Broadcaster RTL wondered why the Dutch are no longer so positive about Israel. That is a valid question, given the growing aversion to the Jewish state. But what is the real answer? This article fills in the gaps that RTL prefers not to mention.

RTL ran a headline on 15 May 2021: ‘Growing numbers of Dutch people fed up with Israel.’ The article offered several explanations for this declining support for the Jewish state:

  • The growing number of Dutch people with a migration background.
  • Israel’s ‘disproportionate’ use of force.
  • Diminishing guilt over the Holocaust, simply because it happened so long ago.

These are reasons worth examining — but they stand out above all for what they leave out: the cold self-interest of the Dutch state and the persistent media campaign aimed at leading the Dutch public to ‘better’ insights.

When the Netherlands Still Loved Israel

The Netherlands used to be pro-Israel. It is hard to imagine now, but as a child at primary school — an ordinary Protestant Christian primary school in The Hague — I was taught the Israeli national anthem. This was somewhere between the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

By the 1960s, the horror of what the Jews had suffered in the Second World War had sunk in for many people. The television series De Bezetting [The Occupation] devoted extensive attention to the persecution of Jews, and in 1965 historian Jacques Presser published Ondergang [The Abyss], a devastating and meticulous account of the destruction of Dutch Jewry. Anne Frank’s diary and Marga Minco’s Het bittere kruid [Bitter Herbs] were required reading in schools. For many Dutch people, the existence of Israel was intimately bound up with the Holocaust. One might ask whether we were buying off our shame at the fate of the Dutch Jews by loving Israel all the more.

Israel was, for the Dutch, that plucky little country where miracle after miracle occurred and tiny David kept defeating Goliath. This was the era when Israel’s neighbours openly attacked it, trying to wipe that irritating little state off the map. It was no secret that extremist Arabs wanted to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’ and were openly calling for the genocide of the Jewish people. It was entirely understandable, in Dutch eyes, that Israel fought back hard.

The term ‘Palestinians’ had acquired a new meaning. Originally it referred simply to the inhabitants of Mandatory Palestine — Jewish, Arab, or Christian. In the 1960s, Yasser Arafat began using it exclusively for the Arabs who had been living in the territory in 1948. The Dutch came to know the Palestinians as terrorists who hijacked planes, carried out attacks on Jews worldwide, and — most infamously — perpetrated the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

Was this picture of Israel and the Palestinians one-sided? Certainly. But how did it come to be inverted? Was it for the reasons RTL put forward, or was something else at work?

The Oil Crisis of 1973

On 6 October 1973, Egypt and Syria — armed in part by the USSR — attacked Israel. That day was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Public life in Israel had come to a standstill; part of the army was on leave. The country was exceptionally vulnerable. Mobilising the troops took enormous effort. The survival of the Jewish state hung by a thread, and only a handful of countries came to its aid — the Netherlands among them. Hard to believe nowadays, but the Netherlands actually supplied weapons, as did the United States. The tide turned, and Israel escaped annihilation.

In the Islamic world, fury ran high. According to Islamic doctrine, territory that was once Islamic — Spain, for example — must never again come under the authority of non-Muslims. This principle appears in Hamas’s 1988 charter (Article 11), which declares that the land of Israel is ‘an Islamic waqf for future Muslim generations until the Day of Judgement.’ Non-Islamic rule is, from this perspective, fundamentally unacceptable. And the repeated military humiliations inflicted by a small Jewish state on the vast Arab forces were a dishonour to Arab pride that had to be avenged.

Having repeatedly failed to defeat Israel militarily, a different weapon was deployed. The Islamic oil-producing states — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Qatar, and others — coordinated their response through OAPEC. In a rare display of unity, on 17 October 1973 they imposed an oil embargo. The Netherlands paid the price for its loyalty to Israel; suddenly principles were no longer free of charge. Panic set in immediately. By 6 November 1973, the Netherlands had signed a European Economic Community declaration that said nothing whatsoever about Arab aggression, while laying out conditions Israel would be required to meet.

