Boycotting Eurovision, the Netherlands continues its old crimes
The Netherlands’ decision to boycott the Eurovision Song Contest because of Israel’s participation is presented as an act of high moral principle. In truth, it reflects something much older and far more troubling: a persistent European pattern in which Jews are condemned, whether they are defenseless or whether they defend themselves.
This is a country that has not yet fully reckoned with one of the darkest chapters of its past.
During the Holocaust, three out of every four Dutch Jews were murdered – one of the highest death rates in Western Europe. This staggering figure cannot be attributed solely to German occupation. It was made possible by widespread Dutch collaboration:
- Dutch police and municipal authorities carried out raids and deportations.
- The Amsterdam population registry, a Dutch bureaucratic masterpiece, provided the Nazis with precise records of Jews’ addresses.
- The Henneicke Column, a Dutch bounty-hunting unit, was paid for every Jew it captured—thousands handed over for deportation and death.
The Dutch resisted in places, often heroically. But as a state apparatus, the Netherlands did not protect its Jewish citizens. It delivered them.
And now, in a bitter contemporary inversion, the Netherlands once again chooses to stand not with Jews facing explicit threats of annihilation, but against them – this time not by handing Jews over to their killers, but by boycotting the one Jewish state fighting those who openly seek its destruction.
When Jews were powerless, the Netherlands failed them.
Now that Jews finally have power to protect their own lives, the Netherlands condemns them for using it.
The false anti-colonialism of a former empire
Much of the discourse of the Dutch campaign against the Jews leans heavily on the language of anti-colonialism. But for the Netherlands—a nation whose colonial empire stretched from Indonesia to Suriname, built on forced labor, massacres, and resource extraction—this posture requires a spectacular act of self-forgetfulness.
Few nations exercised colonial domination as brutally or as globally as the Dutch.
And yet the descendants of this empire now point at Israel, of all nations, and declare it “colonial.” This is not analysis. This is projection.
It takes Europe’s own sins and assigns them to the Jewish people, as if transferring guilt could erase history. The truth is the opposite: Israel is one of the great stories of decolonization of the modern era.
The Jewish people did not arrive in the Middle East from Europe; we emerged there.
It was European imperial powers – from the Romans onward – that conquered Jewish lands, destroyed Jewish sovereignty, enslaved and expelled Jewish communities, and attempted to erase Jewish presence from our homeland. Modern political Zionism was not an act of European expansion; it was the long-delayed reversal of European imperialism.
To portray Jews as “colonizers” in their own homeland is to make the victims bear the crimes of those who oppressed them.
To label Israel as colonial while Dutch colonial crimes scar continents is moral acrobatics of the most cynical sort.
