Peter Drucker
LARGELY BY COINCIDENCE, my partner and I live a couple of blocks down the street from Rotterdam’s major synagogue (which is not that major; Rotterdam was never a big Jewish center, and most of its Jews were killed in the Holocaust).
During the night of March 19-20, this synagogue was the target of an attack. The attack on the Rotterdam synagogue was followed a few nights later by one on a Jewish school in Amsterdam. Both were part of a series of assaults on Jewish targets around Europe that has gathered momentum as anger and frustration have grown at the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, and to a lesser extent on the West Bank.
By contrast with the recent attack on a synagogue in Detroit, no evidence has come to light that the Rotterdam perpetrators (a handful of teenagers from another city) had family members who had been killed by Israeli bombs.
The Dutch attacks caused no deaths or injuries, and minimal damage. Nevertheless, they bear out the point that journalist Amira Hass made in the Israeli daily Haaretz: “Israel is dangerous for Jews, precisely because it presents itself as the representative of the Jewish people across generations.”
Zionists like Benjamin Netanyahu do their best to link Jews abroad to Israeli violence. Netanyahu has a long history, for example in response to much more violent antisemitic attacks years ago in France, of seizing on antisemitism as evidence that Jews do not belong in the diaspora, where they can never be safe, and should all move to Israel.
Flames of Bigotry
The violence in Palestine has been fanning the flames in the Netherlands of bigotry against vulnerable ethnic and racialized minorities, including people of Muslim origin as well as Jews. Both antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism have long histories in this country. The responses to attacks on Jews and to attacks on Muslims differ, however.
Almost across the Dutch parliamentary spectrum, reactions to antisemitic incidents have reflected what Enzo Traverso has called a “civic religion” of anti-antisemitism, with no serious analysis of where antisemitism comes from. (For one analysis of the roots of antisemitism, see my article “Far-Right Antisemitism and Heteronationalism” in Historical Materialism.)
By contrast, attacks on mosques and other Muslim-identified sites have been common in the Netherlands throughout this century and before, eliciting little denunciation. In fact, such attacks are usually not newsworthy at all.
This in no way changes the reality that antisemitism has deep Dutch roots. Unlike the killing of Anne Frank and most Dutch Jews during the Holocaust — safely in the past and supposedly attributable to the Germans — many manifestations of everyday Dutch antisemitism are virtually unknown abroad, though familiar to the Dutch, sometimes in forms that are easy to trivialize.
To draw again on my own experience in Rotterdam: several years ago I was going for a walk one evening on a downtown street, when I found myself in the midst of a procession of young white guys chanting, “Hamas, Hamas, gas the Jews!” (“Hamas, Hamas, Joden aan het gas!”) I was unnerved although, like people in the Netherlands generally, I knew they didn’t mean me.
This is a standard chant of fans of the big Rotterdam soccer team Feyenoord; “the Jews” for them means Ajax, the main Amsterdam soccer team (which before World War II was based on the largely Jewish east side of Amsterdam). Besides being anti-Amsterdam, the chant has the advantage for hooligans of being in-your-face offensive to respectable Dutch opinion.
In this respect as in others, some young Dutch males of Muslim immigrant origin have at times in the past assimilated this strain of Dutch outrageousness. I heard the same chant years ago from a crowd of young guys of immigrant origin at a Palestine solidarity march that I took part in in Amsterdam. In those years Palestine solidarity actions were smaller and not so disciplined.
I haven’t heard the “Hamas, Hamas” chant or anything like it at pro-Palestine actions for years, and certainly not at the “Red Line” demonstrations of over a hundred thousand people in The Hague and Amsterdam this past year against Israeli crimes in Gaza. This reflects the Dutch Palestine solidarity groups’ resolute and vigilant opposition to antisemitism of (not of course counting anti-Zionist chants like “From the river to the sea”).
The Far Right
Although in the Netherlands as elsewhere there are widespread efforts to smear Palestine solidarity and particularly anti-Zionism as antisemitic, open antisemitism is a specialty of sections of the Dutch far right.
Feyenoord fans are vaguely associated with the far right, which has been dominant in local electoral politics in Rotterdam for over two decades now. But young guys of immigrant origin generally aren’t associated with the far right, because they’re not “white.”
In any event, antisemitism remains alive and well on the Dutch right. In local elections across the country a few days ago the vote for the most antisemitic far-right party (the so-called “Forum for Democracy,” FvD) tripled. Typically, Dutch prime minister Rob Jetten and other mainstream politicians have singled out the FvD’s antisemitism for condemnation, more than its anti-vaccine and other lunatic and racist positions, many of them imported from the U.S. far right.
By contrast, in parliamentary elections several months ago the biggest far-right party (the “Freedom Party,” very Islamophobic, pro-Zionist and not openly antisemitic) lost a bit of ground.
Jewish Dissenters
There’s a broader point here, going way beyond the problem of overt antisemitism: the identification of Jews generally with the Zionist state (if sometimes mildly critical of Israel) is still dominant in Dutch society.
There is some dissent among Jews in the Netherlands. The Dutch pro-peace, more or less pro-BDS group A Different Jewish Voice, for example, openly rejects the government’s monolithic picture of the Jewish community, and opposes the resort to repressive measures in response to antisemitism.
There are also groups of pro-Palestinian Israelis here, notably the dynamic anti-Zionist, pro-BDS group Erev Rav. But there is still no large-scale equivalent of the U.S. anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace. Radical Jewish dissenters, though consistently represented in Palestine solidarity actions, are mostly still struggling for wider visibility.
Meanwhile the identification of Jews with Israel is shared by supporters of the Dutch Zionist lobby CIDI, and by mainstream politicians, and by white soccer hooligans, and by the few racialized teenagers who attack synagogues and Jewish schools.
This does not mean that these different groups are equally repugnant. The groups with greater societal and political power bear a far greater share of the responsibility. But so long as Jewish anti-Zionism remains marginal and Israel’s criminal assaults drag on in the Middle East, they will continue to fuel antisemitism in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe.
Peter Drucker is a queer, Jewish socialist in solidarity with Palestine, originally from the United States, who has lived in the Netherlands since 1993 and in Rotterdam since 2006. He was a founding member of Solidarity in 1986. Thanks to Alex de Jong and Sai Englert for suggestions and feedback on an earlier draft.