by Wim Kortenoeven
Post-Holocaust guilt, once a brake on Jew-hatred, has been inverted: many of the descendants of the perpetrators and bystanders now project their unresolved shame onto the surviving Jews and their state. The "oppressed" Palestinian has replaced the oppressed Jew as the object of European moral narcissism. The Europeans, who never forgave the Jews for Auschwitz, are finally free of guilt.
What was once known as the "Country of Anne Frank," a nation that had learned from its own role in the Holocaust... and quietly delivered critical military aid during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, now leads the charge at the EU in Brussels to punish the Jewish state for the apparent crime of Jewish survival....
The Jetten government coalition... has now also taken the lead in pushing sanctions against Israel....
The Dutch pro-Israel parties -- Geert Wilders' PVV, BBB, JA21, ChristenUnie, and the Christian-Zionist SGP -- were deliberately excluded from the governing coalition.
The Jetten minority government therefore governs on parliamentary life support from the very parties that despise Israel.
The Dutch betrayal mirrors a broader European sickness. Mass immigration from Muslim countries has imported a virulent strain of antisemitism that now crosses all political boundaries. Politicians realize only the electoral ramifications: Jewish populations are dwindling and Muslim populations are exploding. Post-Holocaust guilt, once a brake on Jew-hatred, has been inverted: many of the descendants of the perpetrators and bystanders now project their unresolved shame onto the surviving Jews and their state. The "oppressed" Palestinian has replaced the oppressed Jew as the object of European moral narcissism. The Europeans, who never forgave the Jews for Auschwitz, are finally free of guilt.
Europe, which cannot, or does not wish to, protect its own Jewish communities from daily harassment and assault, now presumes to dictate to Jews where they may and may not live in the Land of Israel.
The hypocrisy and moral rot are bottomless. It was Europeans who exiled the Jews from their heritage and cradle of civilization. It was Europeans who subjected "their" Jews to more than a millennium of discrimination, expulsions, mass deportations, and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust. It was Europeans as well, who, at the Evian Conference of 1938, refused to open their doors to Jews fleeing Hitler. It was the British who issued the 1939 White Paper without a single protest from the other European democracies, and thereby slamming shut the gates of Palestine as a place of refuge as the extermination of the Jews began. It was Europeans (Polish, British, and Dutch) who devised the "Madagascar Plan" to deport Europe's Jews to a remote and uninhabitable island where they would surely perish.
Yet the Jews do not forget where they came from. Jews have lived in the Land of Israel continuously for millennia; and many of the descendants who had been forcibly dispersed, returned.
It is precisely this return that triggers such fury. Dutch authorities and many Dutch politicians now eagerly repeat the modern blood libel of "settler violence," -- all while ignoring the unrelenting terrorism committed by Arabs against the Jews of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and the rest of the Land of Israel for more than a century until today.
Established and thriving Jewish cities, towns, neighborhoods, and infrastructure exist in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, and the Golan. These "facts on the ground" will most certainly remain in the future and likely grow into a home for hundreds of thousands of Jews now planning to leave a Europe that is collapsing as we speak. Israel will celebrate its restoration in the Land of Israel long after the Netherlands will have been destroyed by the Muslim and African invasions it invited in, and the remnants of what was once a great and moral country have returned to their natural state: a swamp.
[T]he Netherlands -- governed by a conspicuously childless political elite that includes Prime Minister Rob Jetten and Deputy Prime Minister Dilan Yeşilgöz (VVD) -- stumbles along... effectively outsourcing its survival to a mass immigration that has apparently not come to Europe just for economic opportunity but to transform it fundamentally into its own image.
The Jews have returned home. The Dutch, it appears, are determined to leave theirs up for grabs. History will record the result.
The Dutch government's descent into open hostility toward Israel has recently accelerated further under the minority coalition of Rob Jetten that was sworn in on February 23, 2026. What was once known as the "Country of Anne Frank," a nation that had learned from its own role in the Holocaust[1], that faithfully represented Israel's and Jewish interests in the Soviet Union from 1967 to 1990, and quietly delivered critical military aid during the 1973 Yom Kippur War[2], now leads the charge at the EU in Brussels to punish the Jewish state for the apparent crime of Jewish survival and sovereignty in the Jewish homeland.
