Opinion: ‘Standing up against Israel’s crimes is not the same as endorsing violence against Jews’

Last Monday, a group of students set up an encampment at the campus of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The students demanded that the Amsterdam university reveal and break its ties with Israeli institutions. Reasonable demands for those who see them in the inescapable context of the decades-long oppression of the Palestinians; an oppression characterized by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch as apartheid.

In recent months, more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank and many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced by violence. A decimated number of hostages continue to be held by Hamas and other groups in Gaza and are being sacrificed by their own government in favor of the attack on Rafah and a so-called ‘total victory’ over Hamas that can never be achieved.

And while politicians and opinion makers (including Parool columnist Theodor Holman) fall over each other to denounce the excesses that took place in and around the protest and frame them as anti-Semitic, no attention is paid to the fact that universities in Gaza are in ruins. were shot by the Israeli army and that, according to UN figures, 5,479 students and at least 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in the past seven months.

Remarkable piece of framing

Amid all the reporting about the demonstration, a remarkable piece of framing came along. On Monday, May 6, the Central Jewish Consultation (CJO) called on the UvA in a letter to ‘immediately put an end to the occupation of the campus by anti-Israel demonstrators’. Please note: this letter was sent before violence broke out on the site. The fact that there were demonstrations was sufficient reason for the CJO to put pressure on the UvA.

In the letter, the CJO referred to the commemoration of Yom Hashoa – the Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust, which would take place that Monday evening in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, ‘just 300 meters from your campus’. It was not clarified why this was relevant.

Apparently the CJO was so afraid of the demonstrating students that they mistook them for an unruly mob of Jew-haters, who must naturally be intent on brutally disrupting this commemoration.

The letter further stated that the building of the former Joodsche Invalide – a nursing home for Jewish elderly and disabled people, the vast majority of whom were deported and murdered in Sobibor – is ‘also only 300 meters from the campus’.

Of course, the proximity of a building that once served as a Jewish hospital has nothing to do with the demonstrators and their demands. Yet it was mentioned in passing, as if there was somehow a causal link between the two. As if you can demonstrate anywhere in Amsterdam without being in the vicinity of buildings with a storied war history.

Trenches of culture war

By focusing in their letter on events and buildings that have nothing to do with the subject of the protest, the CJO buries itself deep in the trenches of the culture war. A struggle in which all people who stand up for Palestinian freedom are framed as Hamas sympathizers who hate Jews.

A war in which slogans such as ‘Free Palestine’ are interpreted as calls for a second Holocaust. A war in which it is perfectly legitimate to restrict the right to protest under the guise of the poorly substantiated suggestion of anti-Semitism.

A war fueled by an unintelligent discourse that instrumentalizes the traumas and emotions of Jews against largely peaceful protesters. Protesters rightly questioning the complicity of their educational institutions in apartheid and war crimes, and in what a growing chorus of experts is calling a genocide.

Ironic

One sentence in the letter from the CJO is almost comical in all its irony and calls out for the UvA ‘[…] to act immediately, by ending the occupation’.

Now if only the CJO would use such strong words for the illegal occupation of the West Bank. Or for the years-long siege of Gaza, the starvation of children and mothers, the ethnic cleansing of entire villages in the West Bank, or for Netanyahu’s refusal to rescue the surviving hostages in favor of more death and destruction.

In the meantime, the involvement of Israeli universities in developing military technology is well documented and sufficient reason for Dutch universities to reassess their ties with these institutions.

But no. Instead, we are expected to believe that the students protesting all of the above – and who happen to be doing so near a former Jewish hospital – are the real danger. That standing up against Israel’s crimes is the same as condoning violence against Jews. Who can be fooled anymore?