“I bid you farewell in sorrow.” With this sentence, in his typical archaic language, former Prime Minister Dries van Agt the letter from 2021 in which he terminates his membership of the CDA after more than fifty years. He does this with a “heavy heart”, he writes, but he finds it “incomprehensible that the CDA continues to turn its head away from the immense suffering inflicted on the Palestinian people”. For years he tried to change his party's course, but in vain. “I have lost hope that the CDA will choose the side of law, justice and solidarity with people in oppression.”
It was an exceptional moment in Dutch political history, a former prime minister turning his back on his own party. The termination of his CDA membership was the final part of a remarkable substantive metamorphosis that Van Agt made in the decades before. In 1976, at the CDA conference, he called Israel “a brother in trouble”, which fit in with the dominant thinking in Dutch politics and society at the time: small and endangered Israel, surrounded by hostile Arab countries.
As Prime Minister, Van Agt would continue that pro-Israel line. At the time, he had no knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at all, he said in the farewell interview with Jeroen Pauw, recorded in 2015 and broadcast on Friday. “I didn't know a thing about what the problem actually was, how it came about, how Israel behaves in the occupied territories.” In retrospect, he was “a stupid boy,” Van Agt thought.
Van Agt would only make a substantive change well after his active political career. People around him mention the pilgrimage he made to Israel with his wife Eugenie in 1999. Van Agt was taken by the Catholic Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem to a university in Bethlehem, on the occupied West Bank. The conversations there with Palestinian administrators and students touched him deeply, says Gerard Jonkman, chairman of The Rights Forum, founded by Van Agt. “He has always said that that trip was the great moment for him, when his eyes were opened. The stories about the impact of the occupation on the Palestinians deeply affected him.”
Van Agt delved further into the conflict and joined the Stop the Occupation foundation in 2002. In 2005 he published in de Volkskrant the opinion piece 'A cry for justice for the Palestinians', in which he opposed, among other things, Israel's construction of the separation wall after the series of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada. As a lawyer, Van Agt increasingly interpreted the conflict from the perspective of international law. “The main cause of the violence lies in the endless occupation, the creeping annexation, the tearing of Palestinian land into pieces and all the disaster that results from it,” Van Agt wrote.
In 2009, Van Agt was one of the founders of The Rights Forum, an organization that fights for human rights and an end to the Israeli occupation. The organization would become his life's work in the latter period. Why the great involvement in that one theme? In his farewell interview with Jeroen Pauw, he said that his Christian faith played a role. “For me, this is the Holy Land, that there is so much immense misery there, that cannot be true.” Jonkman recognized that. “The religious aspect was really there, as a fight against injustice. He believed that it would also be better for Jewish Israelis if the occupation were to end.”
His sharp criticism of Israel made Van Agt unpopular, and sometimes even hated, in Jewish circles. Many politicians also had difficulty with his attitude within his own CDA. When Van Agt accused Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen in 2007 of never wanting to condemn Israel and called him “Israel's second ambassador in the Netherlands”, Verhagen bounced back in a TV interview by saying that Van Agt was not strong enough on Hamas. convict. “I never hear Van Agt about that. About rockets or grenades being shot at Israel and the hundreds of injuries as a result. It's always just Israel.”
Despite the dissatisfaction, Van Agt would try for years to get his CDA to follow a different course. He had conversations with party leaders and MPs and was just as hopeful in 2013 when foreign spokesman Pieter Omtzigt formulated a “red line”. Israel was no longer allowed to build new settlements, otherwise sanctions could be imposed. But when Israel continued with this, the CDA did not dare to take that step. And that happened again and again and deeply disappointed Van Agt, Jonkman knows. “He saw that the CDA always condemned Israel, but never dared to draw consequences from it.”
In March 2017, Van Agt announced that he would not vote for the CDA for the first time in his life, because of its position on Israel. Party leader Sybrand Buma was still in contact with Van Agt at that time, but found the conversation about Israel difficult, he said on Friday. On 1. “I was never able to fully understand his turnaround. Van Agt had an enormous lightness, but a fierceness when it came to Israel. I was sorry that it was difficult to find the nuance.”
In the last two years of his life, Van Agt was no longer very active for The Rights Forum due to his fragile health. Gerard Jonkman does not know how consciously and intensively Van Agt has followed events in Israel and Gaza since October 7. “I always brought printed articles to Van Agt, because he did not use email. But we didn't do that anymore over the past six months, he really focused on his family during that period. His work for the company was done. It was good that way.”
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