The German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller is remembered for the famous statement that begins, “First they came for…” He lists socialists, trade unions, and Jews before stating that “I did not speak out” because he was not a socialist, a trade unionist, nor a Jew. The statement ends with “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Niemoller refers to his own silence, and the silence of the general population and church leaders in Nazi Germany that allowed for the persecution and extermination of millions of people during the World War II. Silence is complicity in crime, he argues. And, as his own life shows, silence does not provide protection from persecution for the silent.
Europe did not heed this warning. Palestine is a tragic proof of that fact.
By April 2025, Israel dropped 70,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, the equivalent of six Hiroshima nuclear bombs! One of the most densely populated territory in the world, a quarter of the size of London, Gaza experienced one of the most intense bombardments in history, which resulted in unprecedented death and destruction.
But European governments stayed mostly silent for a very long time. Yes, there were eventually utterances of “concern.” Meek, spineless whispers, apologetic to the genocide, often spoken “in private” and in the form of “quiet diplomacy” even as they silenced—actively, brutally, non-apologetically—any and every voice against the genocide within their own borders. Palestinian citizens and journalists residing in Europe protesting the genocide have regularly been labelled as terrorists and Hamas-supporting anti-Semites. They have been intimidated, harassed, criminalized, and prosecuted. Palestinian organizations have been banned.
European governments have employed the same strategy of maintaining silence in the face of Israel’s war against Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel’s campaign is not even called war in Europe, let alone declared part and parcel of Israel’s wider genocidal politics against Palestinians. Rather, the broader context is left unsaid and specific crimes—mostly settlement expansion and settler violence—are mentioned separately. But the violence and murders by Israeli settlers is an integral accompaniment to violence and murders by the Israeli military. Constant arrests and re-arrests, torture in detention, beatings, demolition of infrastructure (dwellings, schools, hospitals, forced displacement, ever more numerous checkpoints and restrictions of movement, destruction of agricultural produce (in particular, olive trees) and the slaughter of livestock are now everyday occurrences in the West Bank. The expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank continues with almost no restrictions, despite the “concerns” that European governments sporadically express, when an instance of this onslaught on Palestinians living in the West Bank is too drastic to be glossed over.
Then European governments enthusiastically broke their silence to applaud and cheer loudly the “20-point peace plan” for Gaza by the dangerous, deranged, and unhinged narcissist president of the United States. This plan entrenches Israel’s occupation and apartheid system and shields it from accountability. It was never meant to deliver either justice or self-determination to Palestinians. However, the plan succeeded spectacularly in silencing any talk of genocide. With a “ceasefire” on paper, European governments no longer even whisper about Gaza.
Now the dangerous, deranged, and unhinged narcissist has turned against Europe. He scolded European governments about freedom of expression because of the laws limiting hate speech. He imposed trade tariffs. He forced European countries to increase military spending. And now, he wants European territory. He wants Greenland.
When the United States attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Latin American leaders loudly cried foul. European leaders, however, whispered that “it’s complicated.” European presidents and prime ministers seemingly did not understand that a military attack against the sovereign territory of another country is against international law. They also never condemned the earlier U.S. bombing of nuclear sites in Iran.
But once the United States acquired a taste for European territory, European governments were bewildered. “How can Daddy do this to us?” they asked. “We flattered him, we praised him, we showered him with pomp, we kissed his ring, we kept silent on all his transgressions and he is doing this to us! THIS! TO US?!”
As Martin Niemoller pointed out, silence is not protection for the silent. And appeasing a megalomaniac only emboldens him. European opportunism and dependence vis-à-vis the United States are of its own making. Its political and economic interests are aligned with those of the United States far more than European governments usually admit. Democracy, rule of law, freedom, and all those nice but empty words have seldom, if ever, been the true interests of European powers. Rather, as with the United States, the fight for global economic and political domination is what drives post-World War II Europe,. Even the benevolent-seeming programs of development aid and humanitarian assistance concern the conquering of territory, albeit not by military means.
The European war machine has worked in perfect unison with the United States to kill and destroy around the word. European political and economic mechanisms have happily joined those of the United States to spread poverty to an endless number of countries. For Europe to find itself on the receiving end of those destructive structures in the twenty-first century, at the hands of its alleged ally, must have been an unimaginable shock.
What will come out of this U.S.-Europe turmoil? Will U.S. marines land on Greenland? Would European governments risk trade war, let alone real war with the United States over the island? Or will they continue with their measured statements calling for calm and try to explain that this situation, too, is “complicated” and such a “special security operation” in fact benefits all NATO allies? What would the increasing number of military advisors, observers, and soldiers mean for the lives of people in Greenland? Will European nations, one by one, just close their eyes and shut their mouths, fearing that the United States is coming for them next?