AMSTERDAM—There are only 40,000 Jews who live in The Netherlands out of a total population of 17 million, which means 0.2 % of the population, but Dutch Jews were the victims of more than 40 per cent of the country’s criminal discrimination cases in 2017, reveals an overview published annually by the Public Prosecution Service.
41 % of 144 criminal offences upheld by the country’s judiciary, including vandalism, assault and incitement to violence, targeted Jews.
In 2016, 22 percent of the discrimination cases were about anti-Semitism. In 2013, the share was already around 40 percent.
The figure was almost double 2016’s percentage, where 22 per cent of 163 cases were aimed at Jews, the report says.
Over three quarters of these cases have been linked to football. Supporters of Ajax Amsterdam refer to themselves as Jews, much like Tottenham Hotspurs supporters in the UK often refer to themselves as “Yids”.
Rival Dutch teams regularly use antisemitic slurs when playing against Ajax.
“For me it is customary to wear a kippah, but when I go outside, I usually remove it”, Robert Herbschleb, a Dutch Jewish entrepreneur, was quoted as saying in the Dutch media.
“It is what many Jews are used to do: you make sure you are not too recognizable,” he said. “If they put in a ‘mezuzah’, a text tube that you need to apply to the outer door of your home, they would rather do it on the inside.”
According to CIDI, the Center of information and documentation Israel, the situation in the Netherlands is clearly less serious than it is in France. “Our community is much smaller and also much more concentrated in one area in Amsterdam-South and Amstelveen,’’ explains Paul van der Bas, a researcher at CIDI. ‘’As a result, there are fewer collisions. But anyone who shows himself outside that area as a Jew is absolutely at risk. A friend of mine, who went to Rotterdam every Friday afternoon, was spotted and banned almost weekly because he wore a kippah. We are not going to call people to no longer wear kippah, like in Germany, but the fact is that many people no longer do that because they do not feel safe. It makes the Netherlands a less free country.’’
CIDI advocates that anti-Semitic crimes be punished more severely. The Dutch government is considering a change in the law and Mestrum hopes that it will come to this. “Often perpetrators are only prosecuted for vandalism or abuse, not for anti-Semitism. For us, that feels like a lack of recognition. We as a society must show that we do not accept such crimes,’’ says CIDI deputy director Noami Mestrum.