I don’t like using horrors like the Holocaust as a source of wisdom. Many people like it when such misery has a positive edge, as is evident from the popularity of the hopeful books by Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger. It can’t all have been for nothing, can it? Yes. Genocide is for nothing. The death camps were not there to teach us lessons.
And yet I recently realized that I too had hoped that the Netherlands had learned more from the Holocaust. I had hoped that it would have led to a broad-based, sophisticated knowledge of anti-Semitic stereotypes. At least that.
Disappointed again, in this case when listening to SGP party leader Chris Stoffer on Radio 1. He was allowed to request a song on Monday, and chose the Israeli national anthem to “encourage” the Jews “in our own country.” “Let us please also give the Jewish people in the Netherlands a place in our country,” Stoffer said. “Jewish people are of course not identical to the state of Israel,” presenter Astrid Kersseboom tried. Stoffer persisted: “It will do these people a lot of good if this song is also heard in the Netherlands.”
How friendly is this? When Stoffer talks about ‘these people’, you… en masse makes fun of the Israeli national anthem, he is referring to all Dutch people with a Jewish background, whatever their connection with Israel. He assumes that they automatically identify with Israel’s national symbols, and thus makes them all Israelis who happen to live in the Netherlands. But, and this actually feels too basic to write down, Jewish Dutch people are just as Dutch as Stoffer. They are not representatives of the Israeli state. Stoffer seems to see Jews by definition as a kind of foreigners who are guests. And yes, with that (anti-Semitic) logic it is important to give them a place in our country.
This doesn’t come from an adolescent with an unfinished brain. This comes from a potential future ruling party leader who has been able to think about this for a long time. If, after decades of commemorative culture, he has not mastered these kinds of basic thinking steps and has not received any significant criticism from colleagues, there is reason for some national soulsearching.
President Trump also had a hand in it from American Jews equated with Israelis. He called Netanyahu “your prime minister,” and referred to “your ambassador” when speaking to American Jews about Ambassador David Friedman. This idea of Jews having ‘dual loyalty’ is one of them the oldest anti-Semitic tropesand in the US at least Trump was hit with it in national newspapers.
It is quite pedantic to complain about the low intellectual level of the Dutch public debate, but still: the Netherlands is the country of flat literalism. Only when someone literally chants ‘I hate Jews’ does it really stand out as anti-Semitism. (Not to mention general knowledge about racist or transphobic stereotypes – the bar is already on the ground on those topics.)
The poorly adjusted Dutch anti-Semitism radar has been noticeable for some time. De Volkskrant had a full-page anti-Semitic cartoon by Maurice de Hond printed, not out of deep hatred but because anti-Semitism was simply not recognized. During the corona pandemic, spiritual young women casually shared theories about the long tentacles of the World Economic Forum, unaware of any historical evil. And young people from FVD had to literal putting Nazi propaganda in their apps before it dawned on the general public that the party has an anti-Semitism problem: less literal expressions (such as their smear campaign against the ‘globalist elite of Soros’) were apparently too subtle.
Maybe we really haven’t learned anything. If the most basic knowledge about anti-Semitism does not stick, the slightly more abstract ‘lessons’ that you can learn from WWII – about exclusion, violence and complicity – are already too ambitious. Perhaps the majority of Dutch people have internalized that it was very bad to put as many Jews from Europe as possible on the train and gas them near the Polish town of Oswiecim. Never again. Well, that works out just fine, because ‘we’ are now giving ‘them’ a place. In our country’.
Eva Peek is a publicist
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