Denmark is a member of the UN security Council 2025-26. Naturally, as former president of the UN General Assembly, I am proud of Denmark’s stated cross-cutting priority for the coming two years: ‘Standing up for International Law, including International Humanitarian Law, and pushing for a more Accountable, Effective and Representative Security Council.’
I look forward to seeing it put into action in a volatile world with so many conflicts and unknowns that urgently need attention, call for strict implementation of human rights and urgent action against war crimes, not least in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The tragedy of Palestine
Based on extensive documentation, Amnesty International has concluded that Israel is committing in genocide in Gaza with indiscriminately killing and injuring of tens of thousands of civilians, blocking emergency aid and killing emergency workers, resulting in widespread death from hunger and disease.
2.3 million people have been left in a pile of rubble the size of Langeland (a small Danish Island). Their society has been systematically made uninhabitable. Homes, hospitals and schools have been bombed to oblivion. 45,000 people have been killed – most of them civilians. 106,000 have been injured or permanently disabled. Children make up a terrifyingly large proportion of the dead and injured. Nowhere else have so many children had limbs amputated – often without anaesthesia, because medicine and equipment are allowed to arrive only to the absolute minimum, just as little as water and food. Hundreds of thousands of children without schooling and without a future,
On South Africa’s initiative, the accusation against Israel of genocide is being heard by the International Court of Justice. No verdict has yet been rendered, but the Court has for a long time and in vain demanded a ceasefire and sufficient supplies for the victims of the war.
The International Criminal Court has also brought proceedings against Israel’s Prime Minister and former Minister of Defence for their well-documented war crimes.
Yet there are still people in Denmark who believe that Israel’s warfare is necessary self-defence against Hamas’ brutal attacks on and hostage-taking of civilians in Israel on October 7, 2023.
Some say that the Israelis have the right to defend themselves with all means necessary, so as not to be exterminated or expelled from Palestine again. This is said without the understanding that in the real world it is the Palestinians who are threatened with annihilation as a nation and with expulsion from Palestine. Israel cannot be defeated militarily.
Beyond all doubt Hamas’ attack was a war crime, branding the movement a sinister terrorist death cult that not only practices indiscriminate killings of civilian Jewish citizens, but also completely disregarding that the retaliation hits back at their own people by a factor one hundred.
But Hamas’ atrocities can NEVER justify Israel’s almost 15 months of war against the people of Gaza. Of course, neither does it justify the state-sponsored settler-violence and ethnic displacement directed against the Palestinian civilian population in the occupied West Bank – nor the internment of 12,000 Palestinians in prison camps where torture and ill-treatment are widespread.
Historic struggle
The struggle for Palestine between the Arab majority population and Jewish immigrants began well over a hundred years ago, when the Zionist movement – based on centuries of persecution of Jews in Europe – formulated the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine.
After World War I, Palestine passed from Turkish to British rule. In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British promised the Jews ‘a national home’ in Palestine, but without specifying whether this meant a separate state. It was the recipe for conflict with the Arab Palestinians.
Jewish immigration accelerated with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and after World War II with survivors of the Holocaust. Indeed, the Holocaust that in 1947 led a newly founded UN, dominated by the victorious powers of World War II, to propose that Palestine be divided more or less equally between Arabs and Jews – with Jerusalem as a special area under international control.
The UN-plan was never implemented. The neighbouring Arab countries, who were soon to liberate themselves from European colonial rule, rejected the UN-plan calling it a colonialist solution that didn’t take the Palestinians into account, disregarding that they constituted a large majority of the population. Therefore, the neighboring countries declared war against the self-proclaimed Jewish state. But with the support of both the United States and the Soviet Union, Israel won on the battlefield and ended up in control of 77 percent of Palestine. Gaza came under Egypt’s jurisdiction rule, and the West Bank including East Jerusalem under Jordan’s.
Sympathy squandered
I was born in 1946. My oldest living friend is of Jewish origin. I grew up with massive sympathy towards the Jewish people and their historic plight, the cruel persecution, everything they had to go through to get their own state. I experienced the kibbutzim in the new Israel as an exciting socialist experiment.
