Are we an anti-Semitic nation? Have the streets of Amsterdam become too dangerous to walk for the city’s Jews? No, but we do have a problem.
This is my first diary, after an incubation period of two years as a lurker. It is rather a long piece. My spelling may be a little to the Anglo side. Please, cut me some slack.
Update
Thank you for your kind comments.
Stan van Houcke, who is mentioned further down, asked me to clarify an important point. In his blogpost about rabbi Lody van de Kamp that I'm referring at, he did not mean to suggest that the rabbi 'had it coming to him'. He wanted to point out the dichotomy between the rabbi's call for help, while he is at the same time actively supporting Israeli policy in the Territories.(stanvanhoucke.blogspot.com)
A reader asks for some clarification of the Yiddish words in this diary. Maybe I've read to much Michael Chabon, or watched too many installments of The Nanny. Sorry. My bad.
A shul is a synagoge, a shtibl is a small synagogue, or a small shop. A one-room establishment.
Hasbara is the Hebrew word for Public Relations. It literally means explanation.
Iftar is the meal muslims eat after a day of fasting during Ramadan.
Mimouna is a traditional Moroccan Jewish feast after the Jewish Festival of Passover. During the first night you are free to eat bread and cakes and cookies again, Moroccan Jews used to invite their friends and neighbours over for drinks and food. It was introduced into the Netherlands by Moroccan Jews, who saw this old tradition as a pathway to mutual understanding with the Moroccan community.
This is the original post
If I read some foreign newspaper articles correctly, the Jewish community in the Netherlands is supposed to suffer from a large surge in anti-Semitism. According to a report in Israeli daily Ha’arets of Monday June 21, we can hardly go out the door anymore, as Jews, without being harassed or worse. Dutch police has to appoint ‘lokjoden’, police officers dressed up as orthodox Jews, to catch the culprits, who are threatening Jewish visitors to a local synagogue in the West part of town with severe bodily harm.
Something very disconcerting is indeed going on. Interestingly enough, this story ‘broke’ in the weekend after the Parliamentary Elections of Wednesday June 9. I say ‘broke’ in inverted comma’s, because it is in fact an old story. The harassment of visitors to that particular synagogue is nothing new. That story is in fact as old as 2003, when a group of Moroccan-Dutch school kids were caught playing soccer with some wraiths that were left at the local neighbourhood monument that commemorates the victims of World War II. Amsterdam suffered fiendishly during that war, and people, Jews and non-Jews alike, were all rather upset about the loutish behaviour of these kids.
From that moment on, awareness of what went on in the Western part of Amsterdam rose.
There is a lonely shul in this part of Amsterdam. It is a small stibl in an ordinary housing block, not much more than one large room, with a small kitchenette and a very charming terrace outside. Before moving to its present address, the shul was housed around the corner, in a small back room in a former school that had been converted to a community center.
I used to visit this shul occasionally when I still lived more or less in that part of Amsterdam. But since it follows the Orthodox prayer service and is affiliated with the Orthodox Jewish Community, for me, as a woman, there was not much happening. So I’ve not actually been there for a long time, but I know some people, and I always liked it for it’s very relaxed and open atmosphere.
The silly thing is that this shul is a lonely vanguard of Jewishness in an area where there were hardly any Jews. Traditionally, Jews lived downtown and across Amstel river in the eastern part of Amsterdam. Later on, from the sixties onward, they moved down south, and right now, most Jews actually live in neighbouring exurb of Amstelveen. The few people that strayed into the western neighbourhoods founded this small community shul, in a small street, smack down in the middle of an area where only migrants chose to live. The neighbourhood itself – De Baarsjes – has meanwhile gentrified somewhat. But in the areas more to the western edge of town, even more migrants settled. Some of these migrants are doing just fine, others are more or less turned away from Dutch society.
