The most immediate explanation for this decision is international power politics. Israel is the main ally of the US and the EU in the Middle East, and the Israeli military stands as a guarantor of the US and the EU's interests in the region. The US is no longer dependent on oil and gas from the Middle East, but the EU is. Moreover, increasingly so since it doesn’t want to buy oil and gas from Russia any longer. Israel is thus a bridgehead for the ‘West's’ strategic interests in the Middle East.

The other explanation could be that the European countries are keen not to go against their most important ally, the US, which for geopolitical and internal political reasons has tied itself to Israel, regardless of whether the president is a Democrat or a Republican. The European countries are expected to follow their master. So they do that.

A third explanation is the guilt that European countries feel for the persecution of Jews in Europe, particularly the genocide of Jews during World War II, not only by Nazi Germany, but also by collaborationist governments in Finland, the Baltic countries, Ukraine, France and other European countries.

These explanations are undoubtedly correct, but I still have the feeling that something is amiss. This has made me think that there could be an additional explanation in a completely different ballpark.

For 200 years, Europe was a colonial power that dominated almost the entire globe. There were very few countries in the world that were not European colonies (China, Japan, Iran, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Thailand and a few others), but these were deeply dependent on the European colonial powers, especially England. Actually, a rather astonishing feat: a small continent, sitting like an appendix on the large Asian landmass, had managed to subjugate almost the entire globe. It didn't last, however, and the EU and the USA have a hard time accepting that, but that's another story.

So let us return to colonialism.

There were two forms of colonialism.

One was settler colonialism. It consisted of a massive immigration of Europeans to the colonies, whose inhabitants were either killed or expelled to distant corners of their countries. What we today would call genocide and ethnic cleansing. This is what happened in what is now the United States, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand and to a lesser extent Ireland, Algeria and South Africa (where it didn't really work).

Most people know the story of the extermination campaigns of the European colonists against the local inhabitants of the United States (the “Indians”) in the 1800s. However, similar less-known campaigns were carried out in Chile and Argentina in the second half of the 1800s to defeat and exterminate the Indian peoples in the south (Auracanía), especially the Maphuches, who offered stubborn resistance. They were the “terrorists” of the time. Painting from Wikipedia )Johann Moritz Rugendas)

The other colonialism consisted of countries being conquered and many of their inhabitants killed, but the local populations continued to constitute the vast majority. This was the case in the Indian subcontinent (what is now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka), the rest of Latin America, virtually all of Africa, Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia and Indochina. The colonial masters took power and occupied the leading positions in the administration, and in South America, Mexico and South Africa, among others, the colonists took ownership of the land. The local inhabitants were transformed into serfs or farm workers on what had previously been their own land.

In Latin America, the land of the local inhabitants was given to European immigrants as ‘encomiendas’, and they themselves were transformed into serfs. In this painting from Mexico, it is an “encomendero” named Gonzalo de Salazar, mistreating one of his serfs.

It should be remembered that most of this happened during the European Enlightenment, whose values ​​are those with which Europe and the United States today identify. Science, rationality, technical progress and, in the later period, the introduction of parliamentary systems, based on the right to vote for male citizens with personal property. Side by side with colonization, ethnic cleansing, exploitation and slave trade.

To make this coherent ideologically, the European countries defined themselves as the bearers of world civilization, and they considered it their onerous duty to spread knowledge and progress to barbaric and primitive peoples around the world, even if it meant war and extermination of 'savage' tribes. Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden. Christianity was portrayed as the bearer of civilization and played an important role in colonization, not least in Latin America.

In the European and North American imaginary, it was the white man’s burden to spread civilisation and progress to the rest of the world through colonialism. Cartoon from MIT

This imaginary still resides deeply in the European countries’ self-understanding, their world-view and their perception of their role in the world. This is especially true for the Western European former colonial powers, including Denmark. The European countries are, in the words of the former EU Foreign Minister Borrell, a flowering garden surrounded by a barbaric jungle. It is their task to create a garden in their own image in this barbaric jungle that surrounds them.

The State of Israel, like the USA, Canada, Australia, etc., is a state based on settler colonialism, only more recent. It was created by immigrants from particularly Europe, who killed or expelled the local inhabitants, and created a 'civilized garden' in the middle of the 'barbaric' Middle Eastern jungle. The vast majority of the current Jewish residents of Israel are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants who have come to Palestine since the year 1900. In 1900, 586,000 people lived in Palestine, of whom only about 4%, or 23,000, were Jews. Today, about 7 million Jews (and an equal number of Muslims) live in Palestine. Israel is therefore a country of immigrants or colonists. It is estimated that about half of Israel's Jews are what Israelis call Ashkenazi Jews, whose origins are mainly in Central and Eastern Europe, and the other half are what they call Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, whose origins are in other parts of the Middle East, North Africa, Iran, India, Georgia, etc. The Ashkenazim with their European heritage have historically been dominant in politics and economics in Israel. All the prime ministers that Israel has had are Ashkenazim. Israel is thus a piece of Europe that has been transplanted to Palestine. Just as Northern Ireland is a small piece of England in Ireland, and like the small piece of France that the French 'blackfeet' had hoped to create in Algeria (without success).

In the photo, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is with her best friend, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Israel in 2021. She has recently tried to distance herself from her friend, whom she now describes as a problem, but without changing her unconditional support for Israel.

The European countries therefore see the Israeli Jews as their compatriots, just as they do with settler-colonial countries in other parts of the world. They are the Europeans’ brothers. They cannot be left alone, surrounded by a bunch of barbarians. No matter what they do. It is unfortunate when they kill tens of thousands of children, but they have the right to “defend themselves”. That is why the EU is standing by Israel. And I suppose that is why the former English colony of Ireland is one of the few critical voices in Europe. They know what they are talking about.

So European colonialism is alive and well. “European values” must be defended, whatever the cost. If that requires genocide and ethnic cleansing, then so be it. All the talk about 'Hamas' is nonsense. If Hamas were not there, others would organize resistance against the colonizers. If the Algerian “Front National de Liberation”, labelled as terrorists by the French colonial administration, had not organized resistance against French colonialism, others would have done so. The same goes for the Mau Mau in Kenya, the ANC in South Africa, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam and so on. All were labelled as terrorists. Unfortunately, barbarians tend to band together and resist their civilized overlords.

So much for “European values”.