(CN) — In Europe, nothing stirs passions, hatreds and politics like the Israeli-Palestinian clash. When the conflict ignites, Europe catches on fire too.
It was, after all, Europe's history of imperialism, racism, colonialism, war and genocide that created this intractable conflict in the first place, and the Europe of today remains deeply shaped and affected by how the conflict evolves.
“It is seen as one of the defining struggles of our time, so it gets a lot of symbolic attention loaded onto it,” said Ben Gidley, an expert on antisemitism and Israel at Birkbeck, University of London. “It brings more people to the street and the internet than any other conflict.”
“Israel is, in many ways, a fetish of our times,” said Marcela Menachem Zoufalá, a cultural anthropologist at Charles University in Prague and an expert on Israel and Jews in Europe. “I am not the first to say this.”
Since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by the militant Palestinian group Hamas, Europe has been seized by the war.
News coverage of Ukraine has been eclipsed by ghastly images from Israel and Gaza. Debates over good and evil, war crimes and justice, history, realpolitik and geopolitics have shifted from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.
Academics hurl insults at each other. Arts venues have canceled pro-Palestinian speakers, sparking fresh controversy. Incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia are soaring. Border checks are even back in places, cracking the European Union's dream of doing away with frontiers. Authorities say the threat posed by migrants, many of them Muslims, and Islamist terrorists is too great to allow for open borders.
The brutality taking place in Israel is exposing deep rifts and wounds in Europe related to Muslim immigration, the Holocaust, human rights, colonialism, the rise of far-right parties and the EU's self-appointed mission as a moral authority and standard bearer of liberal democratic values.
And the outbreak of war poses serious threats for Europe.
There's the risk the conflict may escalate into a regional war. The bloodshed and destruction could lead to new waves of refugees. New terrorist attacks are a possibility as religious and racial tensions grow in Europe, home to large Muslim and Jewish populations.
Meanwhile, European politicians argue, waffle and flip flop as the war intensifies and Israel's bombardment and siege of Gaza turns ever more deadly. It's a political paralysis that feeds into the image of the EU as a weak international player with little clout.
A bloc divided
But as the war intensifies and the death toll rises in Gaza, Europeans are becoming even more divided.
Each weekend brings out hundreds of thousands of people for demonstrations — with the biggest ones supporting Palestinian causes. For many Europeans, being pro-Palestinian means being on the right side of history.
“It's become kind of a symbolic struggle for an image of anti-colonial liberation in a way that South Africa was for the previous generation, or the civil rights movement,” Gidley said in a telephone interview.
The Palestinian flag “has become an iconic badge of moral integrity,” he added.
As in the United States, these pro-Palestinian demonstrations, made up largely of Muslims and left-leaning younger people, have been labeled as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. Some countries, including Germany, Austria and France, have tried to ban them. Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by the EU.
The condemnation of pro-Palestinian sentiments also reflects a geopolitical shift in Europe away from the Palestinian side.
In part, this can be explained by Europe's closer economic and military cooperation in recent years with Israel but also on a rise in anti-Muslim views across the EU, a reaction to large-scale Muslim immigration and a series of Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, London, Brussels, Berlin, Madrid and elsewhere over the past two decades.