As chapters 6 and 7 showed, the year 1967 already contained all the contrasting (including future) elements in attitudes towards Jews and Israel: on the one hand sympathy, idealisation and unconditional solidarity, and on the other condemnation, aversion and demonisation. In both tendencies, Jewry, the Shoah and Israel are usually seen as one single package. The temptation, in the case of Israel, to turn victim into perpetrator, often turned out to be irresistible, as we have seen in chapter 3 when tackling a fake interview in a 1969 issue of Aloha, the most popular magazine among the rebellious youths, which portrayed Anne Frank as a racist ‘Arab hater’. The supposed interview was a manifestation of what has been called the ‘fatal triangle’ between criticism of Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitism; all three can function as separate issues, but they can also overlap and get intertwined. Since 1967 Israel no longer above all generated a mix of enthusiasm, compassion, doubt and ambivalence, but instead a lasting source of divergence: between Jews and non-Jews – and among Jews. This chapter primarily focuses on the so-called niet-Joodverklaring [literally: ‘non-Jew declaration’; i.e. a statement that so and so was not a Jew] and, as such, on a policy of the Dutch government and administration which facilitated antisemitism due to economic interests. Furthermore, it will become clear that the previous attitude of prominent Jews à la Abel Herzberg – ‘antisemitism is a problem of civilisation of the non-Jew’ – would, during the 1970s, turn into a both legally and activist directed anti-antisemitism, particularly among younger generations of Jews.

The 1973 oil boycott and the ‘non-Jew Declaration’

In 1985, Richard Stein (b. 1936), chairman of the Foundation for the Fight against Antisemitism (stiba), looked back with some astonishment on what Jews in the Netherlands had swallowed in terms of antisemitic abuse, without taking any action. In his compilation Veertig jaar na ‘45. Visies op hedendaags antisemitisme [Forty years after ‘45: Observations on contemporary antisemitism] (1985), a stiba initiative, Stein took stock of the why, what and how of the five-year-old foundation. Stein was an American Jew who had been working in the Netherlands as a concert pianist and piano teacher since around 1969.