Ever since Hamas attacked Israel, my tweets and interviews have caused much controversy. In the interests of both those who agree with me and those who disagree with me, I list below every one of those interventions. An honest debate founded on what each one of us has said (as opposed to what various trolls say we said) is the least we can offer a divided and troubled world.
7/10
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1710627736664854638?s=20
The path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives – both Palestinian and Israeli – begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid.
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1710642297681985834?s=20
When a former Mossad Director concurs that Israel is imposing Apartheid on the Palestinians, is there more to say other than “End Apartheid to Give Peace a Chance”?
8/10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avtX-CWmVG8
“Those who try very hard to extract from people like me, from DiEM25, a condemnation of the attack by the Hamas guerrillas will never get it. And they will never get it for a single reason. Those who care about humans without discrimination, who care equally for a Jew and an Arab, must ask themselves a very important question: What exactly is their idea of the cessation of hostilities? That Palestinians are going to lay down their arms and go back into the largest open-air prison in the world where they are constantly suffocated by the Apartheid state? In other words, back in South Africa in the era of Apartheid, what was the problem? Was it that some members of the Black Resistance, including the ANC but not only the ANC, took up arms against the South African regime and some times killed innocent people? No, that was not the problem. The problem was Apartheid. Apartheid, whether it is practised in South Africa or in Palestine-Israel, is alwys going to procure violence because it is a violent, misanthropic system. Any human being living under Apartheid will either die a terrible, silent death or rebel and, often, take with them innocent people. The criminals here are not Hamas, not even the Israeli settlers who are killing Palestinians. The criminals are us, Europeans and Americans. Every single member of our German society, our French society, our Greek society, the United States society. We have participated in this crime against humanity over the decades by keeping our mouths shut as long as there is no trouble down there. As long as people are dying outside the reach of cameras. As long as it is Palestinians who are dying and not the occupiers. So, this incredible tragedy must be converted into an opportunity for us Europeans to wake up and to redeem ourselves by demanding that we collectively take the first decisive step toward Peace. And that is the destruction of the state of apartheid. Just like we did in South Africa.”
7/10
https://twitter.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711331592998625544
DiEM25 and MeRA25 declaration: Peace Now!
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711153525273645298?s=20
The shock and fury in Israel are reminiscent of the emotions in the US after 9/11. That provoked a display of American unity and power. It also led to a misconceived and self-destructive war on terror. Israel may be heading down the same dangerous path.
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711157219859878365?s=20
Apartheid must be smashed & the two state solution is nearly impossible (even if desirable for a number of reasons). The only realistic civilised solution is for a single secular state for all – with equal civil liberties independently of religion and ethnicity.
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711341886445682884?s=20
From a very young age I was made aware of how those seeking to cover up inhumanities perpetrated by the Great Powers against the weakest of peoples, they invariably did so by explaining it all away as part of “the realities of the world”…
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711351103638393064?s=20
Hamas is nothing like the ANC. [I never said it was.] But Israel’s Apartheid is modelled on the Apartheid the ANC fought. My simple point was that Apartheid (South African or Israeli) IS violence and, thus, begets violence. And the only way to stop violence is to end Apartheid – not moralistically to condemn violence while turning a blind eye to Apartheid.
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711373657073705123?s=20
If a former Mossad Director says that Israel is imposing Apartheid on the Palestinians, it is an open and shut case. You have lost this one I am afraid https://theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/06/israel-imposing-apartheid-on-palestinians-says-former-mossad-chief
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711375495483265171?s=20
Let me remind those screaming blue murder when any comparison is made between South African Apartheid with Israel’s that Nelson Mandela was never in doubt that Palestinians lived under Apartheid. [Or that Israel was openly the best ally of the White Supremacists in Pretoria]
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711378779371634972?s=20
Just in case you are misinformed (rather than a troll), let me point out our campaign for a Peace Process, along with a cessation of hostilities, both in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine. We are consistent. Are you? https://diem25.org/diem25-and-mera25-declaration-peace-now/
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711387107602653621?s=20
No electricity, no food, no fuel for 1 million children. Straight from the horse’s mouth. That can’t be the civilised world’s answer, whatever differences we may have on who did what to whom first or last.
https://x.com/GermanPolyglot/status/1711362849564455031?s=20
If you did not condemn #Israel‘s killing of unarmed journalists, doctors and children, you lost the right to condemn #Hamas‘ atrocities now. The Geneva Convention on war crimes either applies to everyone or no-one. And anyone invoking it against the weak while exempting the powerful is committing an obscenity.
