Karl Jaspers, analyzing post-Nazi Germany, warned against the danger of limiting guilt to only criminal leaders. For him, this approach is wrong because it allows entire societies to avoid political, moral, and metaphysical responsibility: instead of confronting their own complicity, communities self-justify, preserving an image of innocence and allowing injustices to continue unchecked.
Today, Europe is repeating exactly the same pattern with Gaza. By focusing solely on Netanyahu and portraying the ongoing “final solution” against the Palestinians as an “exaggeration” compared to the past (implicitly suggesting that everything was fine before), European institutions knowingly ignore decades of “incremental genocide” against Palestinians since 1948, supported, financed, and protected by their own policies. Silence and minimization turn systematic violence into a specific event, just the tip of the iceberg.
Furthermore, European narratives have gone so far as to amplify figures like Yair Golan and Ehud Olmert, presenting them as “moral alternatives” to Netanyahu. This has two strategic effects: 1) it makes the atrocities appear as an exception in Israeli politics, when in reality these two figures have been under investigation for war crimes for years; 2) it allows them to distance themselves from past crimes, reducing any legal risk.
The result is a European society that self-justifies without interrogating its structural role in the Palestinian genocide, repeating the mistake Jaspers warned against: guilt is confined to visible criminals, while institutional and moral complicity remains intact.
I discussed this on
@globalvoices
How Europe is managing guilt over
#Gaza: The politics of moral cleansing
While Palestinian voices remain sidelined, Israeli dissenters are elevated as Europe absolves itself of its complicity in Gaza.
globalvoices.org/2025/08/22/…