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How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
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Latest Epstein files release unleashes wave of antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media
(JTA) — A bank account named for an ancient god in Israel. A “synagogue of Satan.” References to “goyim” that hint at a Jewish-run global cabal. The mystery of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s alleged visit to China.
These are among the latest antisemitic conspiracy theories to be born from the Jeffrey Epstein files, following the document dump that has occupied online commentators for days.
Since the financial advisor and sex trafficker’s arrest by federal authorities in July 2019 and death by suicide a month later, antisemitic conspiracy theories about him have circulated widely, often invoking his Jewish identity and connections with Jewish and Israeli leaders.
But the Justice Department’s newly released batch of Epstein files on Friday, which contained over 3 million pages of documents, has taken things to a new intensity.
“If you think Epstein was just some rich pedo, you’re missing the big picture,” wrote the X account Clandestine, which has more than 734,000 followers. “Epstein was part of the satanic global elite that pull the strings from the shadows. Epstein was a Deep State puppet master.”
Mike Rothschild, a writer who researches antisemitic conspiracy theories on the far right, said the amount of material available in the files made them fertile ground for misinterpretation and confirmation bias.
“Whatever your particular brand of conspiracy theory is, there’s something in the files for you,” Rothschild told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “One of the problems that we’re having is that there is so much information and there’s no filter for it.”
Among the real revelations in the documents are a variety of exchanges of relevance to the broader Jewish world. Those include revelations that various Jewish nonprofits had courted Epstein for donations even after his conviction, evidence of Epstein’s financial ties with several Orthodox yeshivas, and new details about his well-known relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Some of the emails also show Epstein referencing the High Holidays and deploying Jewish phrases like “goyim” in a disparaging manner.
“This is the way the jew make money.. and made a fortune in the past ten years„ selling short the shippping futures„ let the goyim deal in the real world,” wrote Epstein in a 2009 email to the cognitive psychologist and onetime Trump University executive Roger Schank.
In another email dated August 2010 to Jewish entertainment publicist Peggy Siegal, discussing a party guest list, Epstein wrote, “No, goyim in abundance- jpmorgan execs brilliant wasps.”
Some of the largest conspiracist personalities seized on the new document dump, claiming that it confirmed their longstanding beliefs about secret Jewish control.
“Remember the end of last year when I was called antisemitic for telling you this is the literal, religious worldview of many people in power?,” Candace Owens, right-wing commentator turned conspiracist, wrote in a post on X responding to a photo of an email where Epstein used the term. “Type in ‘goy’ or ‘goyim’ in the Epstein files and be sure to tag a Christian who needs to wake up and leave the Zionist cause.”
In an hour-long livestream titled “BAAL SO HARD: The Epstein Files,” Owens referred to Jews as “pagan gypsies” and repeated the neo-Nazi conspiracy that B’nai Brith was behind the “ritualistic murder” of Mary Phagan, whose killing sparked the antisemitic lynching of Leo Frank in 1915.
“The Epstein files create an opportunity for us to discuss this, to hear the way they speak about us behind closed doors exactly how Sigmund Freud spoke, it’s racist,” said Owens during the stream, which had reached 2 million views on YouTube Thursday. “I want to make it clear that this is for them a religious philosophy, a racist perspective that we are goyim, meaning cattle, that are meant to be herded and ruled over.”
On Sunday, Owens posted on X, “Yes, we are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” adding “This is the synagogue of Satan we are up against.”
It isn’t just leading antisemitic personalities but rank-and-file social media users who have sought to paint the data dump as an indictment of Jewish power.
“Normies: ‘let’s not jump to any antisemitic conclusions, we don’t know why Epstein did these terrible things.’ Epstein: ‘I love trafficking children, manipulating markets, and don’t believe goyim are human. Also this is all because I am Jewish,’” wrote an Eastern Orthodox Christianity influencer on X.
The Nexus Project, an antisemitism watchdog group, condemned the proliferation of antisemitic Epstein conspiracy theories in a series of posts on X, writing, “The Epstein files are real. The antisemitism they’re fueling is also real. And right now, the second part is getting almost no attention.”
“Jeffrey Epstein was a monster. His crimes were real. His victims deserve justice and are being revictimized right now by the DOJ,” the Nexus Project wrote. “Turning his private emails into proof of a Jewish conspiracy is pure antisemitism. And it is spreading faster than anyone is willing to say.”
