Another Example That Israel is on the Brink of a Civil War

 

Jewish community grows with arrival of Israelis: ‘Amsterdam Jews don’t understand why we left’

Bas Soetenhorst en Hanneloes Pen14 maart 2026, 03:00

illustratie Rosa Snijders

The number of Israelis in Amsterdam is growing, bringing the shrinkage of the Dutch Jewish community to a halt. However, the ‘Israelisation’ of the community – which has accelerated since the Hamas terror attacks of 7 October 2023 – is not without its friction. ‘They live on a little island.’

Adults in glittery jackets, girls dressed as witches, princesses, or elves, and a young boy in a Spider-Man costume: it is a colourful group of Israelis gathered at a community centre in Haarlem on a sun-drenched weekend. They are celebrating Purim, a festival that commemorates the saving of the Jewish people in the Persian Empire. While parents chat with drinks in hand, children run circles around them.

The party, to which neighbors have also been invited, illustrates their distinct position within the Jewish community in the Netherlands. Due to the war against Iran, many celebrate Purim in parking garages or bomb shelters. That isn’t necessary here. Yet, outside the Israeli community in Haarlem, no publicity was given to the gathering.

An invitation to Het Parool was rescinded after consultation with the organising parents. They didn’t just want to keep the location secret; they considered even mentioning Israeli residents in Haarlem undesirable, given the rising reports of antisemitism and the hostility they experience.

Many have left their homeland, Israel, specifically because of the poor security situation there – in such numbers, in fact, that the Jewish community in the Netherlands is no longer shrinking. While the trend elsewhere in Europe has been downward since the Second World War, the Netherlands has recently seen consolidation or even modest growth, according to a report published last year by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), a London-based think tank.

Aversion to Likud and Netanyahu

More than a third of the Jewish community now consists of people with a direct connection to Israel (either born there or born in the Netherlands to Israeli parents). The JPR refers to this as the ‘Israelisation’ of the Jewish community, a trend expected to continue. In a few years, Israelis could make up the majority of the Jewish community.

‘I can no longer talk to my Dutch friends about the situation. In my eyes, they don’t understand it’

These emigrants are typically highly educated, work in the tech industry, hold an aversion to the Likud party and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and are secular. Outside of Jewish holidays, they often have little to do with the Jewish faith.

Through the association Hakol, they recently established their own version of the Centraal Joods Overleg (Central Jewish Consultation), which represents the interests of the Jewish community in the Netherlands. However, Hakol (Hebrew for ‘the voice’) is not yet officially registered as a foundation. “We can’t manage to find an address,” says one person involved. “As soon as a landlord hears about our background, they withdraw for fear of an attack.”

Men’s discussion group

The desire for Israelis to organise themselves is a recent development. “Generally, they live in their own bubble here,” he says. “That changed after the Hamas terror attack on 7 October and its aftermath. Because of the antisemitism, the pro-Palestinian protests, and the hatred towards Israel, people started looking for a place to share their feelings. I can no longer talk to my Dutch friends about the situation. In my eyes, they don’t understand it.”

The same sentiment is shared by an IT professional who moved from Tel Aviv to Amsterdam with his family in 2019. He belongs to a discussion group of Israeli men who meet monthly under the guidance of a psychologist to talk about their well-being, their feelings, and how the situation in Israel affects their lives in the Netherlands.

The psychologist himself felt a need for contact with compatriots after 7 October. “I felt lonely. Alienated from people in Israel, because I haven’t experienced what they have. But also alienated from my surroundings in the Netherlands, who didn’t understand what I was going through.”

Victimhood

A WhatsApp group of over fifty Israelis working in the Dutch tech industry initially served primarily for networking. “After 7 October, it shifted to sharing personal experiences,” says one participant. “We also talk about antisemitism in the workplace. And about the hostile climate in the Netherlands, and certainly in Amsterdam, towards Israelis – a climate the media contributes to with accusations of genocide.”

Asaf Agranat (47), an IT professional who has lived in Amsterdam-West with his family since last summer, says he hasn't noticed any antisemitism so far. “When I say I’m from Israel, I don’t get strange reactions. The pro-Palestinian demonstrations fall under the right to protest. To a certain extent, I support the goals of the protesters. Israel has a tendency to wallow in a sense of victimhood.”

