Let's Stop Forgetting the Past

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I was shocked this week when I read about the new law in the Netherlands that prohibits importing products from the West Bank. This trade and import ban officially began on Tuesday, September 21, with intentional violations of the law resulting in up to six years in prison and unintentional violations resulting in up to a year’s imprisonment.

This new legal blockage is said to be merely another step in the 2024 ruling made by the Netherlands' International Court of Justice, formally declaring Israel’s settlement in the West Bank as illegal. According to Gilad Cohen, the political director of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, via an interview with The Jerusalem Post (TJP), this new import ban includes products from Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

According to the ministry director, Israelis have already reported being stopped in airports by Dutch Customs Authorities upon arrival from Israel to check their luggage for products specifically from the prohibited areas of the West Bank, regardless of the date of purchase. Cohen also told TJP that he was not familiar with any similar precedent in which Israelis were subjected to the opening and searching of their bags or being questioned on where an item was purchased.

“From our perspective,” said Cohen, “this is definitely an escalation.”

In direct response to this political escalation, Israel quickly revoked the credentials, including immunities and rights, of Dutch diplomats working in the West Bank inside the Netherlands Representative Office within Ramallah. The Dutch diplomats were given only seven days to return all legal diplomatic documents to the Israeli government.

Needless to say, tensions are high between these two countries, and as such, Cohen voiced a hope that common sense will prevail in the way that other countries react to Holland’s unilateral and hostile measures toward Israel. But he was adamant that if not, Israel would continue to take a broader policy of countermeasures.

I concur with Cohen’s hopes for common sense to prevail, because as a Christian and an avid history buff, this is scary territory to me. I cannot help but be reminded of the years before World War II, in which antisemitism and Nazism grew to a fevered pitch in Germany and other places.

Perhaps those memories and my limited knowledge of history might be why my first reaction to reading about Holland’s obviously biased import law was actually a question. I kept wondering, “What in the world would Corrie ten Boom and her family think of their nation’s brand-new antisemitic law?”

In my mind, I somehow thought I knew the answer to this question. I believed that the ten Boom family would be shocked and saddened by their fellow countrymen’s treatment of modern-day Israel.

After all, this precious Christian family offered their possessions, their home, and the lives of many loved ones to hide and help save the lives of Dutch Jews during Hitler’s occupation of their country during World War II. As unlikely members of the Dutch Resistance, they are credited with saving an estimated 800 Jews from the clutches of the Nazis during the Holocaust. For their heroic life-saving efforts, Corrie and her father were eventually honored and designated by the nation of Israel as “Righteous Among the Nations.”

Yet, before writing this blog, I was shocked by what I discovered through my research efforts. It’s hard to admit, but I was embarrassed to learn that Holland was nowhere near the virtuous, all-out defender of God’s chosen people that I somehow thought them to be. Maybe my love for Corrie ten Boom’s iconic book, The Hiding Place, and my subsequent love of this remarkable family clouded the reality of all that took place in Holland during the Holocaust.

I learned that although the three parliamentary democratic countries of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were basically overtaken by the Nazis during the same timeframe of late 1940, the post-war survival rate for Dutch Jews was much lower than that of Jews in the other two countries. In fact, many Holocaust information websites claim that 74% of Dutch Jews perished under Nazi persecution, compared to a 25% death rate of Jews from France and 38% from Belgium.

This disparity in survival stats is thought to be due, in part, to the difference in how the German occupation of the Netherlands was overseen by a civil regime made up of extremely fanatical Nazi and SS leaders. Supposedly, these leaders “considered the Dutch to be a ‘Germanic brother nation’ and tried to win people over to Nazism.”

Perhaps this intense propaganda campaign served to fuel extreme antisemitism in Holland, but, in turn, it also fueled the extensive Dutch Resistance movement of which the ten Boom family was a part.

Who knows! Maybe the ten Boom family would not be shocked at all by Holland’s current opposition to Israel. They might have expected such antisemitic actions from their present-day Dutch countrymen. If nothing else, today’s rise in antisemitism would probably be very familiar to Corrie and her family members – since they witnessed it firsthand on the streets of their Haarlem home and during their arrests and detention in Dutch jail cells and on to the horrors of Ravensbrück concentration camp.

So, instead of wondering what the ten Booms would have thought of this new Dutch import ban against Israel, I really should have asked if there are any modern-day Christians in Holland who are ready and willing to protest their country’s open antisemitism. In other words, who will stand for the Jews this time in Holland, now that Corrie is gone?

Whether we are willing to face the truth or not, history is rapidly repeating itself right before our eyes. And now is the moment for American Christians to decide where we will stand on this issue.

Will I stand with God’s chosen people? Will you?

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