Maastricht University in the Netherlands is a sought-after international academic destination for being one of the few universities in Europe with English-language curricula. Since October 7, however, Jewish students from around the world have been dealing with hostile antisemitism in and with a governing body that mostly looks the other way.
On March 12, 2025, I attended a talk by Syrian-Lebanese-German peace activist Rawan Osman at Maastricht University.
It was an event meant to foster dialogue, in which there was no representative of the State of Israel and no Israelis taking the microphone. Instead, a female Syrian peace activist spoke, along with an audience that was a constellation of students, professors, and members of the Jewish community, including the president of the Jewish Community of Maastricht and his wife.
What was intended as a civil event turned into a horror scene reminiscent of the darkest chapters of European history.
The Free Palestine Maastricht group had requested permission to protest the event from the local authorities. That permission was denied. Undeterred, they decided to go ahead with their plans anyway. What followed was an unlawful and violent siege.
This group surrounded the building, shouting slogans like “Intifada,” “From the river to the sea,” and labeling us fascists, baby killers, genocidaires, and worse.
They did not protest; they hunted. They did not engage in discourse; they sought to intimidate, isolate, and humiliate. They encircled the Jews with all the psychological terror of a pogrom, banging on the walls, doors, and windows, almost to the point of shattering, trying to get in. They did so with their faces covered with keffiyehs, masks, and, ironically, rainbow-dyed hair.
When I pulled out an Israeli flag, the police immediately pulled me aside, so as “not to provoke the rabid mob.” I was pushed, insulted, and threatened. By the way, I am not Israeli, and I had no role in organizing the event. My only sin was being Jewish in a building filled with Jews.
The security forces chose to shut down the entire event, and five patrol cars arrived, not to arrest the illegal demonstrators, not to enforce the law, but to escort us out of the building like criminals, while the actual aggressors remained untouched. The Netherlands has, once again, failed in its obligation to protect the most persecuted minority in history.
This is not an isolated incident. After the Rawan Osman incident and the indifference, pathetic excuses, and absolute absence of apologies or outreach to the Jewish community, Maastricht University decided to cancel a talk with Shabbos Kestenbaum, an American activist known for leading a lawsuit against Harvard University for failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from antisemitic harassment and discrimination. This time, the Jewish community and I were directly involved in organizing the event.
Yet, Maastricht University had the chutzpah to cancel the talk to make way for another pro-Palestinian event, promoted by the same group that previously broke the laws to round up Jews inside a building.
SINCE OCTOBER 7, 2023, antisemitism has surged across Western campuses. But Maastricht University is special. This is the latest iteration of a complicit pioneering of a new form of institutionalized antisemitism in Europe.
In the weeks following the Hamas massacre, Maastricht posted a new job position on LinkedIn: a PhD researcher on “Palestine Solidarity.” The description of the position entailed a load of ridiculous, contradictory nonsense, blaming Israel for the war in Gaza and equating Palestinian terrorism with liberation, queerness, decolonization, the “Global South,” and Black Lives Matter. It called for active support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, proscribed for its inherent antisemitism.
The position offered a juicy €3,539 monthly salary – taxpayer-funded – and a teaching opportunity within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. This is not a research topic; it’s an ideological mission that undermines the values of academia disguised as scholarship.
We are witnessing a 1930s-like situation where Jews living in the Netherlands are financing their own defamation, discrimination, and institutionalized antisemitism.
This identitarian moral delusion, born in elite institutions like Columbia and now metastasizing through Europe, has inculcated generations of students and professors to an atrocious moral relativism about who is the attacker and who is the defender.
These institutions have substituted science with tribal sloganeering. They denounce genocide while supporting the murder of all Jews. They claim to defend LGBTQ+ rights while championing ideologies that would execute gay people in public. They weep for the oppressed while inviting the oppressors to speak on campus.
No campus outrage over ISIS, Uyghurs, hanging dissidents, child torture; only against Jews and Israel
There are no protests for the Uyghurs in Chinese concentration camps. No outrage over the rape of Yazidi women by the Islamic State. No calls for boycotts against regimes that hang dissidents, crush free speech, and torture children. But when it comes to Jews and Israel, they become fearless revolutionaries.
If, in protest of China’s atrocities against its Muslim minority, student groups harassed Chinese students and forced events featuring Chinese speakers to be shut down, that would be rightly condemned as insane. But replace “Chinese” with “Jewish” or “Israeli,” and it becomes “resistance.”
The Netherlands formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which recognizes demonizing and delegitimizing Israel as a form of antisemitism. Maastricht University’s behavior is in clear violation of this definition and, thus, a direct breach of the Dutch government’s own standards.
But there have been neither consequences nor accountability.
What happened at Columbia University is happening in Europe. Maastricht is not the outlier. It is the European Columbia, an institution that has traded enlightenment for tribalism, critical thinking for fashionable activism, and universal human rights for ideological purges.
Europe is, once again, failing the Jews.
The writer is a scholar specializing in communications and politics, with a focus on political antisemitism. He has lectured across Europe and provided briefings on antisemitism to Spain’s Justice Ministry and the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance.