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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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What do Germans talk about when they talk about antisemitism?
In today’s Germany, an accusation of antisemitism can end careers, shutter institutions and put political alliances beyond consideration. That gravity is understandable in the country responsible for the Holocaust. What has become less clear, particularly since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, is what Germans mean when they use the word “antisemitism.”
Days before Berliners went to the polls on Sept. 20, Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz provided a particularly awkward illustration. At a campaign event for his party, the CDU, Merz called antisemitism “the most perfidious form of xenophobia.” German Jews were quick to point out a glaring problem; they were not foreigners. The contentious IHRA framework officially embraced by Germany stresses that antisemitism and hostility toward foreigners are separate phenomena.
The confusion has become politically consequential since Berlin voted. Die Linke, a democratic socialist party, won 25.7%, more than doubling its 2023 share and finishing nearly seven points ahead of the CDU, which came in at 18.8%. The far-right AfD came third with 16.3%, itself an extraordinary gain of 7.2 points. Yet, since the election, the question consuming German politics has been whether Die Linke is too antisemitic to govern.
Israel’s ambassador, Ron Prosor, described antisemitism within Die Linke as systemic. The Central Council of Jews warned the SPD and Greens against joining a Linke-led coalition. Bavaria’s premier, Markus Söder, called Die Linke “deeply antisemitic.”
Philipp Peyman Engel, editor in chief of the Jüdische Allgemeine, the weekly newspaper of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, distilled the case against Die Linke in Britain’s Jewish Chronicle. The party, he wrote, was “riddled with people who hate Jews and Israel” and represented “the elimination of Israel.” Even voters drawn by rents and social policy had tolerated its hatred of Israel; SPD and Green politicians would forfeit any claim to moral seriousness by governing with it. “No non-Jewish democrat should simply accept this election result either,” he wrote.
That is an extraordinary indictment of a party that just received more votes than any other in the German capital. It is also hard to reconcile with the party that actually exists.
Die Linke does carry unusual historical baggage. It was formed in 2007 from a movement of trade unionists and Social Democrats alienated by Gerhard Schröder’s welfare reforms and the PDS, successor to East Germany’s ruling communist party. The GDR pursued an anti-Zionist foreign policy, strands of which survived reunification; the modern party also absorbed a western anti-imperialist tradition in which hostility toward Israel has at times shaded into antisemitism.
A 2011 analysis published by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education found serious hostility toward Israel in parts of Die Linke but rejected describing the party itself as antisemitic. A year later, Die Linke nominated Beate Klarsfeld — the Nazi hunter who spent decades pursuing German war criminals and famously slapped former Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger over his Nazi past — for the German presidency. She received 126 votes in the Federal Assembly.
Die Linke’s current official position is markedly different from Engel’s characterization in the Jewish Chronicle. At its federal congress in June, Die Linke explicitly affirmed Israeli and Palestinian self-determination and the right of both Israel and Palestine to exist. It passed a separate resolution condemning antisemitism and describing its sharp rise since Oct. 7. While one may regard those positions as inadequate, contradictory or politically naïve, they do not amount to a program for eliminating Israel.
The party that won Berlin last month has changed in other ways as well. Its candidate for mayor, Elif Eralp, a trained lawyer, was born in Munich to Turkish socialist trade unionists who fled the 1980 military coup. Her campaign centered on housing, rent controls and migrant rights, and borrowed consciously from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York; Linke activists even traveled there to meet his advisers.
That helps explain why this election has rattled Germany’s political center. Die Linke is no longer easily dismissed as the residual party of eastern German communism. In Berlin, it has assembled a young, urban and increasingly diverse electorate around an issue — the cost of housing — that the governing parties have conspicuously failed to solve. Unlike the AfD, it also has potential coalition partners. A Linke-SPD-Green government could remove the CDU from power and seek to implement the result of a 2021 referendum, approved by 57.6% of voters, calling for the socialization of large housing companies.
There are nonetheless questions about parts of its Berlin organization, especially in Neukölln. A rapper at a campaign event sang “Yalla Yalla Intifada” and “Death to the IDF.” Ferat Koçak, the district’s Linke Bundestag member, was photographed on election night with Ibrahim Ibrahim, described by Democ, an anti-extremist monitoring group, as a longtime activist with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the EU lists as a terrorist organization. Ibrahim has also been reported to have praised Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a “steadfast leader” and “martyr hero.”
Beyond Berlin, a June investigation by Bayerischer Rundfunk into internal forums and chats of Linksjugend, the party’s youth organization, found messages by a spokesman for Die Linke’s youth organization in Rhineland-Palatinate referring to Israeli “concentration camps” and a “genocide in the name of Judaism” and telling Israel to “drop dead!”
