When have you heard a European leader demand that Hamas surrender, stop using its civilians as human shields, stop using its mosques, schools, and hospitals as staging grounds, or require the terrorist leadership to leave the Gaza Strip without creating a moral equivalence between Israeli and Hamas actions? The answer is “Rarely,” and that includes the first few weeks after the atrocities of October 7, before Israel had even begun its campaign to uproot Hamas.
When America’s ambassador to the UN, Dorothy Shea, vetoed a June 2025 UNSC resolution calling for Israel to accept a ceasefire leaving Hamas in place, which every nation on the Security Council, including the French and British, voted in favor of, she told the Security Council: “We would not support any measure that fails to condemn Hamas and does not call for Hamas to disarm and leave Gaza…We cannot allow the Security Council to reward Hamas’s intransigence. It is Hamas that continues to threaten Israelis and puts Palestinian civilians in Gaza in harm’s way, using them as human shields...It is inexplicable that many members of this council still refuse to acknowledge that Hamas could end this conflict tomorrow by surrendering and laying down its arms. It is unconscionable that the UN still has not labeled and sanctioned Hamas as a terrorist organization.”
One can rationalize the cowardice of the European position, as it is dealing with its own growing Islamist population and the demographic decline of its indigenous citizens. The cross-section of Muslims in Europe ranges from Pakistanis and Bangladesh natives in England, to the Algerians and Tunisians in France, to the Turks and Syrian refugees in Germany. Despite their differences, the one thing the Islamic immigrants overwhelmingly agree about is a visceral hatred of Jews and the Jewish state.
The rising hatred of Jews and Israel in Europe
According to a report in the Washington-based news service Jewish Insider, “The French Interior Ministry released a report titled ‘Muslim Brothers and Political Islam in France,’ calling the Muslim Brotherhood an ‘imminent threat’ to French national security….calling on Paris to recognize a Palestinian state and recalibrate its policies towards Israel to ‘appease’ France’s growing Muslim population.”
Years before October 7, 2023, the European political Left’s hostility toward Jews and Israel was steadily growing from the fringes and now resides in the halls of power. Where once the animosity was spoken in hushed tones, today Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez unapologetically refers to Israel as a “genocidal state,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian accuses Israel of a “long-lasting apartheid,” and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing.” There is almost no context given or condemnation of Hamas without, in the same breath, an expression of moral equivalence.
British political commentator Douglas Murray sees Europe’s criticism of Israel not as a principled defense of human rights but as a politically convenient, morally inconsistent, and often deeply biased perspective. He contends that much of the European hostility toward Israel masks more profound antisemitic sentiments and is partly driven by a desire to absolve historical guilt over Europe’s complicity in the Holocaust. He accuses European media of disproportionately focusing on Israeli actions and underreporting atrocities elsewhere, with European intellectual and political elites grandstanding their condemnation of Israel. European nations rarely condemn Hamas or Palestinian leadership with the same intensity as they condemn Israeli actions, even when Israel is responding to terrorist attacks.
There is no fog of war for the Europeans. For the EU, Israel is disproportionate in its actions from October 8 on. This, despite the head of the Urban Warfare Institute in West Point, John Spencer, saying, “In my long career studying and advising on urban warfare for the US military, I’ve never known an army (IDF) to take such measures to attend to the enemy’s civilian population, especially while simultaneously combating the enemy in the very same buildings. In fact, by my analysis, Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history – above and beyond what international law requires and more than the US did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The Europeans remain unimpressed, lest they upset their predetermined narrative, echoing the Qatari mouthpiece, Al Jazeera.
Well before President Donald Trump highlighted Europe’s lack of investment in armaments and their militaries, the overall tone in Europe was anti-American during Democratic administrations as well, especially when president Joe Biden defended Israel‘s right to fight against a terrorist enemy who vowed to destroy the Jewish state and commit October 7 again and again if given the chance.
There are cases where Europeans do take the high road, especially in their support of the fledging Ukrainian democracy attacked by the Axis of aggression. To my chagrin, my nation, the US, has recently inverted the facts, blaming the Ukrainian victim instead of the Russian oppressor that started the war. This is a stain on American morality.
However, regarding Israel, the Europeans point an accusing finger when they disparagingly refer to Israel as an “ethno-state,” a derogatory term from the progressive Left, while conveniently ignoring the fact that most European states, from Greece to Turkey to Italy to France, are also ethnic states.