I could ponder the socio-economic reasons for some of it, but suffice to say for now that these people, many of which are second and third generation Moroccan-Dutch, are not part of Dutch society as we know it. They don’t follow our social codes which say you should leave everybody in peace. Be it the result of decades of wrong policy, be it the result of decades of them watching the anti-Semitic drivel in talk shows and game shows from Arabic networks subsidised with Saudi and Iranian money on their satellite dishes. Be it the intrinsic anti-Jewish message of Islam, be it that the Jews attacked are themselves unpleasant – I don’t know. Truth is: some Moroccan youth are acting out ever more aggressively, throwing stones at the shul’s visitors and beating them up.
The Jewish Network filmed some of these goings on with a hidden camera, and showed a rabbi, Lody van de Kamp, walking around with some boys. All were wearing kippot, yarmulka's, and they were spat at, verbally abused and attacked. Some guy even performed the Hitler greeting, (raised right arm). According to the regular visitors of the Amsterdam-West synagogue, this is weekly on the menu.
Some Jews who live in more relaxed areas cannot believe this is actually going down. I read a tweet to the head of Dutch Aipac which said: ‘I always walk to shul with my kids, wearing a kippa. Never encountered anything.’ It would not hold up in court as evidence, but I thought it was telling. This harrassment is a very local thing. It also seems to focus on a particularly small number of people, who fall victim.
Ever since 2004, the members and regular visitors of the synagogue have done their utmost to talk to the neighbourhood kids. As a reporter, I’ve been to many an shared Iftar meal, soccer tournament or Mimouna celebration, all in the name of mutual understanding and normalisation of relationships. At the top, that seems to have worked. The local leaders of the Moroccan community have formed relationships with the local Jewish leaders, and they get along fine. It’s at the bottom, on street level, where the problems lie. That’s why Ahmed Marcouch, a local Moroccan-Dutch leader who is a former local alderman and who has just entered Parliament for the Labour Party, suggested the policy of ‘lokjoden’. Undercover police officers, dressed up as orthodox Jews. The Minister of Justice told reporters on Wednesday June 23 that he was not opposed to the idea, and so it may be put into practice.
What is the political and social buzz surrounding these events?
This is complicated stuff, and one really needs some knowledge of Dutch society and the Jewish community to understand.
We’ve got our own Aipac and ADL. It’s called CIDI, Centrum voor Informatie en Documentatie Israel. As I said, this is hardly a new story, as CIDI knows very well. CIDI has for years doggedly made lists of anti-Semitic incidents, and tried to learn something about what is going on in the mind of the Dutch anti-Semite. Over the years, it has become clear that there is a direct relationship between things happening in the Israeli-Palestinian-Lebanese arena, and the occurrence of anti-Semitic incidents. According to CIDI, during the Gaza War of January 2009, the amount of incidents jumped up from a yearly average of about 90 incidents to about 80 in just four weeks. CIDI mainly counted attacks on property. Some windows of synagogues were broken, and one synagogue suffered an attack with a home made fire bomb. The data has led CIDI to believe that the attackers want to show their rage against Israel by attacking Jewish targets.
Classic anti-Semitism is rare in the Netherlands. It has never been in fashion to rally against Jews, and the post-war taboo on anti-Semitism has been very strong. The occasional religious nutcase has made an appearance, of course, but physical violence against Jewish individuals has hardly ever occurred at all in Dutch history. This makes these attacks so very disconcerting. CIDI’s conclusion is that except for the goings on at the tiny neo-nazi fringe, almost every single occurrence of the past years is motivated by migrant frustration. Some people are frustrated about the plight of the Palestinians, others are mainly bothered by their own situation. Children and youngsters who are educated enough about Dutch society know exactly which buttons to push to make the rest of society sit up and pay attention: anti-Semitism.
They got what they wanted: the debate centers completely around the Moroccan-Dutch guys bothering little old ladies going to pray, and all kinds of successful repression strategies to keep these boys quiet.
