The indoctrination of young people in the Netherlands has hit a new low in a recent video from NOS op 3. This time it didn’t stop at the usual carelessness — the NOS ended up promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory. We have analysed the video in detail, and we are sounding the alarm. Which future is the Netherlands choosing?

On Saturday 19 September 2026, NOS op 3, the NOS’s channel for young audiences, released a new video about Israel. We have grown used to a certain amount from the NOS when it comes to Israel, but this video marks a new low. After years of subtle omissions and inaccuracies — which just happened to fall almost entirely against Israel — it appears the time has now come to abandon subtlety altogether.

NOS op 3 takes a long run-up in this video, during which plenty of journalistic norms are already broken, before taking the big leap. At 17:47, it delivers an openly antisemitic conspiracy theory about a secret Jewish hunger for power aimed at a Greater Israel covering half the Middle East. The screenshot in the tweet below really is taken from the NOS video.

Tweet text: The more-than-bizarre video from @NOSop3 (“Israel’s Line Game”) is the textbook definition of dangerous journalistic sabotage and the inversion of reality. Under the guise of ‘education’ for teenagers/young people, they are selling and feeding an extremely toxic antisemitic conspiracy theory. (…) Maaike van Charante: You can write a whole report about it, but the @NOS won’t listen. This disgusting video🤮 is held together by lies and one-sidedness. EVERYTHING to paint Israel as the great aggressor. NOS op 3 is telling this to teenagers. To young people.💔

Tactics

How did we get here? The video itself offers a good glimpse of the answer: before people are willing to believe such a crude conspiracy theory, some groundwork has to be laid. That groundwork has been going on for years, and the first seventeen minutes of the video are a concentrated version of what has been done during those years: cultivating blind spots and prejudices.

There are tried-and-tested tactics for steering news consumers in a particular direction. We see these tactics again and again in coverage of Israel: omitting relevant information, suggestive language, failing to show differing viewpoints, and carefully dosing out inaccurate information. In this NOS op 3 video, not half a minute goes by without one of these.

The deception lies both in the details and in the broad strokes, which is why we produced a detailed analysis that follows the video step by step. You can read that analysis here. That analysis also includes general observations, because some relevant information is suppressed so thoroughly that its absence never comes up in a step-by-step breakdown.

Telling omissions

This video is about Israel’s shifting borders. Every border discussed is given a colour, such as the Yellow Line in Gaza and the Blue Line in Lebanon. That gives NOS op 3 the chance to keep playing with those colours throughout, lending the story a sense of coherence.

The title of the video is already telling: ‘Israel’s Line Game’ suggests that Israel alone holds the power and is the only one deciding how the lines shift. To make that picture credible, NOS op 3 has to leave a great deal out. The result is a history in which the aggression of Israel’s opponents has been airbrushed away, along with every statement and event that contradicts the desired narrative.

In this video, you hear nothing about the terrorism Israel has faced for decades. The countless attacks by the PLO, the bloody intifadas, the rockets fired by Hezbollah and Hamas, the suicide bombings — none of it seems to exist. Also left out of the picture: the Palestinians’ own line game, with maps used everywhere — right down to the schoolbooks — on which Israel does not exist.

On top of that, everything that would make Israel’s actions understandable is missing. First and foremost, Israel’s war aims: bringing the hostages home, making sure Hamas can never again carry out a 7 October attack, and stopping the threat from Hezbollah. Also missing is Israel’s decades-long willingness to make concessions, and the stubborn refusal of the Arabs and Palestinians to accept a Jewish state.

Examples from history

And of course the manipulation is also in the details. It’s hard to choose from such an abundance, but here are a few examples of how NOS op 3 operates. The italicised text is the NOS’s own; the timecode from the video comes free of charge.

(02:10) That year (1917) they promise the Jewish people a national home within these lines of the British Mandate for Palestine. The map of the British Mandate is wrong. All of Jordan still belonged to it back then: that only split off in 1921/1922 and was then called Transjordan. The video also leaves out that Jews had always lived in the land.

(05:14) Israel uses its strong position to begin building settlements in the occupied territories, for Jews to live in. Right after the 1967 war, Israel was not after occupation but wanted to trade land for peace. The Arab states refused. In August 1967, meeting in Khartoum (Sudan), they opted for the notorious three noes: no to peace with Israel, no to negotiations with Israel, and no to recognition of Israel. Only after this triple no did the residents of the kibbutzim of Gush Etzion, driven out in 1948, become the first to return.

