‘No freedom of expression in Europe’: Varoufakis blasts crackdown on pro-Palestine activism

The repression of Palestine solidarity in Europe has exposed the erosion of fundamental democratic rights across the continent, according to Yanis Varoufakis, a former Greek finance minister and vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“There is no freedom of expression in Europe,” Varoufakis told Anadolu in an interview, arguing that citizens are being punished not for violent acts, but for refusing to support Israel’s harrowing crimes against Palestinians.

When you have people being imprisoned for not supporting genocide – in Berlin and in Britain – then we no longer have the right to talk about freedom of expression. It is a freedom we must fight for, as if it never existed

Last year, German authorities imposed an entry ban on Varoufakis and barred him from engaging in any political activity in the country, after police forcibly shut down a Palestine Congress event in Berlin, where he was scheduled to speak.

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More recently, Germany issued deportation orders to three EU citizens and one American in March for participating in pro-Palestine protests, giving them six weeks to leave the country.

“When the German state violates all its own principles and rules in order to defend the right of the Zionist apartheid state to eradicate Palestinian life in Palestine, then you know that there’s no democracy,” said Varoufakis.

For him, standing with Palestine is not only a matter of solidarity, but a litmus test for Europe’s democratic values.

“Democracy has become a sham and we need to protest for Palestine in order to save our own democratic rights in Europe.”

Defending Palestinians ‘a duty for all’

Drawing a stark comparison, Varoufakis said that just as people had a moral duty in the 1930s to defend Jews from the Nazis, today the same obligation applies in defending Palestinians from the actions of the Israeli state.

“If this was in 1938, we would all have one duty: to go out in defence of Jews, defending them from the Nazis. Today, we have one duty – to defend the Palestinians from the Israeli apartheid state and the genocide,” he said.

He said

Europe’s complicity in the dispossession of Palestinians is deeply rooted in colonial history, referring to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the settler-colonial rhetoric that accompanied it, specifically pointing to the phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land”

“That’s what the West has been doing all over the world,” he said.

“When the British arrived in Australia, they looked at this magnificent continent with 6 million natives, and they called it ‘a land without people for a people without a land.’”

Drawing connections to apartheid South Africa and the genocide of Aboriginal people in Australia, Varoufakis argued that the current situation in Gaza is a continuation of a broader European legacy of white settler ideology.

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“Europe is guilty of white settler ideology, which is always the ideology of extermination, of genocide,” he said.

According to Varoufakis, Europe’s current support for Israel marks a shift in the continent’s historic prejudices. While Europe was once responsible for anti-Semitic pogroms and, ultimately, the Holocaust, he believes the focus of racialized fear and hostility has now shifted.

“Europe is responsible for anti-Semitism, for the pogroms against the Jews, for the Holocaust … We have a responsibility as Europe for what happened to the Jewish people,” he said.

“Then, after the Holocaust, you had this transformation and, suddenly, the enemy was no longer the Jew, it was the Palestinian, it was the Muslim. Now, we – both Europe and Europeans – have to extricate ourselves from that very sorry history.”

Yet, despite the official alignment with Israeli policy prevalent in Europe, Varoufakis believes most Europeans oppose their governments’ positions.

“I believe the majority of Europeans are not in concert with their governments … The majority are supporting the Palestinian cause,” he added.

However, he emphasized that these citizens are still up against governments that “do not have at heart the interest of their own people.”

These “same regimes in Europe” also have no qualms in ignoring the “great demand from across Europe, from across the world, from the Global South and the majority of the Global North, to end the Palestinian genocide,” he added.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.