Rothschild said he believed the files were “reinforcing stuff that these people already are pushing out.”
“If you are predisposed to believe Candace Owens’ theory that Israel is behind everything bad that’s ever happened, you’re going to find it in the Epstein files, even if it’s not there, because there’s so many mentions and there’s so much intrigue swirling around about it, because it’s just all this raw material you can kind of use it to make whatever you want,” said Rothschild.
New conspiracy theories also stemmed from an email exchange where Epstein requested money be wired to a bank account that some concluded was titled “Baal,” the name of an ancient Canaanite god.
“BREAKING: 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 EPSTEIN NAMED HIS BANK ACCOUNT BAAL,” wrote AdameMedia, a popular right wing X account that frequently posts conspiratorial content. “Baal is a demonic being that was worshipped in ancient israel by some hebrews before they converted to Judaism. Child sacrifice is a ritual of Baal worshippers, usually through burning, like lsraeI did to Gaza. Archaeological discoveries have found thousands of urns with cremated infant and small children remains. Now we have evidence of Epstein’s circle kiIIing and even eating children.” (Similar files say “bank name” where this one says “baal,” suggesting an error.)
Others across the ideological spectrum extended longstanding theories about Epstein’s ties to Israel.
On Friday, the right-wing anti-Israel personality Tucker Carlson hosted Cenk Uygur, the progressive co-creator of The Young Turks, for a podcast interview titled “Cenk Uygur: Epstein, JFK, 9-11, Israel’s Terrorism and the Consequences of Opposing It,” during which the pair claimed that Epstein was an agent of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. (In July, Carlson received pushback from former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett after he said Epstein worked for Mossad.)
“Jeffrey Epstein was much more powerful than we realized. He could set up a meeting with almost any world leader. He can get almost anyone into the White House. Again, Ehud Barak has trouble getting into the White House, Epstein makes a call, boom, he’s in the White House. Israeli spy stays over at Epstein’s house,” said Uygur. “There’s just no question about it. He is definitely intelligence and in every turn he’s looking to help one country and it’s Israel. American media says shut up.”
Left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker also repeated the claim that Epstein was working for Israel in a post on X Sunday.
“Benjamin netenyahu [sic] is in the files and former pm ehud barak has such an extensive relationship w esptein [sic] they might as well call it the israel files what the fuck are you talking about,” wrote Piker in another post on X, responding to influencer Eyal Yakoby’s claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not named in the files.
The DOJ’s Epstein database includes 659 search results for “Netanyahu,” but the vast majority of the documents that appear under the search include news articles forwarded to and from Epstein relating to the Israeli leader.
“Going by sort of the raw number of mentions in an email database is not helpful, because there’s no context for it,” said Rothschild. “If there’s 630 mentions of Netanyahu, but 100 of them are just forwarded articles, and 100 of them are people responding to Epstein saying how much they hate Netanyahu, that doesn’t mean anything. It just means that you have this number and people run with it, because people are taking these things and turning them into proof for whatever conspiracy they already believe in.”
On X, another conspiracy theory took hold after users claimed that an email sent from China to Epstein in April 2009 coincided with a trip by Netanyahu that same month. (The article cited said Netanyahu met with the Chinese foreign affairs minister in Jerusalem, not China.)
“Benjamin Netanyahu was in China and it seems likely that he was the man sending Jeffrey Epstein torture videos,” wrote Jake Shields, a far-right influencer and former MMA champion, in a post on X.
Other emails appeared to tie Epstein to Russia, leading to speculation that he had provided intelligence to the country and prompting calls for an investigation by the Polish prime minister.
Some conspiracy theorists online rejected the idea that Epstein might have been a Russian asset, instead suggesting it is a distraction being offered to take the heat off Israel.
“The memo went out, and the media is trying to say that Jeffrey Epstein worked for the KGB,” said the TikTok influencer “contraryian” in a video posted Tuesday that has amassed more than 30,000 likes. “He might have had multiple passports, but he talked to Israeli politicians, Jewish businessmen, and repeatedly invokes his Jewish identity.”
In response to a New York Post article about Epstein’s alleged Russian affiliations, one X user with 300,000 followers and a stream of antisemitic posts claimed that the coverage was evidence of a “Jewish controlled media.”
“Jeffrey Epstein- ‘I work for the Rothschilds, Israel, and world Jewry.’ Jew York Post- ‘Epstein probably worked for the Russians….,’” the post, read. “You don’t hate the Jewish controlled media enough.”