Wolfgang Benz, who directed the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Berlin’s Technical University for more than two decades and edited an eight-volume handbook on antisemitism, told the Tagesspiegel that the term Antisemitismus is undergoing an Ausverkauf — an inflationary depletion of its meaning.
“Die Linke is not antisemitic,” he said. Anti-Israel slogans can be crude, denunciatory, even “misanthropic,” without thereby becoming Jew-hatred. His answer when asked whether the chant “Death to the IDF” was antisemitic was no.
In the same interview, Benz also argued that Die Linke’s leadership should deal loudly and decisively with genuinely unacceptable conduct and singled out Bodo Ramelow, who became Linke’s first minister-president in 2014, and Petra Pau, a veteran Linke politician and former Bundestag vice president, as politicians with strong records against antisemitism. Benz’s successor, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, has likewise called the debate around Die Linke “overblown” and warned that antisemitism is being used to influence coalition formation.
The consequences of collapsing antisemitism and anti-Zionism have extended beyond electoral politics. In Verfassungsblog, an open-access forum on constitutional law and politics, scholars Dörthe Engelcke and Ilyas Saliba documented Palestinian-related events at German universities losing rooms or being canceled, while antisemitism commissioners intervened in debates over terms such as “genocide,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism.” Berlin’s Jews, meanwhile, are hardly unanimous. An open letter signed by 150 Jewish Berliners, including Susan Neiman, Deborah Feldman and Eva Menasse, accused parts of the media and Jewish community of instrumentalizing antisemitism against Die Linke while the far right advances.
The signatories also point out some obvious facts that, I imagine, tend to get overlooked: that Jews in Berlin pay rent, send children to schools, use hospitals and, like their neighbors, worry about economic insecurity.
Britain’s Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn offers a cautionary precedent. As genuine failures over antisemitism became entangled with factional warfare, parts of Corbyn’s camp focused so heavily on the political motives behind the accusations that they appeared to minimize the underlying problem. The result was to strengthen the very attacks they regarded as politically motivated. Die Linke would be unwise to repeat that mistake.
Right now, far more than Die Linke’s reputation is on the line. The far-right AfD party won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt last month, an increase of 23 percentage points. On the same day Berlin voted, it won 38.2% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, according to preliminary official results, while the CDU fell to 4.9% and disappeared from the state parliament. In Berlin, the AfD rose from 9.1 to 16.3% and finished third.
Those results should provide some perspective on the attempt to establish whether Die Linke’s 25.7% represents an antisemitic rupture in German democracy. Die Linke’s leadership will have to demonstrate that its stated opposition to antisemitism has real-world consequences. But the claim that Jew-hatred is baked into the party itself is unsupported by its program, its history or the records of many of its leading politicians.
What the controversy more clearly reveals is the alarm produced when a party long treated as marginal suddenly wins and becomes capable of leading its government. Antisemitism, the most devastating accusation available in German political language, offers Die Linke’s opponents a means of turning questions about the behavior of certain activists into a referendum on the party’s legitimacy.
Yet while Berlin argues over whether Die Linke is fit to govern, a far-right party with openly ethnonationalist positions and powerful antidemocratic currents, is winning close to 40% in parts of the former East. What’s shocking is that Germany’s political center is devoting its fiercest moral language to the left precisely when the far right is remaking the country’s electoral map.
The post What do Germans talk about when they talk about antisemitism? appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish federations are losing my generation — and future ones — over Israel and Netanyahu
When my father Norm Gordon was six years old, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland helped rescue him. Recent immigrants from Poland, his parents were already living precariously when his mother died and his father gave him up. The Jewish Children’s Bureau, funded by the JFC, found a home for him and his brothers and kept them all together under one roof. That’s the sort of thing Jewish federations across America were founded to do, going all the way back to the “Stuyvesant Promise” of 1655: pool the resources of Jewish communities to help the helpless. My first jobs were for JFC-funded camps. My mother, a social worker, spent her career working with agencies like Bellefair Jewish Children’s Bureau, funded by JFC. After my father Norm himself died young and my mother married my adoptive father James Ratner, our family’s ties to JFC grew even stronger. My father James was deeply involved with JFC for decades, serving on their Executive Committee and as Chair of their Overseas Connections Committee.
Now all those ties have been cut. My experience isn’t unique. Federations have been alienating constituents who don’t align ideologically with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s been happening all over the country. For three decades, I’d kept a portion of my assets with JFC in a donor-advised fund. I made gifts to my preferred charities out of the fund while the principal remained with JFC as part of the “community chest” they use to finance their operations. But JFC recently told me, in so many words, I should take my money elsewhere. So I did.
Their point of contention was that I wished to give some money from my donor-advised fund to Physicians for Human Rights. After the unprecedented and barbaric terror attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish federations raised a lot of money for Israel. They also made lists of human rights organizations that were critical of the Israeli government. The JFC Donor-Advised Fund Committee notified me that this year, for the first time, my pledge to PHR would not be honored.
