Yanis Varoufakis spoke about the catastrophe currently unfolding in Gaza during our recent livestream, outlining the need for collective responsibility – of individuals and governments – to put a just end to this horrific situation.

DiEM25‘s co-founder also explained why he would not be condemning Hamas‘ recent assault on Israel, providing a historical analysis on the Palestinian struggle and reiterating the need to end apartheid once and for all.

Collective responsibility

“We are talking about yet another example of humanity’s capacity to dive into moral voids and into abysses of inhumanity. Just when we thought we had done our worst, we surprised ourselves with a capacity to do even worse. The emphasis here must be on the word ‘we’.

“It is very natural. I’m not going to take partisan sides here. It’s very natural when we have vicious conflicts like the one in Israel and Palestine, for us to have a natural tendency to take sides. But the scale, the breadth, and the long-lasting nature of this tragedy should concentrate our minds and we should start talking about our collective responsibility for what is going on.

“Now, some of you may have heard that recently when I was in Berlin, in an interview, I refused to condemn Hamas. And as you can imagine, naturally, that stirred up just a torrent of criticism of abuse. There is no doubt that if I were one of those visitors in the music festival near the fence separating Gaza from Israel […] and the Gaza militants arrived, I have no doubt they would have gunned me down. There’s no doubt that they would have even, maybe, taken me hostage. Those scenes are atrocious. There can be no justification. And there can be no absolutely no way of presenting it as justified.

“But I’m not going to condemn the Hamas assault on Israel. Those who want me and you and others to condemn Hamas killing spree are insistent that we, for whom every loss of a human being, every severed limb, every blinded eye, every broken finger is a tragedy for which we consider even ourselves to be responsible, they want us, effectively, to take the side of the state of Israel. That I shall never do. Speaking for myself. And who exactly are they who are demanding of us to condemn Hamas?

“Let’s be clear. These are the same people who look the other way when Israel, the Israeli army, soldiers, kill unarmed journalists, they kill nurses, doctors, children. There are the people who remember international law, remember the United Nations and its charter, they remember the Geneva Convention on war crimes only when the victims are Israeli.

“Somehow it escapes their mind. All these things, UN charter, international law, Geneva Convention, escapes from their mind when it’s Palestinians.”

Selective outrage

“The people who are actually insisting that we should condemn Hamas are the very people who are outraged that women and children are victims and hostages. Well, I am outraged, but are they outraged that for years women and children are kept in Israeli prisons? Where was their outrage about them? They’re the same people who support, or at least they tolerate, the humiliation to which West Bank Palestinians are treated every day, every night of their lives by an apartheid regime, much, much worse than anything that the Boers introduced in South Africa.

“And that is not something I say as a supporter of Palestine. This is admitted to by Tamir Pardo. Tamir Pardo is Mossad’s former director. By Abraham Berg, a former speaker of the Israeli parliament. By Benny Morris, a renowned Israeli historian, and more than 2,000 Israeli public figures, some of them of US citizenship, who signed the public statement declaring that Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid. The people who are insisting that we should condemn Hamas are the ones who turn a blind eye every single time murderous settlers rampage in Palestinian occupied territories, killing Palestinians at will.

“They are the same people who whistle in the wind while Israel’s authorities illegally evict Palestinians from their East Jerusalem neighbourhoods. And these people have lived there for generations. They throw them out, evict them, and they hand over their homes to people who just arrived for the first time in Israel, on the basis of the right of the return for Jews, but not Palestinians.

“They’re the same people who accept uncritically, just now, Israel’s declaration of war against Gaza which, by the way, is not a state. They were never allowed to have a state. So it’s a declaration of war, not against the state, but against an occupied people whom the same army has been terrorising and starving for decades, the same state, which when they announced that they will condemn one million children, because that’s how many kids there are in Gaza, to live without electricity, without food, without water, constantly being bombarded. These same people who can demand that we condemn Hamas, they think that is okay, that this is a legitimate action by the Israeli apartheid enforcers.”

The world’s largest open-air prison

“These same people who demand of us to condemn Hamas demand that the Gazan Palestinians lay down their arms and that they return quietly back into the world’s largest open-air prison. To do what? To return to Gaza? To lead what? A life?

“You can’t live in Gaza. Life in Gaza is impossible. What you can do is you can vegetate. You can exist somehow in Gaza. That was before this turn of the never-ending tragedy of the Palestinians in Gaza. So effectively they want them to lay down their arms, stop causing trouble, and to die slowly, under siege, surrounded by an army that for decades has been starving them, and they shoot at them like fish in a barrel.

