The European Green Party Attacks Solidarity With Palestine

There has been a virulent backlash in the British media against the Green Party of England and Wales since delegates at the party conference voted for a motion that brands Zionism as a racist ideology and supports the formation of a single democratic state in Palestine. As we have come to expect when British pundits and politicians are discussing Israel, nobody has seen fit to ask any Palestinians what they think about Zionism and what it has meant for them in practice.

While Palestinians who live in Britain are studiously ignored, the media extends its search for critical voices to the rest of Europe. The Guardian reported on a statement from the European Green Party (EGP) that criticized the motion — “we unequivocally distance ourselves from it” — and suggested that the English and Welsh Greens were now “facing international ostracism.”

The speed and severity of the response from the EGP contrasts sharply with its deafening silence about the shameful track record of the German Greens, the flagship of the European Green movement ever since the 1980s. The EGP never spoke out against the German party, even though its leaders campaigned against a ceasefire in Gaza, supplied weapons to Israel’s war machine, and branded Palestinian schools and hospitals as legitimate targets.

The Peace of the Grave

The Green politician Annalena Baerbock was Germany’s foreign minister when Israel began its onslaught against the people of Gaza in October 2023, and she remained in that post until May 2025. Her party had already demonstrated its hostility to Palestinian rights in 2019 when it voted to support a Bundestag motion that compared the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to Nazism.

There was a big increase in German arms shipments to Israel during the final months of 2023. Between October 2023 and May 2025, when Baerbock ended her stint as foreign minster, her government had issued arms export licences for transfers to Israel worth more than €485 million.

Baerbock also threw the full weight of Germany’s foreign policy apparatus behind Israel. The woman who spoke about a “feminist foreign policy” was vehemently opposed to a ceasefire in Gaza as the death toll rose vertiginously. Her arguments against a ceasefire in November 2023 were patently absurd:

For a ceasefire, Israel and Hamas would have to agree to stop shooting at each other. That would mean Israel would no longer be able to defend itself amid the ongoing barrage of missiles.

If Hamas had continued firing missiles at Israel, of course, that would not have been a ceasefire at all. What Baerbock really found objectionable was the idea that Israel might have to stop firing missiles at Gaza.

The following month, the German Foreign Office opposed a resolution at the UN General Assembly that called for a ceasefire. It insisted that Israel was entitled to keep going until its opponents surrendered unconditionally: “Only when Hamas lays down its arms will Israel no longer be forced to defend itself.”

Shortly afterward, Baerbock cosigned an article with the British foreign secretary, David Cameron, that sought to rationalize the opposition of their governments to a ceasefire:

We do not believe that calling right now for a general and immediate ceasefire, hoping it somehow becomes permanent, is the way forward. It ignores why Israel is forced to defend itself: Hamas barbarically attacked Israel and still fires rockets to kill Israeli citizens every day. Hamas must lay down its arms.

Let us imagine that we did press Israel to cease all military operations forthwith. Would Hamas stop firing rockets? Would it release the hostages? Would its murderous ideology change? An unsustainable ceasefire, quickly collapsing into further violence, would only make it harder to build the confidence needed for peace.

Racist contempt for Palestinian lives supplied the necessary undergirding for such arguments. By the time Baerbock and Cameron put their names to this screed, Israel had killed nearly twenty thousand people in Gaza. They shed crocodile tears for the victims — “too many civilians have been killed” — while studiously ignoring the evidence that mass slaughter was Israel’s intended goal, rooted in a “murderous ideology” that denies the right of Palestine to exist. The “peace” they had in mind for Gaza was the peace of the torture chamber and the mass grave.

Simple Truths

In January 2024, Baerbock immediately joined the Israeli campaign against the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), cutting off funding for the organization that supplied vital humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. This move came just as Israel went on trial at the International Court of Justice, accused of violating the Genocide Convention. She later admitted that Israel had supplied no evidence to back up its allegations that UNRWA collaborated with Hamas.

Over the course of the year, Baerbock modified her rhetoric in a way that mirrored the discursive games of the Biden administration, calling for a “humanitarian ceasefire” while her government continued to funnel arms to Israel. Israeli leaders had no reason to fear any consequences when they brushed aside such calls.

In September 2024, she addressed the UN General Assembly in New York and explicitly legitimized Israeli attacks on civilian targets in Gaza:

We have to face the dilemma that the values of the [UN] Charter can at times appear contradictory. Such as the inherent right to self-defence and the responsibility to protect civilians when civilians are misused as human shields. Resolving this is harder than simply exclaiming: “either — or,” “us against them.” Especially in this era of social media, where simple TikTok truths seem to blur out all complexity and nuance, sometimes even facts. We can see that with regard to the war in the Middle East.

It is difficult to do justice to the brazen immorality of these remarks. By the time Baerbock spoke at the UN, there was already abundant evidence that Israel was systematically destroying the hospitals of Gaza. The World Health Organization documented 464 attacks on health care facilities between October 2023 and June 2024, resulting in 727 deaths and 933 injuries. For Baerbock to wave aside this evidence with an airy reference to “simple TikTok truths” suggested a capacity for shamelessness that is rare even in her chosen profession.

Israel did not target Gaza hospitals because it believed that Hamas was using them as military bases. It targeted hospitals and the doctors who worked in them because they were giving people shelter and keeping them alive. This was part of a broader campaign against educational, cultural, and religious sites that was intended to make life impossible for the people of Gaza.

Israeli leaders justified this carnage with robotic clichés about “human shields.” In case there was any doubt that Baerbock fully intended to endorse this alibi for mass murder, she bragged about it in a speech to the German parliament:

We have made it clear time and again that self-defence means, of course, not only attacking terrorists, but also destroying them. This’s why I have made it so clear that when Hamas terrorists hide behind people, behind schools, then we end up in very difficult waters. But we’re not shying away from this. This is why I made it clear at the United Nations that civilian sites could lose their protected status if terrorists abuse this status. That’s what Germany stands for — and that’s what we mean when we refer to Israel’s security.

Baerbock ignored a letter signed by three hundred academics that urged her to retract these comments on the grounds that they supplied “a flimsy justification for the genocidal campaign against Palestinian civilians.” After her departure from the German Foreign Office, she ascended to a new job as president of the UN General Assembly, where she sought to reinvent herself as a sassy, straight-talking champion of women’s rights: “As sports star Serena Williams once said: you call us crazy, we’ll show you what crazy can do.”

Selective Indignation

The EGP statement depicts the motion that the English and Welsh Green Party voted for last weekend as a fundamental departure from the agreed principles of the European Greens: “The resolution ‘Zionism is Racism’ as voted yesterday goes against our agreed positions of the EGP and its Member Parties, therefore as EGP we unequivocally distance ourselves from it.”

It goes on to accuse Israel of genocide in the very next sentence:

We condemn in the strongest terms the genocide against Palestinians and the human rights abuses committed by the current Israeli government and have consistently called for EU sanctions against Israel’s government.

A diligent search of the EGP’s website will not reveal any statements distancing themselves from Baerbock’s conduct, unequivocally or otherwise. We can only conclude that branding Zionism as a racist ideology or calling for a “single democratic Palestinian state” based on “equal rights for all” is a greater sin in the eyes of the EGP than providing material support to what it correctly defines as a genocidal regime. The only sensible response from the English and Welsh Greens would be to roll their eyes in contempt.

This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.