This current debate is party the result of the appropriation of the incidents by the right wing PVV Party of Geert Wilders. In Wilders world view, anti-Semitism is an offspring of Islamic ideology. I think that’s not correct. Anti-Semitism is no recent invention, not even in the Netherlands. Suggesting it was introduced to the country by Moroccan migrants, like PVV MP Fleur Agema has been heard saying last year, is a form of denial of the historic roots of anti-Semitism in Christian European society. But Jews and their experiences are being co-opted into his right wing anti-Muslim narrative. Wilders has a great love for the concept ‘Jewish-Christian heritage’, by which he means Western culture. In that way, he appropriates a Christianized and sanitized form of Judaism into his party’s ideological foundations.
On the other side of the political spectrum, on the left, the anti-Semitism that is going on today on the streets of Amsterdam is not taken at face value. Left wing commentators are saying that the anti-Semitism described is either a Wilderian construct, or a particularly distasteful stab at some fresh Hasbara, Israel Public Relations. They reckon that the media feeds by CIDI are no more then clever attempts to deflect attention from Israeli atrocities. Whenever Israel misbehaves, they say, the Hasbara machine starts spinning, and if that does not work, like in the case of the Gaza Flotilla earlier this June, CIDI plays the trump card of some anti-Semitic incident.
These commentators like to add that Dutch Jews are enslaved by their own victimization, that they wallow in it and can not stop their addiction to being the wronged party. Jews can not see the conflict in the Middle East in other terms than Israeli and eternal Jewish victimhood, according to these pundits. Any story that gives the Jewish victimisation more leverage, i.e. anti-Semitic attacks, is gladly used to pursue the point.
These critics may well be partly right. I don’t know. My beef with them is that they don’t take the actual harassment of Jews – because they are Jews – seriously. I do believe one can be a harsh critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, (I myself am such a critic), without wanting to somehow punish Dutch Jews for Israeli actions. That is ridiculous.
One pundit (Stan van Houcke) wrote on his blog that rabbi Van de Kamp – the rabbi in the television news item that got the Hitler salute – had the harassment coming to him, because he had at previous occasions refused to distance himself from Israeli military policy in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.
That is completely crazy. It should not matter whether I am pro or against what-not, pro-Cambodia or anti-Laos, pro-Uruguay or anti-Paraguay, pro-Pepsi or anti-Coke – I want to be able to walk the streets in peace.
We are Dutch, we live here. I would like to claim the right to be protected by Dutch law and Dutch society, as a Dutch citizen. Or as a foreigner who resides here. This may not even have anything to do with being a Jew, this is a civil rights issue. The left-wing-set seem to be unaware of this. Suppose I had an Israeli passport, (which I don’t), and I was going back to this shul again on Shabbos morning; would the abuse be justified?
One more thing: the ever tedious subject of internal politics within the Jewish community or, in this case, the orthodox Jewish community. The organised Jewish community, (the people who actually still give a shit about the life style), is very small. The rabbi who is at the forefront of this last harassment story, dayan (judge) Raphael Evers, is a prominent figure in these religious circles. His mother goes to pray in the synagogue, and his sons regularly perform services. And as it happens with prominent figures: some people like you, others despise you, other others think you are a complete fool. Some people within the orthodox community may take this as leverage in their internal political spiels. They may not like the media to have focused the world’s attention yet again on this man, and his family.
So there we are, in a situation where some actual Jews suffer from aggressive behaviour and harassment, while a large group of talking heads stands around and uses the uproar for their own political purpose. I don’t like this, because I think the backlash could be severe. And it would hurt two groups that are vulnerable. First of all the people who attend the shul, some of whom are close to my heart. I wish for them to have a safe journey, always. They are not making this up, they do not wallow in their victimhood, they are for sure not anti-Islam, they are just like anybody else and want to visit their house of prayer in peace. The second group are these Moroccan-Dutch fucks, whose hearts are filled with hatred of people that mean them no harm. How are we ever going to really deal with them? Using more repression is probably not going to work. So, then what?