Read these four sentences.
We are a people.
We have a name.
This place is ours.
And we will defend it.
Feel free to read them again.
Notice what they do to you.
Now put Israel in front of them, and a lot of people here at home will feel something tighten somewhere in the chest.
Then put Denmark in front of them.
And notice again.
It is not Israel doing that to you.
It is the sentence.
A hundred years ago any European country could say those four sentences about itself without lowering its voice. Most of us wrote them into our national anthems.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you want peace, be ready for war. The Romans said it. Our grandfathers understood it without needing it translated.
Then Germany used parts of that same language for something never seen before. Not in a fit of passion. But with laws, timetables and office clerks. Against a threat the murderous ideological leadership had invented itself.
And the rest of Europe discovered afterwards how much it had helped. Vichy wrote its own anti-Jewish laws in 1940 without anyone having asked for them. Hungary had its own from 1938. Thirty-two nations met in Evian in July of that same year to talk about Jewish refugees - and almost all of them said no. That is only 88 years ago.
When the war was over, the whole of Europe gradually put the four sentences away. A people, a name, a place, a defence. Nobody said them out loud anymore. Not about themselves. The words had become somebody's. And not somebody you would want to stand next to.
And in many ways that was deserved.
But instead of learning to use the words carefully, we abolished the CATEGORY.
That is how we ended up with completely deranged ideas that nobody had ever believed in or acted on before.
“A people” became a construct. “A border” became an administrative line on a map that otherwise meant nothing except being inhumane. “Belonging” became a preference… on the level of a taste in music.
But something worse happened on top of that - because a category cannot be abolished just for yourself.
If a civilisation decides - as our very wise leadership did... - that a people is something we made up, that verdict does not stop at its own border.
Then quite quickly it applies to every people on earth. Including the ones who never agreed to it and still live as one.
That is why many can no longer hear Israel as a country making its case.
Instead it is heard as an error in the filing system. Something that should not exist anymore, and then stands there and exists anyway. Insists on existing.
And then notice what it actually is that stirs the anger.
Because, with a little self-honesty, it cannot be the use of force. Europe has used force within the same generation, in Belgrade, in Libya, in Helmand, in Iraq, and every time with far less at stake for ourselves than Israel has at stake on its own doorstep.
And it cannot be the sentence itself either. Ukraine has said the four sentences every single day since February 2022, and all of Europe has risen and applauded and applauded and applauded. So the sentence is not forbidden. It is permitted when it is said by someone who needs us in order to be able to say it.
A people that defends itself and at the same time asks for our help, that we can make room for, because then we are still the ones who give.
Israel on the other hand - they do not ask for permission. Israel says the sentence in its own name, with its own army, and has no intention of letting anyone else at all decide whether that people should go on existing. And it does so in the very name that was the whole reason we put the language away. The category was retired because of what was done to the Jews.
And then the Jews picked it up again.
That is the short circuit.
That is the one you feel in your chest.
"Never again" became, for us, candles, a squeezed-out tear in the corner of the eye of a politician who was not alive back then, and a speech every January. None of it costs anything.
In Israel it became an army, a border, a passport, a missile shield and an air force. It costs everything. Every day.
Of course it did. That is understandable to anyone who lives in reality.
The truth is that we love those two words - Never Again - as a feeling.
We just cannot stand them as policy.
And then there is one thing here that needs to be said clearly, because otherwise it all collapses into one big mush.
Despite all of the above, you are allowed to criticise Israel.
Israel's government can be wrong. It can pursue the wrong policy in Gaza, build settlements it should not build, and have ministers who should not be sitting there. You can think that and say it out loud, and people in Israel do so themselves every single day. That is how it is with every country. Here too. Governments make mistakes, and then they get replaced. That is not what I am writing about.
I am writing about the difference between two things that many here at home can no longer hear the difference between.
The one is to say - Israel is doing something wrong, and it has to change.
The other is to say - Israel should not exist at all.
The first can be answered. There are elections. There are courts. There is a new government in four years. The second nobody can answer, because it is not asking for anything to get better. It is asking for an entire people to pack up and disappear.
And that is not a theoretical sentence. It stands in comment threads on every platform, written by perfectly ordinary Danes with a name and a profile picture, often by people who are otherwise very fond of the words “inclusion” and “diversity”. They do not write "Israel is doing something wrong". But "the Jews must go"… Make that add up yourself.
Anyways. Think of your neighbour. You can think he trims his hedge wrong, throws parties that are too loud and parks where he is not allowed to. That is a neighbour dispute. It can and should be sorted out over the hedge.
But the day you say that your neighbour should never have had his house, has to pack up and leave the street, or else… it is no longer a neighbour dispute. Then it is something else.
And the test is pretty simple.
Next time you hear yourself say something about Israel, or are about to write it in a comment thread, stop for a moment. Take Israel out of the sentence and put another country in. Poland. Denmark. Ukraine. If it still makes sense, then it was politics, and then we can talk about it. If it only makes sense as long as it says Israel, then it was never about politics.
Then it was about a people standing there and being - without asking anyone's permission first.
And this is where we end up.
Israel remembers what it is.
A people. With a name. A place that is theirs. And willing to defend it with everything they have.
That is the whole crime.
And at the same time it is the question we stopped asking ourselves - and the reason nobody here at home can say what a Dane is anymore without lowering their voice.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Tuesday, friends ☀️
And oh yes, just for the record -
I have no solution to that conflict. People far wiser than me have spent an entire lifetime on it without finding one.
I just have four sentences I cannot make mean something different depending on which country I put in front of them.
Can you?