I took in the myth of the people without a country who came to a barren land without a people and made it flourish. But, with the growing understanding of how the birth of Israel led to the flight and expulsion of two-thirds of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants and the fact that Israel would never let them return, I became increasingly critical of the Zionist state.
The history of the Jewish state is also the history of 77 years of displacement, occupation and humiliation of the Palestinians. And it is the history of how every time there was a movement towards peace, terrorists on one side or the other would blow it up.
The current catastrophe in Gaza places Netanyahu and his associates squarely as the most murderous terrorists in the long history of this conflict. In Denmark, fines and imprisonment are handed out to people who express support for terror. Should the International Criminal Court convict Netanyahu a terrorist, how will this legislation be administered towards those who praise Netanyahu’s war?
No wonder Jews around the world took in the same positive narrative about Israel that I myself listened to in my early youth – and many of them supported the establishment of the state of Israel financially with considerable amounts of money.
But early on, there were also Jews realising the danger that the Zionist project might lead to.
One of them was Albert Einstein, who wrote the following to his friend, the chemist and Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, in 1929: “Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering and deserve all that will come to us, […] Should the Jews not learn to live in peace with the Arabs, the struggle against them will follow them for decades in the future.” A grim prophecy indeed!
Einstein declined the presidency
Weizmann became the first president of the state of Israel. Upon his death in 1952, Einstein was urged to succeed him. However, Einstein declined to become president of Israel because he disagreed with the way the state was developing.
Einstein’s concerns were confirmed when, in the 1967 war, Israel gained control of all of historic Palestine and began to colonize the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, especially with Jewish settlements. This systematically undermined the possibility of realising the UN peace plan for a two-state solution, because this tiny piece of land and the Gaza Strip was to be the foundation of an Arab Palestinian state.
There was a moment of reflection with the Oslo Accords between Israel and Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1994. The last Israeli leader to have both the will and the authority to realise a two-state solution was probably Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish terrorist for precisely that reason in 1995.
Large waves of immigration of Arab and Soviet Jews into Israel gradually increased the political power of ultra-nationalist and religious parties who believe they have a God-given right to all of Palestine and to continue to keep the Arab Palestinians in Palestine under occupation.
This policy has been condemned time and again by an overwhelming majority of UN member states, who demand an end to the occupation, and the implementation of a two-state solution.
No progress has been made because Israel, with massive support from the US, has developed into the Middle East’s military superpower – even with nuclear arms. In the US, support for Israel is regarded as necessary domestic policy if one wants to be re-elected; successive presidents have talked about a two-state solution, but in reality, the US has undermined any such solution by effectively accepting that Israel has established colonies of 700,000 Jewish settlers on occupied territory in violation of UN resolutions and International Law. And the US has supplied Israel with large quantities state of the art weapons, and systematically vetoed any resolution in the UN Security Council demanding a stop to Israel’s rampage, even when all other members voted for.
Tacit US-approval
President Joe Biden, during his recent dramatic aging, turned out to be a scandal and a tragedy, not only because of not stepping down honourably and in time for his replacement to lead a decent election campaign – also because, despite his dislike of Netanyahu’s barbaric warfare, he did not pressure Israel to agree to a ceasefire and to giving access to effective emergency aid that could stop the annihilation of Palestine. Now the return of Netanyahu’s friend Trump may make things even worse:
Biden was led around by the nose in the most humiliating way by Netanyahu, Trump’s henchman in the US election campaign. Perhaps the old president did not even fathom that Netanyahu is no longer defending himself against Hamas’terrorist attacks, but is using it as a pretext to definitively bury the Palestinians’ dream of and legitimate demands for a tolerable life and national self-determination.
This is why the US has unfortunately given in to Israel’s murder of the UN refugee agency UNRWA which, in the absence of a political solution, kept the displaced alive and, not least, ensured education and hospitals in Gaza during 17 years of confinement.
UNRWA is the organization best equipped to provide emergency aid to Gaza, but is now completely obstructed; Israel regards UNRWA as an instrument not for physical survival, but for keeping a Palestinian identity alive. Israel’s war against Palestine has therefore also, dramatically, become Israel’s total war on the UN.