PHR is not the only cause I give to, but it’s vitally important to me. I’m an M.D., an editor of The American Psychoanalyst, and I’ve served on the PHR board for years. I am privileged to know their fine work in detail. Their physicians risk their lives in conflict zones and take on powerful autocratic regimes around the globe, using medical evidence to expose harms to civilians. In 1997, PHR shared the Nobel Peace Prize as a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Their work is especially important to me as I watch leadership in the U.S. subjugating science, reason, and the rule of law to executive power. PHR represents a commitment to precisely those threatened values that the majority of Jews hold dear, values that hadn’t previously conflicted with JFC’s. Very little of what PHR does relates to Israel at all. I saw no reason to choose between the two organizations until JFC asked me to.
Clearly, JFC’s Donor-Advised Fund Committee sees its decision as a laudable act — that they’re standing up to antisemitic bias even if doing so means losing a constituent and his capital. But that does not describe what happened here. The DAF Committee, on the contrary, rushed to judgment against PHR and alienated a longtime backer of JFC’s community chest with false claims of antisemitism, unsupported by evidence.
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In an email sent to some of my family members, who have also sadly withdrawn their support from JFC, JFC’s DAF Committee devoted just 130 words to its judgment against PHR. Echoing Netanyahu’s incendiary talking points about the medieval “blood libel,” the DAF Committee accused PHR of falsely blaming Israel for the destruction of Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza City. Ironically, as NPR reported, PHR was a lone voice that did not rush to blame Israel before the facts were in: “By contrast, the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights put out a call on the day of the blast for the protection of civilian life and for the incident to be the subject of an independent investigation. It notably did not project blame.”
The only piece of evidence the DAF Committee email provided for their claims was exactly that innocuous PHR press release that called on “all parties to abide by international law.” The JFC DAF Committee also claimed, without providing evidence, that PHR does not acknowledge or condemn Hamas’ use of tunnels to store weapons and shield warriors under hospitals. In a joint report on the devastating impact of the war in Gaza on Palestinian mothers and infants, PHR and the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School do, on the contrary, explicitly call on Hamas not to militarize hospitals. The DAF Committee provided no evidence at all of PHR’s conflicts with the JFC mission.
Some may ask, “So what?” The JFC’s priority is defending Israel when it’s under attack. It’s not as though PHR is out there helping Israel. In fact, in highlighting the suffering of Palestinian civilians in their report instead of the victims of Oct. 7, and in documenting that the Israeli military has prevented medicine and baby formula from reaching Gaza without considering the larger reasons for Israel’s blockade, PHR shows clearly enough whose side they’re on. JFC is entitled to decline support to organizations that don’t support Israel and it doesn’t owe you a reason.
I don’t question JFC’s right. I question its wisdom. I’m not trying to persuade them to value PHR’s work the way I do, though I hope I’ve made a reasonable case for why I value it. I’m trying to say JFC is making a mistake in alienating constituents like me over a difference of opinion — alienating people who have long considered themselves allies, supported JFC for years, and care about Israel. There has to be room for rational disagreement in a community organization. If not, the federations will hemorrhage constituents and support and become politicized. The majority of American Jews are highly critical of the current Israeli government and its campaign in Gaza. Younger people even more so. JFC may disagree with the rest of us, but it’s not as though we’re making stuff up out of thin air. Israel’s own ex-generals are accusing West Bank settlers of “ethnic cleansing.”
By refusing to accommodate our views, do the federations hope to change our minds? Is this how the federations want to advertise themselves to the majority of American Jews who dare to question Netanyahu? Telling us there’s no room for us, and justifying their conclusions with sloppy assumptions, naive parroting of Netanyahu, and wanton disrespect for others’ views and expertise?
I have no sympathy for Hamas. Human rights organizations like PHR do not support Hamas. Most of the 2 million people living in Gaza, however, are not terrorists. They are human beings and half of them are children. Before Oct. 7, 2023, there were 30,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, a tiny fraction of the Gaza population. I don’t see the harm in trying to insure mothers’ and infants’ access to medicine and baby formula. Nor in documenting the Israeli government’s violations of the rules of warfare when they deny medicine and baby formula to Palestinian mothers and infants who were not perpetrators of Oct. 7. Is our own government here in the U.S. always beyond reproach? No government is. Only authoritarian regimes consider themselves beyond reproach. Again, I don’t expect JFC’s DAF Committee to see it my way.