(07:59) In the year 2000, Hezbollah drives Israel entirely out of the country. Then the UN draws a new demarcation line: the Blue Line. Hezbollah did not drive Israel out; Israel withdrew unilaterally because the Barak government no longer saw any need to remain in Lebanon. Hezbollah, incidentally, ‘rewarded’ this later that year by kidnapping and murdering three Israeli soldiers. The UN reported that Hezbollah repeatedly violated the Blue Line after the Israeli withdrawal.

Cutting Netanyahu’s words

NOS op 3 mostly gives airtime to Israeli extremists, as if they were representative of what the average Israeli thinks. But Netanyahu himself is a problem. He is supposed to play the role of arch-villain, yet he keeps saying reasonable things. For a creative editor, that’s easily solved: just cut all the nuance out of his statements.

(19:49) Netanyahu on video: “The Jews belong to this land. This land belongs to the Jews. It’s our land, not your land. This has been our land for 3,500 years.” These clips come from an interview with Jordan Peterson. Below are the pieces NOS op 3 cut, shown in context. What the NOS cut is shown in bold. Note that Netanyahu explicitly says the Jews want to live side by side with the Palestinians — something NOS op 3 cuts out. The clips appear in the order NOS op 3 used, which is not chronological.

(5:45) ‘You have no right to be there, but the Arabs who are trying to destroy you, they have that right.’ That is a complete perversion of history, and also a complete perversion of justice. (5:55) The Jews belong to this land, this land belongs to the Jews. The Palestinians are free to live here next to us, among us, but they’re not free to demand the dissolution of the Jewish state.

(4:13) We decided to establish a state in 1948, that’s 75 years ago, and we said: ‘Everybody can live here.’ The Arabs said: ‘There can’t be a Jewish State, you have no right to be here. It’s our land.’ It’s not your land! It’s been our land for 3,500 years.

Smearing Zionism

But everything I’ve written above was only the starter. After a good seventeen minutes, the main course arrives. NOS op 3 sets out to prove that Zionism itself is malicious, starting with Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. According to NOS op 3, Herzl wanted an Israel stretching from the River Euphrates to the Nile, and supposedly based this on a biblical text from Genesis.

Herzl — who, incidentally, was not religious — knew that text but did not use it as a guide. In chapter 4 of his book Der Judenstaat, he named Palestine or Argentina as possible sites for a Jewish state — not exactly biblical. Herzl even considered a Jewish state in Uganda. Yet NOS op 3 wants to pin this ridiculous conspiracy theory on him.

The Euphrates flows through Syria and Iraq, and the Nile is Egypt’s great river — that’s the starting point for the map the video shows at 18:05. The real Israel is that narrow strip of land to the left of the Star of David. For clarity, I’ve drawn red lines around it. The two smaller, blue-outlined areas within Israel’s lines are the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

The very idea that this small country would want to conquer Lebanon, Jordan and large parts of Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia is absurd. Israelis think so too, which is why not a single party with any realistic chance of a seat has this in its political programme. Not even Smotrich and Ben Gvir. At most, they want to annex Gaza and the West Bank, which is already considered fairly extreme in Israel.

Antisemitic sources

There is, incidentally, one more detail visible on the map. In the bottom-left corner it reads: Middle East Political and Economic Institute (MEPEI). This institute organises conferences in cooperation with the Iranian regime, published a book together with the Iranian embassy, and passes on messages from the regime.

MEPEI has, at the very least, close ties to a regime that has been promoting the Greater Israel conspiracy theory ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution. A Tehran reprint (1985) of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion contained a map, ‘The Dream of Zionism’, that bears a suspicious resemblance to NOS op 3’s map.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the most notorious antisemitic book in the world. The Protocols revolve entirely around an alleged, malicious Jewish hunger for power, and the conspiracy theories surrounding it were used to justify pogroms, the Holocaust and other persecutions of Jews. The book remains very popular in the Middle East.

On YouTube, the NOS thanks three of its own correspondents for reviewing the script and offering critical feedback. Daisy Mohr, David Poort and Lennard Swolfs know the Middle East well. That this antisemitism did not catch their attention, or did not lead them to intervene, raises the question of how the editorial process here actually went.

Looking away

How much longer do our administrators, politicians, watchdogs and media want to keep looking away from what’s happening here? NOS op 3 makes these videos for young people, but they are also often picked up by Schooltv and then built into teaching materials. The Expertisepunt Burgerschap (a citizenship-education resource centre) recommends them as enrichment material for lessons.

Last year we analysed dozens of videos and warned about gaps in the rules and in oversight. But the very same people who stand at the front of the commemorations on 4 May (Dutch Remembrance Day), and who spot the faintest whiff of antisemitism in their political opponents, seem determined not to know what’s going on here.

Young people hold the future. Young people are the future. Which future is the Netherlands choosing?

 

This article was originally published in Dutch.

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