Europe Protests: When Lies Collapse

The protests in Europe are not merely a reaction to the scenes of bombings or news from Gaza but represent a moment of truth revelation. It is a moment when people see with their own eyes that what they have known for decades is a fabricated, distorted, and misleading narrative. When images of children under the rubble, destroyed hospitals, and rain-soaked tents in Gaza emerged, the files on Israel since 1948 were opened, revealing dozens of massacres, destroyed villages, and refugees. At that point, the Israeli narrative was no longer the only one in crisis; the European and American narratives about justice, law, and democracy also collapsed, exposing the deception of states to their citizens, along with a long-standing media complicity and systematic misleading that kept their peoples in near-complete darkness about the reality of Palestine.

Why do we protest daily in Europe? This question was asked by one of the organizers, who replied: Until the occupation ends, and the killing of children and civilians in Gaza and the West Bank stops, and the settlers' violence and settlement activities cease, and until the question that Europeans have been asking until today ceases: What is happening in Palestine? Their media have not merely been transmitters but misled them, obscuring the truth and re-producing the fabricated narrative. The protests have evolved from mere anger into an act of revolutionary awareness, and the streets are the only place that has shattered this narrative and forced people to question, read, and search outside of the official media that did not fail but conspired and misled. What started with hundreds of protesters has become millions today, with the question ringing out in every European capital: Why does what I see in the street and on social media differ from what I see on the official screens of European governments? And why is this voice, which expresses the democratic values we were raised on, being suppressed? A large part of the European anger stems from their realization that their governments have deceived them and falsified the narrative and that the truth has not been fully presented to them since the beginning of the Zionist project.

The European bias toward the Zionist project has deep historical roots, revealing political deals promoted for more than a century during World War I. In the summer of 1916, when Britain was considering accepting a peace offer from Germany, representatives of the Zionist movement approached the British War Cabinet and presented a clear deal: they told them that Britain could win the war if the United States entered as an ally, and they were capable of ensuring America's entry into the war alongside Britain if Britain promised to grant them Palestine after the defeat of their enemies. This agreement formed the basis for the promise of granting Palestine—a promise from those who do not own to those who do not deserve—despite Britain's lack of any legal right to it at the time, which later materialized when the United States joined the war on the Allies' side.

Jews did not leave Europe voluntarily; they were expelled, isolated, and oppressed, culminating in racist policies that led to the Holocaust between 1939 and 1945, which claimed the lives of about 6 million Jews. However, Europe did not bear its moral responsibility; Palestinians were made to pay the price for the crime as if justice could be rectified by creating a new injustice.

Since 1947, Palestine has not been without legal support. There are dozens of international resolutions reaffirming the right to self-determination and the right of return, the illegitimacy of occupation and settlement, and considering East Jerusalem as occupied territory. However, these resolutions have not been implemented. The more dangerous reality is that when the law recently attempted to act against genocide and war crimes, the judge was penalized. Decisions by international courts related to war crimes or genocide or accountability of the occupiers' leaders have been ignored, and questioning the legitimacy of the courts has become European and American policy. Political and economic sanctions have been imposed on the prosecutor and the judges themselves. Here, the mask fell completely: the issue is not merely about the weakness of international law but about punishing justice itself when it gets close to Israel. What does it mean to have an international system that punishes the judge instead of the criminal? And what kind of democracy fears judgment from the international court? Why was it used against Russia and others?

Double standards have reached their peak when comparing Palestine to Ukraine. In Ukraine, sanctions are imposed immediately, the media is open, and armed resistance is not labeled as terrorism; defending the land is considered a legitimate right. In Palestine, however, the occupation is justified, resistance is criminalized, solidarity is suppressed, and demonstrations are vilified; the same values apply, but the implementation differs. The reason lies not in the law but in identity and politics.

The Holocaust is a major crime, but it has been used as a moral weapon to silence criticism and prevent comparisons of atrocities, while the extermination of other peoples throughout history has been overlooked, such as the Herero and Nama in Namibia at the hands of the Germans (1904–1908), the Armenians, the colonial massacres in Congo, the extermination of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the French massacres in Algeria, the Japanese occupation in China and Korea including the Nanjing Massacre (1937–1938), the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda (1994), the wars and massacres in Vietnam and Iraq, and the German occupation crimes in Eastern Europe during World War II. Tens of millions were exterminated, yet Western memory has chosen who to remember and who to forget, and pain itself has become subject to politics, with history serving as a tool for manipulation rather than a mirror of justice.

Not all Jews are Zionists, and less than 70% support the Zionist project, while religious and intellectual currents categorically reject it morally and politically. Nevertheless, there is a deliberate conflation of criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism to silence voices and condemn solidarity.

Then came Gaza and revealed everything: open extermination, starvation, bombing of hospitals, killing journalists, wiping out entire families, children dying from the cold, their tents drowning under the rains, and the European and global impotence is glaring; unable to provide even the slightest assistance or protect their most basic human rights. The protests, demonstrations, and social media have broken the monopoly on images and forced European youth to see the truth with their own eyes, far from the fabricated narrative they had been accustomed to for decades.

Daily protesting has become a necessity because it has shattered the silence, exposed complicity, and redefined democracy as a right to knowledge rather than an empty slogan; it is not against Europe but rather to ensure that it remains true to its values, and to urge peoples to say in one voice: We are not partners in the crime or in the lies.

The moment of the collapse of the narrative is not the end of the road but the beginning of a new phase when people begin to question, search, and hold power and the media accountable. No fabricated narrative can withstand, and the truth, no matter how much they try to obscure it, always emerges... from beneath the rubble.