In a podcast episode Monday, Jewish conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who has previously criticized conservative rivals for linking Epstein with Mossad, said there was not evidence in the files that Epstein was blackmailing people “on behalf of a foreign power or a cadre of powerful people who are attempting to shape global policy.”
Rothschild, the conspiracy theory expert, said everything he has seen reflects deep-seated antisemitic animus among conspiracy theorists.
“Antisemitism is huge in these circles, it always has been,” he said. “Whether it’s just outright attacks on Jews, or the sort of more crouched globalists, European bankers, you know, antisemitism is a huge part of that world.”
But he emphasized that not all claims about Epstein amount conspiracy theories — which is why the drumbeat of antisemitism can continue unabated.
“Jeffrey Epstein was part of a cabal. I mean, it’s not like the Elders of Zion sitting around in a dark room, you know, deciding on the fates of nations, but it’s pretty clear that Epstein was at the center of a gigantic conspiracy,” said Rothschild. “That’s not a theory. That has nothing to do with Judaism. It has everything to do with greed and perversion.”
The consequences, he said, are bad for the Jews and for everyone else.
“Anything that calcifies our politics and our discourse even more, I think is very dangerous,” Rothschild said. “Certainly there’s always going to be a danger that it falls disproportionately on the Jewish community. I think it’s probably making life difficult for actual survivors of trauma like this to get people to pay attention to them.”
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Netanyahu is floundering without the hostages
After the return of the final hostage last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a fresh wave of propaganda aimed at rewriting history.
Among the false claims spread by him and his allies: That outrage against Haredi draft dodgers is an exclusively leftist issue (it’s not); that opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz collaborated with Qatar, rather than any of Netanyahu’s aides (the facts say differently); that former United States President Joe Biden is to blame for Israeli soldiers’ deaths — despite the exceedingly limited reach of the arms embargo Netanyahu cites as being at fault; that the attorney general’s office is trying to dismantle Israel’s democracy, when it is simply holding Netanyahu and his cronies to account.
Perhaps worst of all, a Netanyahu envoy baselessly claimed that Israeli hostages’ families aided Hamas
These lies are bolder and more pernicious than those we have become accustomed to from the prime minister’s office. And it’s because, with elections quickly approaching, Netanyahu is in a particularly precarious situation.
The return of the body of Staff Sergeant Ran Gvili marks a closing point in the war: One of its two stated aims — to secure the return of all hostages and oust Hamas — has been completed. Now, all the public attention that was focused on protesting to secure the hostages’ return for nearly two-and-a-half years is ready to be redirected.
Focusing on ousting Netanyahu is an easy next step, and the prime minister knows it. Which means the only way he can hope to maintain enough support to hold on to the government is by doing what he knows best: Pushing an aggressive propaganda campaign to rewrite history.
Since the onset of war with Hamas, Netanyahu and his inner circle have been selling half-truths, deceptions and flat-out lies to convince the public that the war would end in “total victory.” But Israelis remain unconvinced. Fewer than one-third of Israelis believe that Israel won the war.
Netanyahu, who is currently ahead in the polls for November’s election but lacks a majority coalition, can’t easily change that skepticism. What he thinks he can do, it seems, is spin a convincing story of his own victimhood and blamelessness.
Netanyahu has been laying the groundwork for this campaign for years. His first interest after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, according to one of his former aides, was figuring out how to avoid taking responsibility for the security failures that primed the ground for the massacre. Since those early days, his brazen willingness to push false narratives and point fingers at anyone but himself has been on full display.
Now, he’s amping up the falsehoods, using the rhetoric of terror and treason to inflame animus toward those seeking his removal and convince his base that they, too, are under attack. He has leaned into his focus on certain favorite targets: protesters, the opposition, and the so-called “deep state,” a term mainstreamed by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has used it to spread the conspiracy that government workers are trying to undermine the national interest.
“In these days we are witnessing an illegal and deliberate witch hunt,” read a Likud Party statement that Netanyahu reposted last week, claiming that effort aimed for “the overthrow of the right-wing government by the Israeli deep state and its operatives in the State Attorney’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office, and the police.”
“This witch hunt is designed to instill fear and terror” in Israeli politicians, the post continued, “while creating a noose around the people surrounding the Prime Minister.”