“They practice their different weaponry. They try it out on them. They’ve been doing this for decades. No, we shall not be condemning Hamas, even though we consider what they’ve done to be atrocious. Even though I have no doubt that if I were in Gaza, I would probably be on the hitlist as an atheist, as a feminist, as an opponent of fundamentalism, as a great supporter of the Jewish people’s long, long struggle against antisemitism.

“I think I would be one of Hamas’s targets, but I’m not going to be condemning Hamas, just like I would not condemn Ukrainians. Or Yemenis or Syrians who fight back when their homes are invaded by British armies, even if I disagree with them on many things, even if in the process of defending their lives, the territories, their villages, their neighbourhoods, they do terrible things.

“So let’s be abundantly clear on this. Nothing justifies deliberate killings, rapes, maiming, especially of non-combatants. Every loss of a human being, I’ll repeat what I said before, every severed limb, even a small finger, tiny little finger, being severed or being broken, is a tragedy. And in this case we, Europeans and Americans, who have been watching our respective governments support Israel’s construction of the circumstances that inexorably lead to these crimes, and above all else, the grand crime of apartheid, we must consider ourselves, I consider myself, to be responsible.

“I’ve done everything I could to support the Palestinian cause for decades. I’ve clearly not done enough. So let’s be properly responsible, shall we? Let’s embrace our responsibility to the Jews, to the Bedouins, to the Palestinians, to the Christians, the Muslims, who live on that land. What does that mean?

“What does it mean today, especially at this juncture, to take our responsibility seriously? Does it mean parroting yet another condemnation of Hamas like that of our governments here in Europe who did not even slap the wrist of the hand that has been strangling the Palestinian nation that’s bringing it to the brink of despair?”

Lessons from the past

“Some say to me, with guns and with bombs, there will be no solution. Remember Yasser Arafat, who laid down his guns? Remember the PLO authorities that signed the Oslo treaties, hoping for a peace process? How did Israel treat them? Well, we know how they treated Arafat. We know how they humiliated Fatah, the Palestinian Authority.

“We know that the Israeli state effectively created Hamas in the early 1970s. Read Ilan Pappé’s fantastic book on this, on [how] Hamas in Gaza was to a very large extent sponsored by an Israeli state trying to create an antagonist to the PLO and to Yasser Arafat in particular personally.

“So let’s not have any of this. The Israeli apartheid state is determined to crush those who lay down their arms and it is determined to crush those who do not lay down their arms. The apartheid state of Israel is all about fencing off, caging the Palestinians until either they die a slow death or they migrate.

“It’s pure ethnic cleansing, occupation, apartheid. I close the bracket, the parenthesis. And I finish by reminding those who do not know that DiEM25, well, we’ve tried to respond to the question, what does it mean to be properly responsible in face of this tragedy? By means of a declaration. It started in Athens in May of 2021 with the Athens Declaration in response to Ukraine.”

Our updated declaration

“Now we have a declaration updated and I’ll just read it out for you and then I will stop. The declaration which came out yesterday reads as follows:

“The wars in and around Gaza. as well as in Ukraine, cannot be resolved militarily. There can be no military victory that will not spawn more war crimes, more suffering, more injustices against the weakest, the poorest, and therefore more wars.

“The governments of the world’s leading powers, the United States of America, China and the European Union, those governments are failing in their duty to [set up a parallel peace process under the auspices of the United Nations, for a just resolution of both wars.

“DiEM25, and our political parties called MERA25, extending our Athens declaration, call upon the world’s progressives to demand of our governments that a parallel peace process begins today with a cessation of hostilities as its first step.

“Any excuse to delay it constitutes a monumental service to the normalsation of war crimes and the instrumentalisation of inhumanity, which generates new hordes of refugees.

“Hearing the European commission, the government of the United States, the governments of the members of the European Union, hearing them effectively endorse in advance a major assault on Gaza by the Israeli forces that have been terrorising the people of Gaza for 25, 26, 30, 40 years now, brings us to the brink of despair.

“What is the end game? If their end game is to exterminate the people of Palestine, there is a logic to it, a cruel final solution logic. But if the end game is to end apartheid, that cannot happen by projecting the flag of Israel on the buildings of our governments.”

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