10/10
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711608211105571157?s=20
Apartheid is an abomination. Desmond Tutu, a hero of the anti-Apartheid movement in its place of origin, understood it. Will those who claim to respect Tutu and Mandela follow suit? Or will they continue to defend Apartheid’s continued, strengthened variant in Israel-Palestine?
https://x.com/GermanPolyglot/status/1711582200418693399?s=20
There is nothing that can justify deliberate violence against non-combatants. This means that attacking Israelis at a rave is wrong, bombing Palestinian hospitals is wrong, abducting Ukrainian children is wrong, torturing Russian prisoners is wrong… In fact the nationality of the victim or attacker is completely irrelevant. Either targeting innocents is ALWAYS wrong, no matter who does it, or you don’t have morals, you just have opinions. We need to stop this weird move where we excuse/ignore war crimes from our preferred side and strongly condemn war crimes from the other side – it leads to the annihilation of ethics itself, everything becomes relative.
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711978132645826944?s=20
1982: Sharon invades Lebanon to destroy the PLO. Thus Hizbollah was born. 2002: Arafat is crushed to end hopes of Palestinian state. Thus Hamas rose up. Now Israel is pulverising Gaza to destroy Hamas. [All such moves had full US support.] Any guesses of likely outcomes?
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1711995086811058347?s=20
Desmond Tutu made this comparison. I dare you challenge his authority on the subject.
11/10
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1712188831233941599?s=20
Compare & contrast! Attacking “civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes. Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror”. UNLESS the attacker is Israel. Then it’s NOT terror!?@?!!!
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1712343232208609635?s=20
I condemn the killing of every person, let alone 40. I also condemn the notion that Israel is imposing Apartheid and war crimes for decades in… self-defence. Foisting Apartheid/Occupation on a whole people for decades can NEVER be self-defence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-ZXE24uiW8
DiEM25 LIVESTREAM EXTRACT (from 1’40” to 17’38”): We are talking about yet another example of humanity’s capacity to dive into moral voids. Just when we thought we had done our worst, we did even worse. The emphasis is on the word WE. It is very natural, in the context of vicious conflicts, for us to have a tendency to take sides. But the long-lasting nature of this tragedy should concentrate our minds so as to take seriously our responsibility for it. A few days ago, in Berlin, I refused to denounce Hamas and, naturally, that stirred up a torrent criticism, of abuse. There is no doubt that if I were in their path, near the Gaza Fence (which, I must stress, is not an international border but a hideous, illegal fence since the people living behind it used to live on the other side before they were ethnically cleansed and forced into the awful Gaza strip), if any one of us were at, say, that music festival dedicated to Peace, the Hamas fighters would have gunned me down or taken me hostage. Those scenes are atrocious. There can be no justification and there can be no way of presenting them as justified. But, I am not going to condemn the Hamas assault on Israel. Those who demand of me, and you, and others, to condemn the Hamas killing spree are insistent that we, for whom every human loss is a calamity for which we consider even ourselves to be responsible, they demand that we – effectively – take the side of the state of Israel. That I shall never do. And who are they who demand that we condemn the Hamas atrocities? It is the same people who…
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…look the other way when Israel kills unarmed journalists, doctors and children
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…support or tolerate the ritual humiliation to which West Bank Palestinians are treated every day of their lives by an apartheid regime much worse than the original one in South Africa – a reality revealed by, amongst others, Tamir Pardo, Mossad’s former Director, Avraham Burg, the former speaker of the Israeli parliament, renowned Israeli historian Benny Morris and more than 2,000 Israeli and American public figures who have signed a public statementdeclaring that “Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid”
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…turn a blind eye when murderous settlers rampage in Palestinian areas killing Palestinians at will
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…whistle in the wind while Israel’s authorities illegally evict Palestinians from the East Jerusalem neighbourhoods, where they lived for generations, to hand over their homes to people who just arrived in Israel for the first time
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…accept uncritically Israel’s declaration of war not against a state (since it has never allowed Palestinians to have one) but against an occupied people whom it has been terrorising for decades.
