Red Line demonstration (October 5, 2025, in Amsterdam). Photo: WeLikeSharing CC BY 4.0.

Recruitment for the next Red Line demonstration is in full swing, and left-wing politicians and NGOs are rallying behind it. Yet they are silent about the actions of Hamas and even give a platform to Hamas-linked organisations and speakers. Do facts no longer matter? Do the Israeli and Palestinian victims of Hamas actually matter any more? Where does criticism of Israel end and antisemitic mob behaviour begin?

On Sunday 8 November 2026 there will be another Red Line demonstration (a recurring mass protest calling on the Dutch government to draw a ‘red line’ on Israel). The organisers’ website carries the slogan: no money for genocide. So everyone who marches on Sunday will be marching for a lie. Because there is no genocide in Gaza, as military experts have already made clear. See also the excellently argued case made by the historians Norman J.W. Goda and Jeffrey Herf in The Washington Post. More importantly, the ICJ found no evidence of genocide.

The Red Line marchers will object that there most certainly is a genocide. How do they know? Very simple: everyone around them says so, so it must be true. As Agnès Callamard, the head of Amnesty International, noted with satisfaction back in December 2024: a consensus is emerging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. And once there is consensus, who still asks about facts?

But the ‘reports’ brandished by activist politicians, NGOs, media and even academics always follow the same recipe: stretch the definition of genocide, ignore evidence to the contrary, and fabricate evidence. They count on the public’s gullibility, and unfortunately it works. Just look at the massive turnout at previous Red Line demonstrations.

Don’t mention Hamas

One hallmark of these ‘genocide reports’ is that they play down the role of Hamas. The UN report, for instance, left out the fact that Hamas fights from a tunnel network hundreds of kilometres long. Nor do these reports mention the statements by Hamas leaders themselves about their refusal to let civilians shelter in those tunnels — the human shield strategy.

Anyone who visits the Red Line website sees the same pattern. Hamas does not seem to exist. And if Hamas does not exist, then Israel is fighting innocent civilians and is ‘therefore’ committing genocide. The great silence about Hamas is all the stranger given how many of the Red Line’s speakers and organisers carry a distinct whiff of Hamas.

The Red Line reeks of Hamas

The researchers Carel Brendel and Kees Broer have mapped the contacts of the Red Line organisations, and ties to Hamas and other questionable actions and statements have been documented elsewhere too — see the links. The initiators include dubious groups such as the Palestijnse Gemeenschap Nederland (Palestinian Community Netherlands, PGNL), BDS Nederland and Plant een olijfboom (Plant an Olive Tree).

To prove that this really is not about Jew-haters, the tiny groups Een Ander Joods Geluid (A Different Jewish Voice) and Erev Rav are, as usual, allowed to take part. There is also a cohort of anti-Israel NGOs still trading on their former good reputation, such as Amnesty International, Oxfam Novib, PAX and Save the Children. Other initiators are anti-Israel activists such as Artsen voor Gaza (Doctors for Gaza), Dutch Scholars for Palestine, The Rights Forum, the Rotterdam Palestina Coalitie (Rotterdam Palestine Coalition) and the flotilla fanatics of Global Sumud.

Speaking for PGNL on Sunday is Medhat Alamawi, whose organisation Utrecht4Palestine disrupted a Utrecht city council meeting in July 2025 and blocked the way of Mayor Sharon Dijksma. Speaking for BDS is Omar Barghouti, who openly states that BDS seeks the end of Israel as a Jewish state. The moderator is anti-Israel activist Hasna El Maroudi, while the writer Benjamin Moser and former Labour (PvdA) leader Lilianne Ploumen represent the Jewish and the left-wing anti-Israel voice respectively.

Bizarre activism

The odd thing about demonstrations like this is how inconsistent the activists are. The Palestinians in Gaza are ruthlessly oppressed by Hamas, so what are all these Hamas-linked organisations and speakers doing at the Red Line demonstration? Why does the Red Line give a platform to the oppressors of the very people the demonstration claims to stand up for?

In fact, the organisers do not seem to care about the oppressed Palestinians at all. And that is not unusual. In recent years countless celebrities have joined the anti-Israel movement, and their lack of substantive arguments is directly proportional to their fanaticism. The object of their devotion seems to be not the Palestinian cause, but activism itself.

Text tweet: “It’s very much the fashion to be anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian,” says Krant. “And the people who are shouting the loudest for a boycott often have no idea what’s really going on.”

Greta Thunberg, for example, switched from climate activism to anti-Israel activism shortly after 7 October 2023, with the slogan: “No climate justice on occupied lands!” These days the climate hardly seems to interest her at all. And the school pupils’ protests in France in October 2026 also quickly degenerated into violent riots under the Palestinian flag.

Gaza has gradually come to stand for all the injustice in the world, which is bizarre given the relatively limited scale of this conflict. The far bloodier wars, famines and ethnic cleansing in Sudan, Afghanistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ethiopia, Yemen and Ukraine seem to pale into insignificance next to Gaza. And that is not down to any special affection for Palestinians, because the oppression of Palestinians in Syria or Lebanon barely attracts any attention.

Evidently, this is about Israel.

