Well, almost never again
In Amsterdam, we are constantly reminded to heed the lessons of the Holocaust, we cannot be allowed to forget, to look away. Never again, right?
I live in the historical Jewish Quarter (Jodenbuurt) of Amsterdam. A few steps away in the Nieuwe Uilenbergerstraat is the Uilenberger Schul, a small but beautifully preserved Roccoco gem dating from 1766. A block to the south is the massive, austere Portuguese Synagogue (1670-75), once the largest synagogue in the world. Across the street is the Great Ashkenazi Synagogue (1670-71), which now houses the Jewish Museum. A few blocks further up on Plantage Middenlaan is the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater which was used as collection point for deportations and is now a Holocaust memorial. Across town is the Anne Frank House, where the young girl’s Jewish family went into hiding and where she wrote her world-famous diary. The secret annex where the family lived is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Amsterdam, attracting some 1.2 million visitors a year.
In additional to these and other historical sites, there are various more recent memorials: the Auschwitz Memorial (nooit meer, “never again”) in the nearby Wertheim Park, (Jan Wolkers, 1992), In 2021 the Holocaust Names Memorial, designed by celebrity architect Daniel Liebeskind, was unveiled just up the street from the Portuguese Synagogue. That year another small monument was unveiled at one of the entrances to the Vondelpark, which, according to its creator, Niels van Deuren, was inspired by the words of King Willem-Alexander during the customary address by the monarch on Amsterdam’s Dam Square on May 4 (National Remembrance Day) the previous year in which he observed “Sobibor began in the Vondelpark. With a sign, ‘Forbidden for Jews’”. The title of the memorial is hence Sobibor – Wat doe jij (“Sobibor - What would you do?”) and consists of a mirror, inviting onlookers to gaze into their own souls, so to speak.
In the Jewish Quarter, as well as other 19th and 20th Century neighborhoods, you will also find numerous struikelstenen, (German, Stolpersteine), small brass plaques embedded in the sidewalks in front of houses where Holocaust victims had lived. They display the name, birthday, year of deportation, and the concentration camp in which they were killed. (The concept was created by the German visual artist Gunter Demnig, and there are now more than one hundred thousand of these simple sidewalk memorials in the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic.)
I have focused on Holocaust memorials in Amsterdam because I live surrounded by them, but there was a large Jewish population throughout the Netherlands and there are of course memorials in many locations, perhaps the most notable of which is the former Nazi deportation camp, Camp Westerbork.
The process of what one might call the institutionalization of Holocaust remembrance continues. On March 10, another museum dedicated to this tragic history was opened in Amsterdam, the National Holocaust Museum, directly across the street from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, about two blocks east of the Portuguese Synagogue. And therein lies a tale.
On that day, a Sunday, I left the house around 11am and encountered a crowd gathering on the Waterlooplein facing the Portuguese Synagogue on the other side of the Daniel Meyerplein, where the opening ceremony for the new museum was about to take place. The guest of honor was Israel’s President Herzog, who was photographed in late 2023 inscribing an artillery shell,“I trust in you”, and who also declared “there are no innocents” in Gaza. Herzog’s statements were included in the indictment filed at the International Court of Justice on 29 December 2023 by South Africa, ‘Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People’. The judges subsequently accepted the evidence and included Herzog’s “genocidal incitement” in their ruling. (“Israeli president accused of genocidal incitement will attend opening of Dutch Holocaust Museum”, 7 March 2024, The Rights Forum)
There were several small but noisy demonstrations that day, another one on the Plantage Middenlaan near the entrance the new museum, with loud chants intended let President Herzog know that his presence was not welcome. In short video clips taken outside the Synagogue as the guests of honor were leaving, one can hear the ruckus in the background. President Herzog would have heard the many expressions of anger and rage at his presence, but he clearly did not get the message.
In commentaries that followed, various individuals insisted that the chants that day were “antisemitic”. They were not. I was there, I didn’t hear a single word that could be categorized as “antisemitic”. They were anti-Zionist. It was reported that President Herzog had been invited the previous summer, before the events of 7 October, but apparently it did not occur to management of the museum at any point between that date and 10 March that perhaps the leader of a country charged with “genocide incitement” was not the most appropriate guest of honor for the opening of a museum dedicated to the Holocaust. Had he not been invited, there would have been no demonstrations, of that we can be certain.
Subsequently in May we had a brief outburst of student protests at several universities, including a short-lived encampment at the University of Amsterdam. There have been — and continue to be — numerous other small protests by activists. A few parliamentarians, mostly of Turkish or Moroccan background, speak out. But the overwhelming impression one gets is indifference. There has been nothing like the vast public outcry, the wave of indignation and “cancelling”, that we saw in the aftermath of the special military operation Russia launched in Ukraine in February 2022.
Yesterday, 7 October, there were a number of “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations planned at various train stations around the country. These activities were characterized as “facilitating antisemitism” by public figures such as Dilan Yeşilgöz, the current leader of the VVD, the center-right party formerly led by Mark Rutte, now secretary-general of NATO. The Zionist settler-colony, we are led believe, was and remains the victim of 7 October. Only it and its sympathizers should have been allowed to mark the day. Israeli victimhood always comes first.
I will stop here. In a subsequent post I will try to answer: Why this profound and disturbing cognitive dissonance?
For all the intense emotional content, the anti-semitism industry is remarkably vacant. There's no connection to principles and no lessons to be learned. It's collection of empty signifiers and glittering generalities.
I find 'organized' religions to be clubs (at best); they have dues, rules, and instill in their members the idea that they are better than people in other clubs, or people not in any club. In fact, most religions actively recruit. No different than gangs, they often seek retribution for wrongs on a group basis. Much badness can be done with the cloak of a religious organization to hide behind. On it goes.