Europe, once hell for Jews, now a refuge for Palestinians displaced by Jews

Palestinians have been fleeing to Europe for decades. But in recent years more have shifted thither.

Several European nations recognise Palestine as what it is: a sovereign state. In 2024 the Republic of Ireland and Spain conferred this recognition upon Palestine. Tel Aviv was so incensed about the Irish action that the Israelis withdrew their diplomatic staff from Ireland. Their excuse was the catch-all for anything that is uncongenial to Israeli policy: ‘anti-Semitism.’ But Ireland is the only country in Europe that has never persecuted Jews.

The extreme nationalist party in Ireland is Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein is a racist and sectarian party with a terrorist history. But it is good for Palestine. Irish politicians are usually invited to Washington DC on St Patrick’s Day: Ireland’s national day. To their credit, Sinn Fein refused Trump’s invitation. They said they could not countenance doing so when Trump is an accessory to crimes against humanity in Palestine.

There are now hundreds of thousands of people of Palestinian stock in European countries. Few of them are fully Palestinian. Often, they are half or a quarter Palestinian. Their parents or grandparents often married Europeans or people from Arab such as Jordan. Many Palestinians are dual nationals: citizens of Palestine as well as another country.

The European countries with significant Palestinian communities include Romania, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. These tend to be the more affluent countries in Western Europe. They attract more immigrants than the east of the continent.

In the communist epoch, Romania recognised Palestine and welcomed some Palestinian refugees. President Ceausescu lauded Yasser Arafat but Romanian intelligence spied on Arafat to gain blackmail material. Ceausescu played on both sides of the street. He maintained amicable relations with Israel. He let Romanian Jews emigrate to Israel in return for hard currency. Later he decided he wanted a breed of Danish pig that was renowned for its bacon. He insisted that the Israelis purchase these swine for him in exchange for permitting more Jews to leave the country. In Ceausescu’s peasant mind, trading pigs for Jews was hilarious.

The United Kingdom has a serious Palestinian community partly because it is the former colonial metropole of Palestine. Mandatory Palestine was the era of 1918-48 when a huge number of Jews immigrated to Palestine and a Jewish State became possible. The Palestinians in the United Kingdom are part of a wider Arab and Muslim community in the country. Left-wingers in the UK tend to sympathise with Palestinian freedom.

Palestinians and human rights activists of all ethnicities across Europe have protested against the barbarities that Israel daily visits Palestinian civilians. Left-wingers usually recognise that the State of Israel is in flagrant violation of numerous human rights instruments and international laws that Israel has signed and ratified.

A Palestinian family applied for asylum in the United Kingdom under the same scheme that was designed specifically for Ukrainians. A judge ruled that they were eligible, and asylum was granted. This has angered some British politicians. They said that the legislation was exclusively for Ukrainians and that judges must not usurp the legislative competence. The judge’s ratio decidendi is that the same human rights concerns applied to the Palestinian family as they would to a Ukrainian and thus the nationality was immaterial.

France boasts that it invented human rights. Of course, Ancient Persia and India had human rights long before anyone in Europe. The French drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen in 1789. This did not prevent the French Army from committing many large-scale atrocities in Algeria in the 1950s.

Almost every European country has signed and ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). They are therefore legally bound to arrest anyone for whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant. Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister have had such ICC arrest warrants put out in their name.

Netanyahu was allowed to travel to Poland for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January. The Poles made an exception. It should not have been made. He is an indicted war criminal. He has no business exploiting one genocide to commit another.

Whenever Israelis are exposed as having committed the most egregious violations of human rights law, they will always cite the Holocaust as somehow justificatory of what they are doing. It is vile and illogical. They are abetted in this by Zionist hirelings across the Western World.