Canary in the coal mine

In 2016 the EO (a Dutch Christian public broadcaster) aired a series on antisemitism in Europe: De kanarie in de kolenmijn (The Canary in the Coal Mine). The image of the canary in the coal mine — the first to die when dangerous gases are released — has often been applied to Jews. The theory is that a rise in antisemitism signals danger for society as a whole. That theory certainly has merit, but in fact it goes deeper still: whenever a sick way of thinking gained the upper hand, it often expressed itself most strongly against Jews.

In the religious wars between Christianity and Islam, the Jews were the first to be slaughtered. When the excesses of capitalism provoked resistance, the Jews became the capitalists par excellence. Was there fear of a communist revolution? Then the Jews were the communists. Whenever a scapegoat was needed, the Jews had the matching label slapped on them. And since 1948, Israel has increasingly been cast in this role.

What is the dominant sick way of thinking today? Above all, postmodernism and identity politics run amok. Postmodernism is a farewell to facts. ‘Everyone has their own truth.’ It is essentially anti-Western and constantly draws attention to the dark chapters of our history, without appreciating the good that Western culture has brought.

In this line of thinking, the West’s original sin is colonialism, and given the Jews’ age-old role as scapegoat, it is perhaps not surprising that Israel has been turned into the symbol of colonialism. Jewish Israelis — most of whom are descended from refugees from the Islamic world — have been branded white perpetrators, and the Palestinians indigenous victims.

Anti-Zionism

Israel’s opponents are hypersensitive to accusations of antisemitism, because the crimes of the Nazis still cast their shadow over the present. The Holocaust was such a crushing manifestation of evil that, even more than eighty years later, few people dared to play it down. Although that taboo now seems to be breaking down where Gaza is concerned.

But for a long time the Holocaust was the yardstick by which good and evil were measured, and no one disputed that the Jews of Europe had been hit hardest by it. Paradoxically, that memory probably gave Western Jews temporary protection against open antisemitism.

But it did not change the old mechanism. It was primarily the revulsion at the Holocaust that forced Jew-hatred into hiding for a few decades and made it present itself in a different guise. As the Dutch writer Gerard Reve wrote more than fifty years ago: ‘Antisemitism is very much in fashion again. Nowadays it goes by the demure name of “anti-Zionism”.’ It is shocking that this quote dates from as long ago as 1971. Anyone who thinks anti-Zionism only became popular after 7 October 2023 has missed a great deal.

Left-wing hatred of Israel

Such a person has missed, among other things, the Soviet propaganda against Israel. For the collection Kroniek van het Zionisme (Chronicle of Zionism), I dug into the newspaper archives to find out what the five largest Dutch national newspapers wrote about Zionism fifty years ago. Those archives showed how the Soviet Union campaigned against Israel by casting suspicion on Zionism.

Text tweet: My contribution to ‘Chronicle of Zionism’. What did @nrc @volkskrant @trouw @telegraaf and @ADnl write about Zionism 50 years ago?🤔 And what are they writing now?🧐 The Soviet propaganda that people were so repulsed by back then is now mainstream.💔

All of today’s accusations — colonialism, racism, apartheid — were already central to Soviet propaganda back then, and sadly they struck a chord with the useful idiots in the West. When the Soviet-Arab bloc managed to push through a UN resolution in 1975 branding Zionism a form of racism, almost the entire Dutch House of Representatives condemned this outrageous accusation. The only exception? The radical-left CPN and PSP (the Communist Party of the Netherlands and the Pacifist Socialist Party), which later merged into GroenLinks (GreenLeft).

It is no wonder that PRO — the merged party of Labour (PvdA) and GroenLinks — is so susceptible to that old Soviet rhetoric. GroenLinks has taken control there, and anyone who was paying attention has long known what this party stands for. In 2019 a GroenLinks party congress passed a motion that whitewashed BDS, even though it was already clear then what kind of movement BDS is and what its goal is: the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.

The moral bankruptcy of the Red Line

The alliance between the radical left and Islamists, whose violent excesses we saw in France in October 2026, invariably appeals to empathy. But that empathy is selective and essentially suicidal. Islamists cleverly exploit this Western weakness; for years Hamas has been instructing its supporters on which rhetoric to use to win over the West and turn it against Israel. That rhetoric will no doubt be heard from the stage at the Red Line demonstration too.

Do not expect well-founded criticism of Israel; expect Israeli mistakes blown up to grotesque proportions, topped off with wild, unfounded accusations. Do not expect anyone to spare a single word for the threat posed by Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah or the Houthis, all of whom openly declare that they are bent on destroying Israel. It is more likely that the destruction of Israel will be advocated, under the guise of justice.

The Red Line website features a large photo of a Red Line demonstration. Front and centre is a huge banner reading ‘stop genocide’, and in the crowd someone is holding up a sign that says: ‘Stop Genocide Holocaust in Gaza’. If Red Line marchers bothered to inform themselves, they would know that these are not only lies, but that they even count as antisemitism under the IHRA definition, which was adopted by the Netherlands in 2018.

Anyone who marches with the Red Line is marching in step with Hamas.

This article was originally published in Dutch.

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