From Atonement to Absurdity: Europe’s Shifting Stance on Israel

Long before political Zionism emerged, small, marginal Protestant sects in Europe developed restorationist theologies centred on the biblical land. These groups - often on the fringes of mainstream Christianity and implicitly antisemitic - did not merely support a Jewish “return” to the Holy Land. Many appropriated the role of the “Chosen People” for themselves, imagining their own communities as a “New Israel” and treating actual Jews as either instruments in a prophetic drama or obstacles to be displaced. This was arguably more corrosive than routine bigotry, because it sought to disinherit Jews from their own covenant and replace them with a self-appointed “new” chosen community.

In much of Europe, these sects were obscure and politically marginal, lacking the numbers or influence to shape national policy. Facing social and religious marginalisation, many adherents migrated to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, where the relative religious freedom of the colonies allowed them to thrive. Over time, their restorationist ideas fused with the developing American concept of manifest destiny, eventually producing a powerful strain of Christian Zionism that became a real political force in the United States.

Seen in this light, the Zionist project in the 19th and 20th centuries had a ready-made echo in these traditions. “A land without people for a people without a land” could be reimagined by such sects as a project for marginal Christians without a home - a biblical destiny relocated to the Middle East. By the late 19th century, British imperial interests fused with these restorationist currents, producing political support for a Jewish homeland that would culminate in the Balfour Declaration.

Outside Britain and its settler-colony descendants, however, Christian Zionism never became a significant political force in Europe. In most continental states - whether former colonial powers, post-Holocaust societies, or Cold War allies - today’s pro-Israel stance cannot be explained by Christian Zionist fervour. Instead, it stems from a patchwork of other drivers: colonial nostalgia, Holocaust guilt, strategic alliances, and the political cost of challenging entrenched narratives.

The EU is not a single actor but a collection of states with diverse, sometimes contradictory histories and emotional responses to the Middle East. Israel has successfully cultivated two symbolic narratives that cut across these differences: Europe as under “Islamic siege,” and Israel as a Western “bulwark of civilisation” doing Europe’s “dirty work.” The first plays to anxieties about Muslim immigration, framing Palestinian resistance as part of a broader threat. The second flatters European self-image by casting Israel’s wars and occupation as a shared civilisational mission.

The “Islamic siege” frame also resonates uncomfortably well with the rhetoric of emerging neo-Nazi and far-right movements across Europe, producing a set of strange bedfellows: Zionists and avowedly antisemitic extremists finding common cause in Islamophobia. The resulting moral posture, however, differs by country. In Germany and Austria - whose own wartime record includes direct responsibility for the Holocaust - unconditional support for Israel is defended as a moral duty, even when it means enabling war crimes. In the Netherlands, which was itself occupied and victimised during the Second World War, the rationale descends into pure Monty Python. A recent Dutch government statement claimed the Netherlands “cannot defend itself” without Israeli weapons - weapons “battle-tested” in an absurdly asymmetric conflict - and therefore cannot take effective measures to stop Israel’s ongoing violations of international law.

In both cases, the contradictions are glaring: for Berlin and Vienna, it is moral atonement that enables moral blindness; for The Hague, it is a kind of bureaucratic slapstick - dependency on tools perfected through the very acts it claims to condemn. This is Europe’s erratic morality in action - sustained less by coherent strategic interest than by habit, symbolism, and fear of disrupting the prevailing narrative. And it is precisely this fragility that makes the stance vulnerable to sudden collapse once the supporting myths lose credibility, as is now visibly starting to happen.