there been a shift in the Public's attitude toward Palestinians and if so will this lead to any kind of substantive government positions changing not really what we have seen is a truer expression of the feelings out there in our communities the people of Europe in the majority have traditionally traditionally recognized the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians since the nakba since 1948 the majority of the French the majority of the Germans the majority of the Greeks we always understood because it's the obvious thing to understand that there was an attempt ethnically to cleanse a people but I do not see our governments shifting fast enough so that we will be able in the future to answer our grandchildren when they ask us what did you do when the thousands of children in Gaza were being massacred in Cold Blood what some governments have done in response has been to ban protesting yes uh France Germany Hungary Austria have all banned solidarity protests with Palestine other European leaders have tried to delegitimize them framing them all as anti-semitic or extremist events uh one German MP even suggested stripping non-eu Nationals of their right to protest uh how dangerous is this backlash for European civil rights and the global Palestinian Rights Movement as a whole well let me ask answer your pertinent question with an example a few days ago a friend who happens to be an Israeli Jew who lives in Berlin studied very carefully the German Constitution to establish what her constitutional rights as a resident of Germany are and she discovered that the police cannot ban her from doing a one-person demonstration that is standing in the middle of a square with a plard which read as an Israeli and as a Jew I say stop the genocide of Palestinians and she was arrested need I say more the moment we allow this to happen the moment we allow our police force our parliaments our instruments and organs of the state to tell an Israeli Jew in the middle of Berlin that she's being arrested because of the expression of a view which was not even spoken but it was written on a blackard that is a very slippery slope to two things morbid anti-i here you have a white German policeman arresting a Jewish woman who happens to be Israeli as well in Berlin and the second thing that happens is the end of civil liberties for all of us since the uh October 7th attx has also been a rising anti-Semitism across Europe we've seen Molotov cocktails thrown on a synagogue in Germany we've seen stars of David sprayed on residential buildings uh in France uh there was a Jewish cemetery desecrated in Austria this is all very worrisome stuff uh however some accusations of anti-Semitism have been against people who are simply criticizing Israel's human rights records for example uh in response to Amnesty International stating that war crimes had been committed by all parties leor hayette the spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs called am Amnesty International anti-semitic and a quote propaganda organization that's working for Hamas terrorists how does one thread the needle between dismissing the idea that all support for Palestine is anti-Semitic without delegitimizing the fact that there is a very real rise in anti-semitic hate crimes against Jewish people going on right as we speak whenever you have a tragedy like the one unfolding in the land of Palestine Israel today the extremes are the great beneficiaries on the one hand the gross anti-semites and on the the other hand the gross um hate you know haters of Palestinians um allow me to answer by means of a personal story I grew up in a fascist dictatorship here in Greece we had Colonels running the Ministries they were abominable they were imprisoning Greek Democrats we lived in fear for seven years of the earlier part of my life now whenever a foreigner the German Chancellor at the time willly brunt great man criticized the Greek government he was being accused by the Greek fascists in power here in Athens as being anti-greek a Mist right the equivalent of anti-semite uh whenever a Greek confronted the fascist government the fascist government talked to him talked about him as a Greek hating Greek this is what we have now happening across the world there is a concerted propaganda effort to identify to equate opposition to netanyahu's fascist government and to the apide state that he has so successfully created with anti-Semitism the moment you conflate the two an objection to a fascist regime which oppresses Jewish intellectual Jewish Democrats just as much as it oppresses anyone else the moment you identify that criticism of that regime with anti-Semitism that is the greatest victory of anti-semites and to go back to the previous example with Iris havest the uh psych analyst the woman that I refer to in Berlin the Israeli Jew that was arrested for protesting uh isn't that the height of anti-Semitism to have a wide German police officer arresting an Israeli Jew in Berlin now a lot of Europe's far right parties are providing unequivocal support for Israel at the moment but those same parties