Netanyahu’s Israel
Netanyahu’s version of Israel believes that the Jewish state can only survive if the Palestinians are expelled or locked behind walls. The two extreme parties in Netanyahu’s coalition are the ideological children of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir’s terror groups, which in the 1940s massacred Arab villages, driving people to flee, and murdered the UN mediator Folke Bernadotte because he insisted on sharing Israel equally between the Israeli and the Palestinians. The man who murdered the praying Muslims in the Hebron mosque in 1994 to derail the Oslo peace process is also one of their role models!
Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was a private secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who, strongly inspired by Mussolini, was the leader of the fascist wing of the Zionist movement. Jabotinsky believed that the Jewish state could only exist by placing the Arabs ‘outside an iron wall’ around the state. That is, expelling them.
Why do I bother?
As frightening and tragic as it all is – and as difficult as it seems to change with Trump’s return and Netanyahu’s huge and bloody victories on the Middle Eastern battlefield – why do I bother to write yet another long article about this instead of writing about all the world’s other tragedies and crimes that deserve just as much attention?
Firstly, because I believe that many in the West – and in Danish politics – are monumentally ignorant of the history that has led us to the current catastrophe in Palestine.
Secondly, because Israeli democracy discriminates non-Jewish citizens and renders non-Jews in occupied territories in particular completely without rights. The territory that Israel controls is an apartheid society. Furthermore, the current far-right nationalist government is trying with all its might to curtail the power of the courts and the freedom of the media. Democrats on the near extinct Israeli left fear that Israel is developing into the second theocratic dictatorship in the Middle East, in line with its main opponent Iran.
Thirdly, because Israel will never find peace by relying solely on its overwhelming military might against its neighbours and the massive oppression of the Palestinians. This is the very recipe for eternal conflict.
Fourthly, because if Israel succeeds in completing the murder of Palestine, while the United States and many Europeans look on passively or even approvingly, it will cement the perception in the Global South of the West’s monumental double standard regarding human rights violations and war crimes: When Putin is summoned to the war crimes tribunal, we all, rightly, applaud; but when Netanyahu is summoned to the same place, the United States wants to punish the tribunal rather than letting justice take its course. And too many Europeans who only mumble about our obligation to support the court.
Denmark has little to say when it comes to changing the course of this tragic development.
But we must support with all our might a total ceasefire, where surviving hostages on both sides are released, and with equal dedication work to create a peacekeeping force – likely with an Arab majority – to replace Israel’s rule over the people of Gaza. And we must step in with ample humanitarian aid.
Recognition of Palestine
It is regrettable that Denmark has not yet – in line with Sweden, Iceland, Norway and the vast majority of other countries in this world – diplomatically recognised Palestine as a state: Recognition serves to symbolically strengthen and support the inadequate self-rule in Ramallah, which represents the Palestine that sought peace and has long since recognised the state of Israel, but which was humiliated and made irrelevant, being denied any and every concession from Israel.
Therefore, recognition should be supplemented by the demand for the release of Marwan Barghouti, the most popular Palestinian freedom fighter, whom Israel has imprisoned for life. Barghouti is the real – and only realistic – alternative to both the discredited leaders in Ramallah and the Hamas death cult. Along with the other European countries we should have set this agenda long ago.
As member of the UN Security Council it is important for Denmark to do the right thing. Therefore, we must speak clearly on Israel and Palestine, even if it triggers disapproval in the White House.
As member of the UN Security Council, Denmark must use the position wisely and do the right thing. Therefore, we must speak loud and clear on Israel and Palestine, even if it triggers disapproval in the White House.
Mogens Lykketoft is former MP in Denmark, (1981-2019), he served as Danish Minister for Finance as well as for Foreign Affairs, he is former leader of the Social Democratic Party and Speaker of Parliament (2011-15). He served as President of the UN General Assembly in New York (2015-16).
Translation of my piece in the national Danish daily Politiken from 22nd of December, 2024.
