Tag: Palestine

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Many Americans have had enough. And now European governments must show active solidarity with Palestine

Will Trump finally bring Netanyahu to heel over Gaza? Will a changed – and more critical – public mood in the US gain political significance? Europe must step up. Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen must understand that Israel is not an outpost of democracy, but apartheid and massive oppression.

This is a translation of my commentary in Danish on Palestine in the Danish magazine Ræson on Aug 10th, 2026.

Commentary by Mogens Lykketoft, former Foreign Minister of Denmark and President of the UN General Assembly

Ten months ago, Trump got a plan approved to stop the war in Gaza. Unfortunately, the plan’s main consequence so far has been that the media have lost interest in covering the horrors the Palestinians continue to live under. Once again, there is also less attention on the active efforts of Israel’s current rulers to prevent, at any cost, the establishment of a Palestinian state—which the UN has demanded in vain for 80 years – and rather to drive the Palestinians as far as possible out of their homeland.

The crisis continues – in silence

It was in October last year that the American president received massive praise and applause from much of the world’s leadership for his plan. The UN Security Council approved the plan and had to leave it to Trump’s new “Peace Council” to carry it out. The agreement was that there would be a ceasefire and free access to supplies for the civilian population, who had lived through hell for two years and seen 75,000 killed and twice as many wounded or permanently disabled. The plan called for Hamas to be disarmed, accompanied by the establishment of a civilian Palestinian administration and an international peace force, and a starting an Israeli withdrawal from all of Gaza.

Most of the state leaders who applauded the American president’s peace plan probably had only the slimmest hope that he would maintain focus and put the necessary pressure on his close ally Netanyahu and his extremist partners in government. That doubt was unfortunately fully confirmed: Israel has since systematically undermined the agreement and continued to make life horrific for the Palestinian civilian population. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, 1,255 Palestinians – many of them children and aid workers – have been killed by Israeli forces since the so-called peace was announced (figures as of 8/7 2026).

The Israelis have seized an ever-larger share of the small territory of Gaza and destroyed the remaining buildings in the occupied area. More than two million Palestinians are now crammed into the ruins of a completely destroyed society. They live in a prison camp the size of one third of the small Danish island of Langeland under wretched and unhygienic conditions, hunger and disease being daily realities. The Israelis have blocked the agreed access to necessary supplies of food, water, medicine, and tents, and sabotage aid efforts from outside, according to, for example, Human Rights Watch. In particular, Israel is waging war against UNRWA, the UN’s historic effort to maintain a bearable existence for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Will Trump say no to Netanyahu?

A couple of weeks ago, Trump’s so-called peace council finally met and produced a more concrete elaboration of the peace plan. A heavily weakened Hamas declared itself willing to hand over its weapons at the same pace as the rest of the plan was implemented. But no -entirely predictably – Netanyahu’s government rejected the proposal, while continuing the barbaric ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and the mass imprisonment and torture of Palestinian prisoners.

Will Trump finally put pressure on Israel, then? Hardly out of concern for the victims of Israeli war crimes. But reportedly, he is angry that he let himself be lured by Netanyahu into starting an offensive war against Iran, which is hurting him politically at home. The war is also greatly damaging for peace and development throughout the Middle East, the global economy in general, and the world’s poorest countries in particular.

When, occasionally, Trump tries to stop the Iran war, he is also aware that he must try to prevent Israel from levelling to the ground large residential districts in Beirut and many villages in southern Lebanon using the same modus operandi as in Gaza. Since March 2nd, Israel has killed 4,300 people in Lebanon according to the UN, and hundreds of thousands have become internally displaced. In a rare moment of clarity, a few weeks ago Trump said that Netanyahu did not need to knock down entire residential blocks in Lebanon and kill many civilians in order to hit a single opponent. Why didn’t he say that when the war in Gaza began?

The great American shift in opinion

At the same time, Vice President J.D. Vance made the Israelis aware that the US will soon be the country’s only remaining friend in the world! It is thus becoming ever clearer that there is a conflict of interest between Netanyahu and the US government:

It is not in the US’s interest to have even more geopolitical instability, which could very well be the result if Israel chooses to break up neighbouring countries like Syria, Lebanon, and Iran into fragments torn by civil war.

