Dutch Ex-Premier Uses Holocaust Rhetoric To Describe Israeli Crackdown
Image by Wikimedia Commons
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A leader of Dutch Jews criticized a former prime minister of the Netherlands for using a word that is widely associated with the Holocaust to describe arrests by Israel of Palestinians.
Ex-premier Dries van Agt, a pro-Palestinian activist who in 2012 said Jews should have “gotten a piece of land in Germany” instead of Israel because “World War II had nothing to do with the Middle East,” used the word “razzia” on Twitter to describe the arrests of terror suspects last week.
No one died in the arrests.
Originating in Arabic, the word means invasion or raid. But according to Ronnie Eisenmann, a former leader of the Jewish Community of Amsterdam and current chairman of the pro-Israel Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, “it is mostly used in the Nazi context” in Dutch.
According to the ENSIE Dutch-language encyclopedia, “the word ‘razzia’ in the Netherlands is mostly used in connection with the time of the German occupation.”
Eisenmann called Van Agt’s use of the term “unacceptable and inappropriate,” adding that Dutch Jews “are used to this by now from Van Agt.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