As David Ben-Basat, writing in The Jerusalem Post, says, “Europe tends to adopt a one-sided approach, granting the Palestinians near-immunity from criticism…Palestinian terrorism is met with relatively mild responses, as if it were an unavoidable fate rather than a murderous ideology that should be condemned outright…Many European nations show remarkable tolerance toward oppressive regimes and turn a blind eye to well-documented human rights violations in places like China and Iran.” Unfortunately, facts in context fall on deaf European ears, as advancing the anti-Israel narrative finds few detractors.
For its own interest, America must retake the mantle as the leader of an internationally engaged, security-minded democracy and avoid entering an isolationist cocoon. The road to an American value and security-based redemption begins by highlighting the long-standing immorality of Europe concerning the Jewish state, in concert with the anti-Israel perspectives of their leading anti-Zionist media organizations like the BBC, Le Monde, and The Guardian.
What is old is new. In 2005, a French court found Le Monde’s editor and authors of an opinion piece guilty of “racial defamation” for their article which criticized Israeli policies. The court ruled that the article targeted a nation and a religious group in a way that could be construed as “racial defamation.”
While French President Emmanuel Macron and company accuse Israel of genocide and mass starvation, the Palestinian population has grown from 350,000 to 2.3 million people since 1967. Israel has provided 1,700,000 tons of food to an enemy population, a 40% increase compared to before the October 7 massacre.
As Zach Goldberg, writing on Tablet, said, “If Israel’s war in Gaza qualifies as genocide, it would be the first such case of genocide triggered by a mass terrorist attack involving the slaughter of civilians and the taking of hostages; the first in which the genocider permitted food, fuel, and humanitarian aid to flow into the territory of its purported victims.”
Ironically, Europeans accuse Israel of colonialism, yet fail to look at their own long and sordid history of colonization. In fact, Israel’s creation was an anti-colonial movement against the colonists of England and France, who divided up the Middle East according to their advantage a little over 100 years ago after WW I with the Skyes-Picot agreement.
Recently, the UK sanctioned far-right Israeli coalition members Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich over their “monstrous” comments calling for a siege of Gaza to release the hostages and force Hamas from power. Okay, but if the Brits want to be considered the moral compass of Europe, one must ask why they haven’t also sanctioned the Supreme Leader of Iran for his “monstrous” comments calling for the annihilation of the seven million Jews in Israel:
- “The only solution is the elimination of the Zionist regime.”
- “We believe the only solution is the elimination of the Zionist regime.”
- “Israel is a cancerous tumor that must be removed.”
Europeans are cheered on by the horde of NGOs that were obsessed with the Jews in Israel years before October 7. The director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office applauded the EU’s recent decision to review Israel’s obligations under international law because “Israel is committing genocide …The EU must ban trade that contributes to the commission of genocide.”
Brussels, the capital of the EU, is the harbinger of Europe’s future. According to the Gatestone Institute, “74% of Brussels’ population is of foreign background…The wave of Jew-hatred (in the city) is marketed in unconvincing, transparent disguises as anti-Zionism, as it flourishes in many other Islamic-centered and radical left-wing circles” in Brussels.
America’s latest European import is “Globalize the intifada,” which gives license to attack and intimidate Jews, leaving them to fend for themselves. It is also a call for insurrection against the United States and Europe. The movement is anti-Western and antisemitic, ignored by far too many Europeans who cannot face the uncomfortable fact that Islamism is on the rise in their countries, and they have no idea how to deal with it taking over their nations. America needs to be aware of the rise of Islamism in the US, the root cause being the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has spawned Hamas, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Council for Islamic Relations (CAIR), ISIS, al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and so many other jihadist branches that are coming to a campus near you with Qatari money.
Is there a desire among the non-Islamist population in Europe to fight Jew-hatred and the call for Israel’s destruction? It seems not. The time to act was decades ago, or indeed before German chancellor Angela Merkel let one million unvetted Syrian refugees into Germany. What Europeans would need to do is grow a spine, uphold Western values for self-preservation, and stop excusing Jew-hatred masquerading as anti-Zionism.
In 25 years, the continent will be unrecognizable. However, I am confident that Israel will still be an outpost of Western civilization and an even more indispensable American ally.
Europeans, as well as the UN, would be well served by listening to the words of Secretary of State Marco Rubio concerning moral equivalence. “We reject any notion of equivalence: Hamas is a terrorist organization that committed unspeakable atrocities, continues to hold innocent civilians hostage, and prevents the people of Gaza from living in peace. We remind our partners not to forget who the real enemy is.”■
The writer is the director of the Middle East Political Information Network (MEPIN) and senior security editor of The Jerusalem Report. He briefs members of Congress, their foreign policy legislative aides, and the State Department on security, defense, and intelligence issues in the Middle East and how they affect American national security.