often have a deep and long history of anti-Semitism themselves for example you have um Marine Le Pen's National rally party in France which fully supported Israel but the party was founded by a former SS member and another founder leen's own father was convicted for minimizing the Holocaust many have pointed towards similar Trends among farri parties uh in Hungary and and Poland and other places how do you make sense of these Trends where farri parties have these incredibly powerful pro-israel views but also deep histories of anti-Semitism well this is a worldwide phenomenon it happens here in Greece too we have Nazis who were um campaigning actively uh on anti-semitic tropes they were even selling those disgusting pamphlets and volumes uh about sonion and so on the conspiracy theories against the Jews uh and now they are you know they are wearing the Israeli flag and egging on the idef to kill as many Palestinians as possible you have this in the United States you have an Evangelical movement which is extremely rightwing it was extremely anti-semitic for 200 years in the United States and suddenly they have made the extreme Z position the Messianic position whereby God supposedly is going to reappear in the land of Palestine and that needs that needs that makes it necessary to expans all the Palestinians from that land uh this is a wewi phenomenon it's very interesting one I think that you know sociologists psych analysts psychiatrists are going to have a field day for the next 100 years explaining it but what what we see what we see is you see that really very simple flip of a switch from a rabid anti-Semitism to Rabbit Islam islamophobia because in the end what the AL right needs is a group of people to demonize it so happened that it was the Jews now it can be anything it can be the syrians it can be the Palestinians and could be you know the belgians it doesn't really matter they need es a a a scapegoat they need to be able to point at the people to say if these people were eradicated life would be easier this is what gbls did in the 1920s and 1930s so successfully with the Jews being targeted and being the victims today is happening in France by the same people who were targeting the Jews they're now targeting um algerians and Moroccans and so on so the greatest enemy is a fascism that requires scapegoats the fact that they go the flip-flop between different Target groups is not racial I want to ask you about something else um European countries have long been involved with sending weapons to Israel the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that Italy and Germany have supplied Israel's military with crucial weapons and equipment that is now being used on the ground in Gaza the UK has helped bolster the Israeli Air Force while Germany has sent tanks to Israel as well uh there's a lot of awareness of US military aid to Israel we talk about it all the time we talk about the billions that we send but how underplayed is Europe's direct military assistance to Israel severely and it takes uh two forms you mentioned one form selling Israel Weaponry but there is a second form buying Weaponry from Israel because Israel is a major producer of weapon weon as well and not just lethal Weaponry but also spy wear think of Predator so you know my government here in Greece the the government of the um conservative party that I oppose they've purchased predator and they've used it against their political opponents they even use it to spy on on one another so Israel's uh location in the international trade of uh surveillance and lethal Weaponry is is is a very important location and Europe is um an active supporter of this now to those who are watching us and we think yes but Europe must help Israel survive my message to you folks is Israel is not in danger Hamas yes they have a capacity to inflict a lot of pain on Israel but it is not a present and clear danger for the Israeli state Israel is a tremendously powerful State it's a nuclear armed State it's got an army armed to the teeth and technologically incredibly Advanced there is no way that the Israeli Army can lose to anyone only the Palestinians are being ethnically cleansed and they are very clear guidelines by the Israeli government supported by the West to get rid of them fully to eradicate them from the Gaza street from East Jerusalem and from the West Bank jannis bar Fus thank you so much for joining me on up front appreciate your insights as always well thank you all right that is our show up front we'll be back later this [Music] week

Channel: Al Jazeera English

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Keywords: Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera English, Europe, Gaza, Greece, Israel, Palestine, UpFront, Yanis Varoufakis, al Jazeera, al jazeera English, al jazeera live, al jazeera video, aljazeera English, aljazeera latest, aljazeera live, aljazeera live news, conflict, israel palestine conflict, latest news, news headlines, palestine israel conflict

Id: _OAniUDMA1Y

Length: 25min 0sec (1500 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2023