This is not policy. This is pathology.
The Jetten government coalition (consisting of the left-leaning liberal and anti-religious Democrats of D66, the Christian Democratic CDA, and the center-right conservative-liberal VVD) has now also taken the lead in pushing sanctions against Israel within the EU-Israel Association Agreement framework. It has championed measures targeting so-called "violent settlers" and their "excessive violence," parroting a narrative that a devastating June 2025 report "False Flags & Real Agendas: 'Settler Violence' — A Modern Blood Libel", by the Israeli group Regavim, dismantles as a fabricated, foreign-funded smear.
This harebrained Dutch obsession with Israel reeks of dark motivations, especially considering that the Netherlands is drowning in an escalating immigration crisis that is fueling civil unrest. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, asylum applications surged by 33% year-on-year, with Palestinian Arabs forming the single largest group at around 1,100 first-time claims, the top nationality for asylum in January and February 2026. This influx comes on top of already strained housing, welfare systems, and social cohesion, amid repeated anti-migration protests that have turned violent in places all over the Netherlands.
Not having been entirely successful on the EU track in punishing the Jewish state, however, the Jetten government recently announced unilateral Dutch sanctions: a trade ban on products from Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The Jetten government stated:
"The expansion of illegal settlements and excessive violence by settlers are causing an ever-deteriorating situation, in which a two-state solution is moving further and further out of reach." [...] "We want to prevent Dutch society from contributing, through our economic activities, to an unlawful occupation and the maintenance of illegal settlements."
The decision can best be read as "Kauft nicht bei Juden" ("Do not buy from Jews"), and its small print formally even prohibits Dutch passport holders living in Israel from trading with Jews that live in the wrong place -- according to the Dutch government, that is.[3]
This "political sentiment" has rapidly built up since the violent collapse of the already existing "two-state solution" on October 7, 2023, with hatred of the Jewish state and everything that it stands for metastasizing to almost every sector of Dutch society, even uniting ideological arch-enemies. Israeli Ambassador to the Netherlands Zvi Vapni recently captured that moment on X:
"A dangerous coalition formed in the Dutch parliament yesterday between the radical left and the antisemitic extreme right to pass motions against Israel. No moral qualms whatsoever! Shameful!".
The mask is off.
The ultimate logic of this position is to expel Jews. The Dutch government, by labeling every Jewish city, town, and village beyond the 1949 armistice lines "illegal," is demanding that more than 900,000 Jews be forced out of Judea and Samaria -- the cradle of Jewish civilization, where Abraham walked, David ruled, and the prophets spoke -- the Golan Heights, the Old City of Jerusalem, and the adjacent Jewish neighborhoods, and additionally the high ground that protects Israel's densely populated coastal plain from being attacked by long-time bellicose neighbors to its east.
Let that sink in.
Jerusalem was already the political and spiritual capital of the Jewish people for a thousand years when the territory that would become the Netherlands was still a swamp inhabited by nomadic and illiterate semi-Neanderthals. The current Dutch arrogance is not merely political, it is civilizational and existential -- and it reflects what is manifest in most of Europe.
The Netherlands' increasingly hostile government policy did not emerge in a vacuum. It rests on a parliamentary majority that is now structurally anti-Israel. The left -- made up of the Socialist Party, Pro (the GreenLeft-Labor merger), the Animal Party, the pro-EU party Volt, and the Muslim Denk party -- has since October 7, 2023 never missed an opportunity to relentlessly peddle the false accusation that the Jewish state is an "apartheid state" involved in "mass murder", "deliberate starvation", "genocide" and even "infanticide". This is Goebbels' tactic of 'repeat a lie until it becomes ambient noise', updated for the Dutch Parliament (and many Dutch media as willing accomplices). On the right of the political spectrum, the ever-more-fascist and antisemitic Forum voor Democratie (FVD) has boarded the same demonization train. In April 2026, as Ambassador Vapni noted, this unholy alliance passed motions against Israel with no moral hesitation.