The mass killing of civilians in Gaza has shifted American public opinion, so that more people sympathize with Palestine and fewer with Israel – significantly so among the younger generation. This is resonating in the American election campaign, where Netanyahu’s wealthy friends in the lobbying organization AIPAC are finding it much harder than before to buy friends in the US Congress. In both major parties, a revolt is underway against decades of unconditional American support, regardless of how aggressively the state of Israel develops. It is telling that even in the world’s second-largest Jewish city, New York City, voters elected a new progressive, Muslim mayor who is critical of Israel’s policies—even with support from a large share of Jewish voters.

Attitudes toward Israel have also shifted dramatically in European public opinion. It reminds me, an old man, of the mobilization many of us as young people took part in against the US war in Vietnam. That was a protest which was to a great extent inspired by our peers in the US and which—albeit far too slowly—helped bring the war to an end.

An appeal to the European governments

We must maintain our engagement, even though the worst of the bombardment of Palestine is over. It is good that the governments of Norway, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, and others are speaking out clearly. It is also shifting in the UK and France. But an EU-wide response is being blocked by a Germany that, in its shame over Hitler’s horrifying genocide against the Jews, uncritically allows the State of Israel to carry out what, unfortunately, under any reasonable interpretation of international law, must be described as genocide.

It is feeble to only be able to agree on sanctions against a handful of violent settlers and settler goods, when everyone knows that the whole thing is directed and desired by Israel’s government.

Some European governments – including Denmark’s – have only moved from uncritical support of Israel’s “right to self-defence” to reactions against Israeli war crimes, far more muted than the reaction to Putin’s crimes in Ukraine.

One reason for the low profile of some European governments is the fear of challenging Trump, because they still hope – for our own safety – to maintain the US as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Ukraine. But the cost of this kind of pragmatism is that it brands us with double standards in much of the world.

This low profile is also supported by the fatalistic attitude that it is impossible to change the one decisive factor – the US’s unconditional backing of the State of Israel, which has made this state increasingly aggressive. This backing is indeed the result of many years of American politicians’ dependence on money from a few far-right Jewish billionaires, from AIPAC and the arms industry, and support among the Bible Belt’s evangelical Christian fundamentalists, who have become Trump’s core voters.

But this fatalism is probably misplaced in light of the new dynamic in American politics described above.

Face the realities

Another reason for the silence – or even defence of the State of Israel’s actions – is a lack of historical awareness and unwillingness to face today’s realities: My most fundamental disagreement with my old comrade-in-arms (Denmark’s prime minister) Mette Frederiksen is that for far too long – perhaps as a gut reaction of her aversion to Arab and Muslim immigration – she has clung to an image of Israel as an outpost of Western civilization, a democratic outpost in the Middle East that keeps the “savage Arabs” in check and prevents them from driving the Jews into the Mediterranean. But Israel is an occupying power and an apartheid state that violently oppresses and displaces Palestinians in the area it controls.

It is by no means a defence of Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, to point out that the conflict began at least 80 years ago, and that the people of Palestine have been subjected to endless abuses – displacement, ethnic cleansing, and occupation. All of their peace-seeking leaders have been deceived and discredited among their own people, because there was never any progress – only new setbacks and new humiliations. Terror is unacceptable – including state terror. Today, Netanyahu is the worst terrorist in the entire long conflict.

It is an outrage that, at political request, Denmark’s Director of Public Prosecutions brought a series of cases after Hamas’ attack, charging Danish citizens who had shown sympathy for the Palestinians – although hardly for Hamas’s terror – with supporting terrorism. Fortunately, the Supreme Court dismissed some of these dubious cases.

By far most of the Middle East’s countless conflicts over more than a hundred years have had two sources: Western great powers wanting to gain or maintain control of the region’s resources; And a United States that – for domestic political reasons – has one-sidedly supported the State of Israel, regardless of how aggressive it has become.

In the Middle East, Palestine is not “the mother of all conflicts.” But an important precondition for lowering the level of conflict in the region is that a solution be reached – with peace, rights, and access to a decent existence for the Palestinians. That is also why there is a need for us to engage far more forcefully in their cause. ■

Mogens Lykketoft (b. 1946) is an economist, graduated from University of Copenhagen (1971) and was a member of the Danish Parliament (Folketinget) 1981–2019, Minister of Taxation 1981–82, and Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs 1993–2001, party chairman 2002–2005, including as prime ministerial candidate in the 2005 election. Speaker of the Folketing 2011–2015. President of the UN General Assembly 2015–2016. He wrote his first article for RÆSON on October 28, 2002.

