2 results
10 - Turkish Anti-Zionism in the Netherlands: From Leftist to Islamist Activism
- Edited by Remco Ensel, Evelien Gans
-
- Book:
- Holocaust, Israel and 'the Jew'
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 11 December 2020
- Print publication:
- 08 November 2016, pp 259-284
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
On 13 April 2002, a demonstration was held in Amsterdam in protest at Israeli military operations in the West Bank. Under the heading ‘Stop the war against the Palestinians’ it drew approximately 20,000 people, a huge number by Dutch standards. Observers were struck by the numbers of Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch protesters; one of them even spoke of a demonstration with ‘a distinct Islamic character’. A Turkish-born Muslim activist was of a different opinion: most protesters were Dutch. Although impressed by the large crowd with people of all persuasions who marched ‘as one body’, he was disillusioned by the number of ‘our Turkish Muslims’ present. Not that Palestine was a Muslim issue, according to him, but those who considered themselves Muslim should be the first to take it up. He found himself demonstrating alongside Turkish and Kurdish leftists whom, he confessed, he preferred over the apathetic and gutless conservative Turks. At least these leftists knew how to side with the oppressed against imperialism. This lament illustrates the strong anti-Israel protest tradition among Turkish leftist activists in the Netherlands, which still continued at a time when Palestine had come to be seen as a Muslim issue.
In the 1970s and 1980s, protesting against Israel was largely a leftist affair in the Netherlands. Demonstrations against Israel featured representatives of various leftist parties and organisations, including leftist migrant associations. This changed in the 1990s, when religiously inspired organisations introduced novel frames and forms of protest. For a small number of Muslim organisations the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became an important issue which could also be used to mobilise their followers. This shift reflected the advent of political Islam in the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s. The first signs of this change were observed in the Netherlands a few years after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
In Turkey itself, antisemitism was an integral part of religious-nationalist and ultranationalist ideologies. With the arrival of Turkish migrants in the Netherlands these ideologies came to be represented locally. From the start of labour migration from Turkey to the Netherlands in 1964 until 1975 about 63,000 Turkish migrants settled in the Netherlands, the majority foreign labourers.
16 - Reading Anne Frank: Confronting Antisemitism in Turkish Communities
- Edited by Remco Ensel, Evelien Gans
-
- Book:
- Holocaust, Israel and 'the Jew'
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 11 December 2020
- Print publication:
- 08 November 2016, pp 445-474
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In February 2013, a documentary shown on Dutch television triggered a prolonged debate on how to deal with antisemitism. The programme featured a Turkish-Dutch youngster stating loud and clear that he hated Jews. The statements made in the programme were a shock for many. ‘This most unadulterated antisemitism ever seen on Dutch television’, as one commentator called it, became the subject of commentary and parliamentary questions and provoked international reactions as fragments of the footage went global on YouTube.
The explicit anti-Jewish statements shown in the documentary Onbevoegd Gezag [Unauthorised Authority] were made in reaction to a reading from the Diary of Anne Frank, organised by a youth worker who lived in the city of Arnhem. He had started reading the diary with local pupils as a panacea against the antisemitism he had encountered in his environment. But in this case reading about the persecution of the Jews did not prevent youngsters from expressing their antipathy of Jews. On the contrary, the youngster who expressed his hatred of Jews said that by killing them Hitler had done a good thing. For some people this made the statements even more incomprehensible. If knowledge of the Holocaust did not help against antisemitism, what would?
An explanation for the lack of effect of Holocaust education on these youngsters was found in their background. The four boys featured in the documentary all came from Turkish families and were, presumably, Muslim. As newcomers – or rather children of newcomers in Dutch society – migrants were, apparently, not fully aware of the historical experience of the Holocaust and would, therefore, cross the boundaries of what was acceptable to say about it. There was some surprise that the youngsters had a Turkish, and not Moroccan, background. Antisemitic incidents since the beginning of the Second Intifada in autumn 2000 had led to an identification of antisemitism with Muslims, migrants and Moroccans. So far, the Turkish-Dutch had not been associated with antisemitism in the same way that Moroccan-Dutch youngsters had.
This raised the question whether the antisemitism which now manifested itself among Turkish-Dutch youth was a new phenomenon or, alternatively, if it had been there all along without being recognised or challenged.