The Dutch pro-Israel parties -- Geert Wilders' PVV, BBB, JA21, ChristenUnie, and the Christian-Zionist SGP -- were deliberately excluded from the governing coalition.[4]
The Jetten minority government therefore governs on parliamentary life support from the very parties that despise Israel.[5]
The VVD, once nominally pro-Israel, has proven itself an amoral, cynical power broker willing to sacrifice the Jewish state for coalition arithmetic. The result is guaranteed: an anti-Israel parliamentary majority that rubber-stamps the government's agenda.
The D66 party, largest in Parliament and the true engine of this government, has long specialized in Israel-hatred dressed as "human rights." Its prominent figures have moved seamlessly between parliament, government ministries and anti-Israel NGOs. Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, now Minister of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, exemplifies the type: a polished former diplomat who served at the Dutch Representative Office at the PLO/PA in Ramallah, long-time D66 foreign affairs spokesman, and relentless advocate who treats the Jewish state's right to defend itself and to exist in its ancestral heartland as negotiable at best. He has repeatedly pushed for recognition of a Palestinian state -- never mind that it would be committed to Israel's destruction -- settlement import bans, sanctions-style pressure on Israel, and criticism of its military operations, while downplaying or ignoring Hamas's role and the "diversion" of aid".
On May 28, 2026, Sjoerdsma had this to say on X:
"It was good to meet the Palestinian Representative @ammarhijazi1 today. We spoke about the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza, the increasing settler violence and expansions of illegal settlements in the West Bank. I outlined the Dutch humanitarian commitment in Gaza and the ban on trade in goods originating from the illegal Israeli settlements. The Netherlands values its good relationship with the Palestinian Authority and I look forward to continuing it."
I outlined the Dutch humanitarian commitment in Gaza and the ban on trade in goods originating from the illegal Israeli settlements. The Netherlands values its good relationship with the Palestinian Authority and I look forward to continuing it. 2/2
Regavim sent him this reply:
"What a pity you had no time left to discuss the thousands of PA-funded acts of terror against Israelis, the barbarous sexual violence committed by the PA's brothers in Gaza or the Pa's incessant violations of international law that the EU and the Dutch government support."
Other D66 politicians have, for years, populated the same ecosystem of malicious lawfare and delegitimization. One of the most prominent is a former government minister and former UN diplomat, Sigrid Kaag, a staunch anti-Israel activist with intimate ties to the Palestinian cause. Married to Anis al-Qaq, a Palestinian Arab who served as a deputy minister under Yasser Arafat, the couple wed in Jerusalem in 1993, and have been photographed with the terrorist leader as a family. Already in a 1996 interview, Kaag branded Benjamin Netanyahu a racist and Israeli settlers as "illegal colonists on confiscated land" -- never mind that the land was repeatedly promised to the Jews not only by biblical covenants, but also, in modern times, by the Balfour Declaration (1917), the San Remo Resolution (1920), and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922).
At the UN, as Gaza Humanitarian Coordinator and later Middle East Peace Process chief, Sigrid Kaag relentlessly condemned Israel, demanded open aid flows to Hamas, portrayed the Gaza crisis as Israel's deliberate creation, and pushed hard for Palestinian statehood -- cementing her role as a key figure in the international delegitimization and lawfare campaign against the Jewish state.
The CDA's trajectory is even more grotesque. As a party that still claims a Christian identity, it has abandoned any recognition of the moral and biblical rights of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland. Former CDA Minister of Justice and Prime Minister Dries van Agt, who committed suicide in 2024, spent his later years building "The Rights Forum," a vehicle for Israel-hatred that attracted other former CDA bigshots to its board. Van Agt's earlier record -- including his attempts to shield Adolf Eichmann's local henchmen from justice in the Netherlands and his repeated antisemitic slurs -- casts a long shadow over any claim of Christian conscience.