ILLUSTRATION: Gaza, January 29, 2025 [photo: Jaber Jehad Badwan/Wikimedia Commons]

Other articles by Mogens Lykketoft in English

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End of the murder on Palestine?

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.

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Palestine must be saved from Netanyahu, and Israel from itself

Most of us in my generation grew up with enormous sympathy for Israel as the home country of the survivors of the worst genocide in history. When it came to the consequences for the Palestinians, for a long time, we were myopic. Israel became known as the only democracy in the Middle East, constantly threatened by hordes of hostile Arab states. But in the 1967 war, Israel conquered all of historic Palestine, and since then democracy only serves one half of the people who live under Israeli control.

Benjamin Netanyahu is one of this world’s most repulsive and unscrupulous elected leaders. He will stop at nothing to maintain power, and avoid the looming conviction for corruption. His return as head of government in coalition with the worst racists and fascists in Israel is a deadly threat to the rule of law and peace in the country. The new government wants to undermine judicial independence by giving parliament the authority to override the Supreme Court’s decisions and replace independent judges and prosecutors with its own henchmen. It is the same course as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary – only Netanyahu’s dismantling of the rule of law is described as Orbán on steroids. The judicial reforms have sparked mass protests in the Jewish population.

Disempowered ‘home rule’

Sadly, these Israeli mass protests do not yet address the fact that Israel/Palestine has been transformed into an apartheid state with no prospect of peace and reconciliation: The Palestinian ‘home rule’ is more powerless than the ‘home rule’ of the blacks in the so-called Bantustans of apartheid era South Africa. The settlers have good roads, but the Palestinians’ freedom of movement in the occupied territories is hampered by poor infrastructure and incessant harassment at Israeli checkpoints. They are squeezed together and walled off in small enclaves with no real opportunities for development. They are unjustly governed by the Israeli military, which conduct arbitrary house searches and detentions day and night. Jewish residents in the illegal settlements on occupied land, on the other hand, enjoy full Israeli civil rights and military protection: the latter also applies when the most extreme of the settlers attack their Palestinian neighbours with impunity and destroy their property – e.g., by cutting down thousands of their olive trees. Civil society organisations – such as are supported by Denmark – are attacked and punished with unfounded accusations of terrorism when they criticise human rights violations.

The Palestinian state that UN member states have overwhelmingly demanded for decades has effectively become impossible. The world community has only responded with critical resolutions, while Israel’s offensive settler policy has pierced the Palestinian territories like a Swiss cheese. With the most radical right-wing ministers in the driver’s seat, the expansion of the settlements and the formal annexation of Palestinian territories are now even more accelerated. The annexation is taking place more subtly, but equally contrary to International Law as Vladimir Putin’s attempts to move borders by force in his annexation of the eastern provinces of Ukraine.

Disproportional Israeli retaliation

Israel justifies any violation against Palestinians as an effort against terrorism. Terror against civilians on both sides of the conflict must be unconditionally condemned. Terror is a vicious circle of mutual retaliation, where one side is a state power with one of the world’s strongest militaries, while the other is an occupied civilian population. When Palestinians react to the hopelessness of 55 years of occupation with violence, murder of Israeli civilians and rockets from Gaza, it is the path deeper and deeper into hell. Each time it gives Israel an opportunity to strike back even harder and bloodier against the Palestinian civilian population. Not least does it unfold in the shape of the always brutal rain of bombs against the over 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza, who live in deplorable conditions, locked up in an area the size of the Danish island of Langeland (with 14.000 inhabitants). People in Gaza have no possibilities of supporting themselves: they live the world’s largest open prison, and survive only on UN emergency aid. 

The US must exert friendly pressure 

Hope for peace and justice can only be rekindled from outside. It will not happen unless the United States as Israel’s friend, sponsor and military ally takes the lead. Fortunately, there are signs that many in the powerful Jewish-American community are demanding pressure on Israel to change course. The Biden administration has also reacted critically. But the risk is always that the tragedy of the Palestinians will be overshadowed by larger wars, crises, and tragedies elsewhere.

Europe has a key role in – also by appealing to the USA – preventing it from happening again.

We have a moral obligation to save the Palestinians from even worse oppression – and, if at all possible, to save Israel from itself.

This is a translation of my column in the Danish national newspaper Berlingske on 21st of February, 2023.

Illustration: Demonstrating against PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister for Justice Yariv Levin’s plans to suppress the Supreme Court, 13 Feb, 2023. Photo: Oren Rozen via Wikimedia Commons