Days later, on Feb. 2, Netanyahu reposted a clip from Channel 14, with which he is generally allied, implying that Lapid and some hostage families were involved with Qatari foreign agents. Here, too, the message was the same: Don’t believe the bad press about Netanyahu — he, like the Israeli public, is a victim.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Netanyahu is staking his political future on conspiracy theories and lies. His commitment to that strategy was on full display on Thursday, at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
There, Netanyahu regurgitated false excuses for Israel’s failures leading up to and on Oct. 7, 2023. He said that defense officials thwarted his past attempts to deter Hamas, when he in fact spent years allowing Qatari funds to be channeled to the group. And he accused former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar — whom he fired last year — of falsifying documents that show he was updated about a possible Hamas invasion before Oct. 7, as part of an effort to claim that Israeli intelligence shown to him never indicated an impending attack. Yet independent Israeli media have confirmed that the documents Bar produced are legitimate.
What this barrage of untruths shows us: Netanyahu is floundering without the hostages.
Many believe he unnecessarily prolonged the war to sell the public on the idea that they needed him. No matter how much the hostage families might accuse him of delaying their loved ones’ return, he could still argue that the war he was leading gave Israel its only shot at their recovery.
Now, all the accountability that he sought to avoid over the last several years is coming to a head. What remains to be seen: Will he finally have to face the music, or will he succeed in manipulating Israeli voters into giving him another shot at power?
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A maligned marker honoring a French Nazi sympathizer is off NYC’s streets — for now
(New York Jewish Week) — Menachem Rosensaft was pleasantly surprised this week to learn that a historical marker honoring a Nazi collaborator that has been a bane of his existence for years had been removed.
Then panic set in: Could New York City really be planning to reinstall the plaque honoring Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister during World War II who was executed for treason?
“It’s one thing of making a decision to remove something,” Rosensaft told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It’s quite another to make a conscious decision, of doing the work in order to replace it and put it back.”
For years, Rosensaft — general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress and the son of Holocaust survivors — has lobbied against the plaques honoring Laval and Philippe Pétain, hero of the French army during World War I and later head collaborator with the Nazi regime. They are two of 206 names embedded on a half-mile stretch of Lower Broadway known as the “Canyon of Heroes.”
Rosensaft published an essay several years ago urging the removal of the plaques. He wrote another last month in conjunction with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
What he didn’t know at the time was that Laval’s name had been removed back in November after city officials deemed it a tripping hazard. The cold snap and winter weather have wreaked havoc on the pavement, causing more than a dozen markers in total to be removed.
They could return. The Alliance for Downtown New York, the nonprofit that installed the plaques, plans to eventually replace them, the New York Times reported. The Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers has previously fended off calls to remove the markers.
In 2017, following the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted that his administration would remove all hate symbols from city property — starting with the Philippe Pétain plaque downtown. (The plaque is still in place.)
But in 2018, the monuments commission recommended that the Pétain plaque remain where it is — though it advocated for “re-contextualizing them in place to continue the public dialogue.” The commission also recommended the removal of all official references to the name “Canyon of Heroes,” so as not to mischaracterize the markers as a “celebration” of any historical figures.
In 2023, following a national reckoning over Confederate statues that saw many of them torn down, then-Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who is Jewish, attended a Holocaust Remembrance Day event where he said it was “unacceptable” that Laval’s and Pétain’s names remained on the marker. Levine also sent a letter to the city’s Public Design Commission calling on the city to remove the plaques.
JTA has reached out to Mark Levine’s office — he is now the city’s comptroller — and City Hall for comment on the current situation.
The Alliance for Downtown New York contends that the removal of any of the plaques is a form of erasing history.
“Trying to render history free of mistakes, free of contradictions and horror, risks sanitizing our past and perhaps makes us more likely to repeat those mistakes,” Andrew Breslau, a representative from the Alliance for Downtown New York told The New York Times this week when it broke the news that Laval’s name had at least temporarily disappeared.
Before they became war criminals responsible for the deaths of more than 75,000 Jews, Laval and Pétain were honored in ticker-tape parades in 1931. Laval was even named Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” that same year for his management of the Great Depression in France.
Rosensaft concedes that an additional plaque with the full context of who these men were would be “better than nothing.” But he said he would not give up advocating for their full removal.
“Controversial is one thing,” Rosensaft said. “And being convicted war criminals, both sentenced to death — one executed, the other had his sentence commuted — who were responsible for sending over 70,000 Jews, deporting them from France and sending them to their death is in a separate category.”
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