I would, however, ask them to consider the possible long-term consequences of purging people who think as I do. If protecting Palestinian mothers and infants is really such an affront to JFC’s mission, what does that say about its mission and its priorities? Quashing criticism of the Israeli government is a dramatic departure from JFC’s founding principles. The leaders of the social welfare agencies that depend on JFC’s support will be dismayed to learn that JFC worries more about defunding PHR reports on baby formula than they worry about maintaining the Bellefaire Jewish Children’s Bureau. JFC has been a national leader among the federations from the beginning in caring for their community’s most vulnerable, including children and the elderly. The founders of United Way emulated JFC when in 1913 they began organizing their own community chests. If JFC’s central aim is still the thing they were always best at — maintaining a community chest to help people, as they once helped my father and his brothers — then pushing me out for supporting PHR hardly seems like a good way to serve that aim.
What is most shocking to me is that the federations really don’t seem to care what the majority of American Jews think, or how many constituents they lose by purging those who refuse to equate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism. Like Netanyahu, they seem quite comfortable without us. But they’re losing this generation and the next one.
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Israel’s supreme court says Arab parties can run in Oct. 27 election
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – Israel’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the right of Arab parties to run in the Oct. 27 election could make it more difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form a new coalition after the election.
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Joint Arab List and Ra’am, the two Arab-led political lists competing in Israel’s elections, could run. The ruling overturned a decision by the Central Elections Committee, a largely political body in which parties in Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition hold a majority of the seats, which had voted last month to bar the lists from running.
“The court found that the materials submitted to the Central Elections Committee did not meet the standards established in the case law for disqualifying a list of candidates,” the court said in its ruling, which did not include extensive reasoning.
The decision restored the parties that traditionally represent Israel’s more than 2 million Arab citizens and in doing so helped the opposition block. Now a wide constituency that rejects working with Netanyahu will have a reason to head to the polls rather than stay home.
Most polls have shown that the opposition bloc would need to include the parliamentary seats held by the Ra’am party, led by MK Mansour Abbas, in order to gain the lead over Netanyahu’s coalition. Unlike Ra’am, the Joint Arab List has never sat in an Israeli coalition and there is no expectation that it would join with Zionist Jewish-led parties to do so.
The court also took a number of other steps regarding the upcoming election. It overturned the committee’s decision to disqualify Ofer Cassif, a Jewish lawmaker running as part of the Joint List. In Cassif’s case, the decision was made by a 7-2 majority.
The Supreme Court justices said they “strongly condemn the outrageous statements and actions by Cassif that evoke revulsion.” At the same time, they ruled that “these statements or actions do not meet the stringent tests established” for disqualifying a candidate.
According to the petition seeking Cassif’s disqualification, he had legitimized Palestinian violence during the war, referred to those seeking to attack Israeli soldiers as “freedom fighters” and taken actions against Israel in international legal forums.
The most significant development, however, came in the case of Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of Balad, one of the parties that make up the Joint List.
During a Thursday hearing, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of indicating to Abu Shehadeh that a majority of the justices were inclined to disqualify him and recommended that he withdraw his candidacy.
Following internal consultations, Balad announced that Abu Shehadeh would withdraw his candidacy, rendering the court’s expected ruling on his disqualification moot.
“Sami Abu Shehadeh did not retract his positions and did not flee the struggle. Only after the court itself announced its intention to uphold the disqualification did he decide to withdraw his candidacy,” Balad said in an official statement.
A central part of the case against Abu Shehadeh focused on an article he published on Oct. 8, 2023, one day after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, in which the terror organization killed 1,200 people in Israel and took another 251 hostage.
In the article, Abu Shehadeh described the Oct. 7 events as an “important historic event” and suggested that lessons could be learned from how Hamas had managed to surprise Israel and carry out its invasion. His comments were cited as evidence that he supports armed struggle against Israel, one of the grounds on which candidates can be disqualified under Israeli law.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court said there was “a consensus that the things said by Mr. Abu Shehadeh are painful, outrageous and revolting.” The decision to disqualify Abu Shehadeh was also supported by the Democrats, Israel’s most left-wing Zionist party.
During the Supreme Court hearing, Abu Shehadeh acknowledged that “this paragraph was not written correctly.” He said, “I have never supported violence in my life,” and said that he knows victims of the Oct. 7 attack.
Balad said Abu Shehadeh would continue to lead the party’s political activities even without serving in the Knesset.
The Joint List sharply criticized the court’s handling of the case. In a statement, the list said that “the heart of the matter” was “preventing an Arab political leader from running in the elections and infringing on our public’s right to choose its representatives.”
The list accused the court of acting “following a campaign of incitement and political persecution led by the fascist and Kahanist right, joined by the leaders of the Zionist opposition parties.”
“The court must bear responsibility for its disgraceful decision before our public and before public opinion in Israel and around the world, for providing judicial cover for political exclusion. This ruling is another link in the chain of persecution of our public.”
Right-wing Israeli politicians also criticized the court for declining to issue a ruling formally disqualifying Abu Shehadeh rather than merely pressing him to withdraw.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist member of Netanyahu’s government, called the court’s proposal “too merciful” and said it “harms the democracy of the State of Israel.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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