On September 22 the Netherlands began enforcing a decree that makes it a crime, punishable by up to six years in prison, to buy or sell Israeli goods produced beyond the 1967 armistice line. Customs officers at Schiphol Airport are reportedly searching luggage from Tel Aviv for wine and dates. The government says it is meeting its obligations under international law.
No Dutch decree threatens prison for a bottle of Turkish wine from occupied Northern Cyprus, Moroccan phosphate from Western Sahara, or a cotton shirt from Xinjiang. China, Turkey, Morocco, and many other governments with disputed territory can sell freely in Amsterdam. Of all the countries in the world, the Netherlands wrote a criminal statute for exactly one, and it is the Jewish state.
From most European countries that would be ordinary bias or hypocrisy. From the Netherlands, it is something else. To explain why, we are compelled to share our own families' experience in the country we grew up in, and about what Anne Frank's diary left out.
Many know the Dutch from cheese, herring and Anne Frank. Two of those are accurate. The diary gave the world an image of ordinary Dutch people risking everything to hide a Jewish family. That story is true, but as a portrait of the nation it is almost exactly backwards. The helpers were real, but they were rare. The diary turned these singular saviors into the whole country, and the Dutch were happy to let that be the narrative.
Here is the rest. The Dutch Nazi party had over 75,000 active members during World War 2, several times the few tens of thousands who ever joined the resistance. After the war, 425,000 Dutch individuals were accused of active collaboration with the Nazis, which is nearly 5% of the wartime population.
The machinery of persecution in the Netherlands was Dutch
The Germans did not even bother with a military administration. Unlike France or Belgium, the Netherlands got a civilian one, and the machinery of persecution was Dutch. The municipal registry handed over every Jewish address. Local police carried out the raids. The Amsterdam tram company drove Jews to the collection points and billed the occupier for the fare. In 1943, Dutch civilians formed a unit to collect a German bounty for every Jew in hiding they turned in. The Frank family was discovered, likely on a Dutch tip, and sent through that machinery to Westerbork and then east.
Of about 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, roughly 102,000 were murdered, three in four, the highest rate in Western Europe. Dutch authorities often implemented the anti-Jewish orders with zeal. Fortunately for our families, that was not the whole population: thousands of Dutch citizens disobeyed their authorities and risked their lives for their Jewish neighbors. But they were the exception. Survivors, our grandparents among them, came home to find neighbors occupying their houses, and in 1946 the city sent them back tax bills covering the years they had spent in concentration camps. Amsterdam's tram company was still chasing the German government in 1947 for payment on its final deportation run. The Dutch government did not apologize for the treatment of its Jews until 2020.
None of this obliges the Dutch to admire Israel's government or policies towards the Palestinians, and we don't doubt that the images from the war in Gaza produced real revulsion. But something else happened underneath it. The Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex once put it in a sentence: the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. If the Jewish state can be cast as the perpetrator of the age, then the descendants of the people it was built for are owed nothing, and the tax bills and the tram fares and the bounties are finally paid off. The Dutch found a way to liberate themselves from feeling guilty.
When NOS, the Dutch public broadcaster, began describing Israel's conduct as "genocidal violence," following a report about Gazan casualties that turned out to be incorrect, leaked emails published online showed the editor-in-chief applauding the decision and justifying it by the lack of complaint emails it received. True, there aren't many Dutch Jews left to write them.
Dutch Jews hunted
You can see how liberated the Dutch feel from their history in how the country now treats the Jews who still live there. In March 2024 the Netherlands opened its National Holocaust Museum, twenty years behind schedule, partly because residents petitioned to keep such memorials out of their streets. At the opening, broadcast live, a survivor named Rudie Cortissos fixed a mezuzah to the doorpost with his great-granddaughter beside him. A few dozen feet away, with the mayor's permission, a crowd whistled, shouted and hurled slurs about “Zionists” and Jews.
On the first anniversary of October 7, Jews and their supporters gathered on the main square in Amsterdam to mourn the victims while protesters were again permitted to station themselves nearby, assaulting and harassing dozens on their way in. A month later, Israeli soccer fans and Dutch Jews were hunted through the same streets by hundreds of young men who had planned the night in group chats. They called it a Jodenjacht, a “Jew hunt”. That was their own word for it.
Under international pressure, prosecutors moved. Courts gave the men they caught sentences measured in weeks; the heaviest was six months, and several were cut on appeal. Through Dutch media, however, a false narrative was promoted that put the blame on the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.
Now put the numbers side by side. Beating a Jew on an Amsterdam street: six months. A Dutch Jew bringing back wine from the wrong side of a line: six years. That is the moral ranking the Netherlands has written into law, for Israel alone, and it is the same country that delivered over three quarters of its Jews to the Germans and then billed the survivors for taxes.
None of this is the 1940s, and we will not pretend it is. It is something smaller and, to Dutch Jews, quite familiar: a country that has decided its history entitles it to judge rather than obliges it to remember. Shame is not a punishment. It is what a decent country feels when it looks at its own record. The Dutch did look. Then they hid behind a young Jewish girl's diary and those rare exceptions to the Dutch record of shameful compliance, and decided to move on.
Richard Priem and David de Bruijn grew up in Amsterdam and The Hague respectively and now live in the United States. Richard is the CEO of the Community Security Service, a nonprofit that works to secure the American Jewish community. David is Senior Lecturer at Auburn University.