The VVD's collapse into expediency completes the picture. A party that once understood the strategic and moral case for Israel has apparently decided that throwing the Jewish state under the bus is a small price for remaining in power.
The Dutch betrayal mirrors a broader European sickness. Mass immigration from Muslim countries has imported a virulent strain of antisemitism that now crosses all political boundaries. Politicians realize only the electoral ramifications: Jewish populations are dwindling and Muslim populations are exploding. Post-Holocaust guilt, once a brake on Jew-hatred, has been inverted: many of the descendants of the perpetrators and bystanders now project their unresolved shame onto the surviving Jews and their state. The "oppressed" Palestinian has replaced the oppressed Jew as the object of European moral narcissism. The Europeans, who never forgave the Jews for Auschwitz, are finally free of guilt.
The European Union's recent sanctions against Israeli organizations and individuals under the banner of "settler violence" -- including the targeting of Regavim itself, the very NGO that exposed the data fraud behind the narrative -- represent the same moral inversion. As one observer put it, Europe is sanctioning the critic of its own documented acts.
Europe, which cannot, or does not wish to, protect its own Jewish communities from daily harassment and assault, now presumes to dictate to Jews where they may and may not live in the Land of Israel.
The hypocrisy and moral rot are bottomless. It was Europeans who exiled the Jews from their heritage and cradle of civilization. It was Europeans who subjected "their" Jews to more than a millennium of discrimination, expulsions, mass deportations, and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust. It was Europeans as well, who, at the Evian Conference of 1938, refused to open their doors to Jews fleeing Hitler. It was the British who issued the 1939 White Paper without a single protest from the other European democracies, and thereby slamming shut the gates of Palestine as a place of refuge as the extermination of the Jews began. It was Europeans (Polish, British, and Dutch) who devised the "Madagascar Plan" to deport Europe's Jews to a remote and uninhabitable island where they would surely perish.
After the Holocaust, when the surviving Jews -- against all odds -- returned en masse to rebuild their ancestral state, the same Europeans, now sanctimoniously lecturing the Jewish state about "international law," moved to ban them from the very territories that are central to Jewish history, identity and heritage. This campaign of exclusion is reinforced by semantic warfare. The territorial names "Palestine" (an invention of the Roman Empire designed to erase Judea) and "West Bank" (a Jordanian invention following its illegal occupation in 1948 of Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem) are still deliberate tools to sever the Jewish people from their origin and undermine their claim to their ancestral homeland.
Yet the Jews do not forget where they came from. Jews have lived in the Land of Israel continuously for millennia, and many of the descendants who had been forcibly dispersed, returned.
It is precisely this return that triggers such fury. Dutch authorities and many Dutch politicians now eagerly repeat the modern blood libel of "settler violence," -- all while ignoring the unrelenting terrorism committed by Arabs against the Jews of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and the rest of the Land of Israel for more than a century until today.
Even as their own policies and rhetoric actively fuel incitement and violence against the Jews in the Netherlands, they continue to delegitimize the Jews in Judea and Samaria. Jews were chased in the streets of Amsterdam, Jewish students experience exclusion, bullying and intimidation at Dutch universities, Jewish schools and synagogues have been repeatedly attacked, even with explosives. Mayors of major Dutch cities such as Amsterdam and Utrecht have taken to commemorating the "Naqba" with the passion of weeping crocodiles, shamelessly trampling the historical record of the Arab-Israeli conflict and placing the blame for everything but climate change squarely on the Jews. But the very authorities who piously claim to fight antisemitism are in reality among its chief enablers, fueling and participating in the very campaign that produces it.
Amanda Kluveld, a non-Jewish professor in Holocaust studies at the University of Maastricht, wrote:
"Words are offered, but protection is withheld. Definitions are endlessly debated, but violence goes unanswered. Jews are once again left vulnerable, isolated, and demonized -- this time in the heart of a democratic Europe that claims to have learned from its past."
Kluveld is a frequent target of threats, institutional intimidation and concrete violence, because of her brave, consistent, but lonely pro-Israeli and pro-Jewish positioning.
So, we arrive at the final, cynical logic of the current Dutch Israel policy. The government of the country of Anne Frank effectively insists on the expulsion of every last Jew from the heartland of Israel. So will the Dutch authorities one day come to arrest, disown, and deport the Jews of Israel's heartland the way they arrested, disowned, and deported the Jews of Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands during the Holocaust?[6] Of course not. The (Israeli) Jews have an army now.
Established and thriving Jewish cities, towns, neighborhoods, and infrastructure exist in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, and the Golan. These "facts on the ground" will most certainly remain in the future and likely grow into a home for hundreds of thousands of Jews now planning to leave a Europe that is collapsing as we speak. Israel will celebrate its restoration in the Land of Israel long after the Netherlands will have been destroyed by the Muslim and African invasions it invited in, and the remnants of what was once a great and moral country have returned to their natural state: a swamp.
It is the height of irony that the Jewish people of Israel maintain the developed world's highest fertility rate of nearly 3.0 children per woman, thereby securing their demographic future, while the Netherlands -- governed by a conspicuously childless political elite that includes Prime Minister Rob Jetten and Deputy Prime Minister Dilan Yeşilgöz (VVD) -- stumbles along at a catastrophic 1.4, effectively outsourcing its survival to a mass immigration that has apparently not come to Europe just for economic opportunity but to transform it fundamentally into its own image.
The Jews have returned home. The Dutch, it appears, are determined to leave theirs up for grabs. History will record the result.
Wim Kortenoeven, a political scientist, is a former member of the Dutch Parliament.
[1] Approximately 102,000 to 104,000 Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, out of a pre-war Jewish population of about 140,000 (roughly 73-75%). Dutch authorities and civil institutions showed a high degree of cooperation with the Nazi occupiers during the Holocaust, contributing significantly to the high death toll among Dutch Jews (around 102,000-104,000 out of ~140,000, or ~73-75%).
[2] This was unilaterally and secretly initiated by Minister of Defense Henk Vredeling (a former resistance fighter), who later said that he had once witnessed the Jews being taken away and that he could not let that happen again.
[3] "The decision concerns measures relating to the trade in goods originating from unlawful settlements in the territories occupied by Israel (the Palestinian territories and the Syrian Golan Heights). The decision includes both a customs measure (import ban), various market supervision measures (purchase ban, sales ban, and the prohibition on providing intermediary trade services), as well as a prohibition on circumventing these bans. The measures apply to every natural or legal person located in the Netherlands (including the public bodies of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba) and to all Dutch natural or legal persons outside the Netherlands."
[4] As of late May 2026, in the Dutch House of Representatives (150 seats total), the pro-Israel caucus consists of the PVV with 19 seats, Groep-Markuszower (led by Gidi Markuszower, which split from the PVV in January 2026) with 7 seats, BBB with 3 seats, JA21 with 9 seats, ChristenUnie (CU) with 3 seats, SGP with 3 seats and Mona Keijzer with one seat, for a combined total of 45 seats. The Pensioner Party 50+ with 2 seats is not counted here, but is not per se anti-Israel.
[5] As of late May 2026, in the Dutch House of Representatives (150 seats total), the anti-Israel caucus consists of the Party for the Animals (PvdD) with 3 seats, the Socialist Party (SP) with 3 seats, GL-PvdA (the GreenLeft–Labor merger, often referred to as Pro) with 20 seats, the Muslim DENK party with 3 seats, Pro-EU party Volt with one seat, and the fascist Forum for Democracy (FVD) with 7 seats, for a combined total of 37 seats.
[6] Dutch police played a major role in arrests, roundups, and guarding Jews. They assisted the Nazis in deportations to transit and detention camps like Westerbork and Amersfoort. While not all police officers were enthusiastic, many complied, and some received bounties for capturing hidden Jews. The Henneicke Column (Dutch bounty hunters) alone delivered thousands.
Wim Kortenoeven
Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22581/netherlands-betrayal-of-israel
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