This is not to say that the Netherlands was uniformly pro-Israel before 1973 and uniformly against it afterwards, nor that the OAPEC countries had not tried to deploy the ‘oil weapon’ before. But those events in the autumn of 1973 may fairly be called a turning point. As the satirist Wim Kan put it in his New Year’s Eve show that year: ‘That Golda Meir is a fine woman, I tell you — we’ll get more oranges. But that’s no use if your car doesn’t run on orange juice…’

Dutch foreign policy post-1973, in a nutshell.

Inverting a Narrative

The problem, of course, was: how to sell this new narrative. Politicians had to manoeuvre between Dutch ‘interests’ and the determination of many Dutch people not to abandon the Jews ‘this time,’ now that a new genocide seemed to threaten. This uncomfortable situation was gradually resolved with considerable help from the media. Slowly, the perpetrators became victims, and the victims became perpetrators.

Palestinian terrorists — who slaughtered children without remorse — did not sit well with the public; they were too obviously the villains. Palestinian refugees were far more useful as victims.

We almost never hear about the Jewish refugees driven out of Islamic countries after 1948. Why not? Because they built new lives, primarily in Israel and the United States. Roughly as many Arabs fled or were expelled from what is now Israel at that time, but they were never given the chance to build new lives in the countries they fled to. Their descendants are still counted as refugees — something that applies to no other group on earth — and the greater their misery, the more useful they are as a political weapon.

Conversely, the Jews now became the perpetrators. The left-wing worldview fitted this perfectly. The origin of many Jewish Israelis — remember those refugees from Islamic countries — became irrelevant. The image emerged of Western Jews who had colonised a land that was never theirs. Lost from view was the fact that Jews had always lived in Israel. It no longer mattered that the European Jews were (descendants of) Holocaust survivors, or that the Russian Jews were (descendants of) survivors of pogroms and communist persecution.

There are good arguments for viewing Israel as a state of refugees. But that does not fit the new narrative. According to that narrative, Israel must be a Western colonial power — a foreign occupier to be expelled. Every time Israel fights to survive, it must be framed as aggression against the indigenous population. Every time Israel is attacked, the attack must be framed as resistance against an occupying force. And so it has become entirely normal to call Israeli Jews ‘settlers,’ even when they live in the homes of their ancestors.

Indoctrination Works

The new narrative has been remarkably successful in the Netherlands. One might say: public support has been manufactured for a different policy. Decades of anti-Israel reporting and a relentless focus on Palestinian suffering have paid off. For years, the Netherlands has dutifully voted in favour of almost every anti-Israel resolution in the UN, without raising much protest.

And then analyses like the RTL article can appear. But in that article we see the same manipulative framing we have been drowning in for years. ‘Images of innocent Palestinian civilian casualties 3,000 kilometres away make a strong impression on people.’ True. But those images almost always stand alone. ‘Look at that poor child! That poor father!’ Far less often: how did these people come to be victims? The term ‘human shield’ does not appear in the RTL article.

Then we read that people experience Israel’s use of force as ‘disproportionate’: ‘In every conflict there are casualties. On both sides. But there are now at least fifteen times more Palestinian deaths than Israeli ones.’ Well. If Israel cared as little about civilian casualties as Hamas does, there would certainly be more Israeli dead. Is that Israel’s fault? Can we only sympathise with Jews once they are being slaughtered? And following on from this: ‘So much violence, combined with families being evicted from their homes and the humiliations many Palestinians face every day, is generating growing outrage. Here too.’

In these analyses there is invariably no clear explanation of why those families were evicted, or what lies behind those daily humiliations. You should count yourself lucky if the context gets a passing mention in a subordinate clause. For the record: those evictions involved properties owned by Jewish landlords whose tenants had refused to pay rent. Would Dutch people not be evicted in such circumstances? And there is plenty to criticise about how Palestinians are treated at checkpoints, but is it not relevant to mention how many Palestinian attacks preceded those measures?

When reporting on rockets fired from Gaza, it is also almost never mentioned that Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Jewish residents were removed from their homes and transferred to Israel, despite protests. Businesses were handed over to the Palestinians. All of it in the hope that ‘land for peace’ would work. One sometimes wonders whether the Israelis who supported that withdrawal at the time ever feel like tearing their hair out. Everything Israel got in return was rockets. The moment it defends itself against them, Israel is called the occupier again.

Commemorations and Immigration

This collective amnesia also affects us at the national level. RTL had a point, of course, when it came to diminishing guilt over the Holocaust. Unfortunately, we have to observe that the growing ‘distance’ from these terrible events has been actively encouraged by, among other things, the hollowing-out of Remembrance Day. In other countries, specific historical events are commemorated — even those from the distant past — but in the Netherlands, the remembrance of the Holocaust was diluted by cramming virtually everything into a single ceremony. Here too we see a narrative imposed from above.

Teachers also seem to be spending less and less time on the Holocaust. Some blame this on the presence of Muslim pupils who refuse to accept the subject in class. And this brings us directly to the third reason cited in the RTL article: ‘Dutch people with a migration background (…) often feel culturally, ideologically, or religiously connected to the Palestinians.’ The word ‘Islam’ is carefully avoided here, but we can safely assume this does not refer to the Chinese community.

There are now close to a million Muslims in the Netherlands, and it is a flat-out scandal that many of them took to the streets last week chanting slogans such as: ‘Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa ya’ud.’ A casual passer-by might not recognise it, but this chant glorifies the annihilation of a Jewish tribe by Mohammed. Mobs like these were marching all over the world, screaming at ‘the Jews.’ It was nauseating to hear such a mob outside the synagogue in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. ‘Scheiß Juden! Scheiß Juden!’ Contemporary Nazis. But when Jews flee to Israel because of this, they are colonists.

Translation tweet: Jew-hatred in the heart of Gelsenkirchen, outside the synagogue. Times in which Jews are abused on the open street should long since have been behind us. This is pure antisemitism, nothing else.

Our ‘leaders’ have, out of self-interest, propped up a narrative in which Israel has been progressively cast as the villain. At the same time, they have admitted large numbers of immigrants who were raised on Jew-hatred — and to whom the Dutch government offered no antidote whatsoever. We see the results now in our streets. And then RTL writes that ‘growing numbers of Dutch people are fed up with Israel.’

Critics Without a Moral Leg to Stand On

Since last Monday, 2,500 rockets have been fired at Israel — so far. Without the Iron Dome, Israel’s formidable defence system, that would have meant thousands of deaths. And yet ‘progressive’ politicians still managed to call this tweet from Prime Minister Mark Rutte ‘one-sided’: ‘It is unacceptable that Hamas is arbitrarily firing rockets at the civilian population. The Netherlands supports Israel’s right to self-defence, within the limits of international law and proportionality.’ There is a dutiful caveat directed at Israel in there — proportionality! — but that is not enough for these people. No, Rutte must also condemn the ‘occupation.’ Never forget: the Jews have no right whatsoever to this land. They are colonists. The narrative has taken hold.

It is no surprise that many Dutch people have by now become ‘fed up with Israel.’ Decades of indoctrination are bearing fruit. Indoctrination that had nothing to do with noble motives, and everything to do with self-interest. With money. And, in all likelihood, with that stubborn, dark impulse towards antisemitism. An impulse that was briefly impermissible after the Holocaust, but now appears to be defensible again.

RTL expresses bewilderment at the declining support for Israel and readily places the blame on others — whether ‘the immigrants’, ‘the Jews’ or ‘the dim-witted public’. But perhaps RTL could also take a look at its own reporting — on the bombing of the media building in Gaza, for instance. The many errors and the bias in its coverage speak for themselves. Or does journalist Olaf Koens truly not know that Hamas was firing rockets from that building, and that journalists were given ample time to evacuate?

This applies not only to RTL, of course. The NOS (the Dutch public broadcaster) has long been notorious for its anti-Israel coverage, as has the NRC, which is known as a high-quality Dutch newspaper. In fact, all mainstream media outlets have questions to answer when it comes to the Jewish state. Just this week, Nu.nl published outright disinformation about the civil rights of Arab citizens within Israel. If you tell your news consumers, year after year, at every available opportunity, that Israel is in the wrong — you should not then be surprised when large sections of the public are convinced that Israel is in the wrong.

The most insidious war against Israel is the propaganda war.

 

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