Other Israeli migrants are more cautious about revealing their background. “In Israel, everyone has Zionist stickers on their car,” says a Dutch Jew who lived in Israel for several years and returned just before the 7 October massacre. “Here, you think twice before visibly wearing a Jewish symbol. Israelis have to adapt in that respect. It’s confronting.”

What causes confusion for Dutch Jews is the often harsh criticism of Israel by the Israelis themselves

“If someone asks where I’m from, I always hesitate for a second: should I say it?” says his Israeli wife. An IT professional adds: “If I identify as Israeli, an awkward silence follows.”

Concealing backgrounds

The debate also plays out in the IT workers' WhatsApp group. “People often hide the fact that they served in the army,” says one participant. “Freelancers, in particular, keep a low profile. They conceal their background just to get a job.”

“Recently, I met the parents of a classmate of my daughter in Year 3,” another shares. “They asked: where are you from? You just know you’re about to set off a bomb.”

The desire for anonymity is further evidenced by the fact that employees of Dutch-Israeli organisations – whether a website or an Amsterdam welfare organisation – objected to even having their names mentioned in this article.

‘The bottom line is: we are one big family, especially now that we are under pressure’

What causes confusion for Dutch Jews is the often scathing criticism of Israel by the Israelis themselves. “They feel they have more of a right to speak out,” says someone from the Dutch Jewish community.

More assertive

“The Israelis feel that we are years behind in our thinking. They are also more assertive and less inclined to stay under the radar. In that sense, they are a reinforcement of the ranks,” says David Beesemer, who works on integrating the Amsterdam Jewish community with the Israeli one. “The bottom line is: we are one big family, especially now that we are under pressure.”

However, both Dutch and Israeli Jews speak of mutual friction. Israelis complain about the aloofness of Dutch Jews, while Dutch Jews perceive Israelis as arrogant and loud.

“The warmth of Israelis is different from that of the Dutch,” says the Dutch Jew who returned shortly before 7 October. “Israelis call Dutch Jews parve, Hebrew for food without any spice.”

Culture clash

Given the relatively young age of Israelis in the Netherlands, the changing composition of the Jewish community will first be felt in Jewish schools, the JPR predicted in its 2025 report. According to those involved, this is already the case, though some Israelis send their children to regular schools. At Rosj Pina – one of the two Jewish primary schools in Amsterdam – the number of pupils rose from 232 in 2017 to over 330. The Jewish secondary school, Maimonides, went from 140 pupils in 2021 to more than 200.

Not everyone is happy with the Israeli pupils. “They don’t have a bond with the Netherlands yet, they are a bit louder, and because of their language difficulties, they pull down the academic level,” says David Beesemer, echoing the complaints of Dutch parents. “I know Amsterdam parents who have taken their children out of school for that reason.”

He also speaks of a culture clash between the two groups. “The Israelis seek each other out, speak Hebrew among themselves, and are tougher. They live on a little island.”

Amsterdam Jews behave like Holocaust victims too often, says an Israeli woman who left Israel with her family a few days after 7 October. “Amsterdam Jews don’t understand why we left. We get challenged on it: why come here? Weren't you in the Promised Land?”

Inbar Hasson, who moved to the Netherlands fifteen years ago, tries to bridge the gap between the two groups. The effects of the Gaza war have provided an incentive. “Due to the demonisation of Israel, which often leads to antisemitism, the dividing lines between the two groups are blurring. The realisation is sinking in that we are in the same boat. When Israel is under fire, we all feel the consequences.”

Driver of emigration

The Israeli emigrants are mostly progressive. “Yes, that’s obviously bad for that movement in Israel,” says an Israeli in Haarlem. “For years in Israel, they’ve been saying: ‘The good people are leaving.’ These are also people who can afford it. They have jobs, passports. They are privileged.”

‘7 October’ is a driver of growing emigration and declining remigration in Israel. Rosita, a Turkish Jew who moved from Istanbul to Tel Aviv with her husband in 2017, left headlong on the day of the massacre with nothing but a bag of clothes. A few hours after the terror attack, they were back in Turkey. Later that same year, they moved to Amsterdam with their son, who was born in Tel Aviv.

He attends a public school here. “We don’t want a religious school where there is prayer. Besides, a Jewish school requires all sorts of security measures. And my son doesn’t speak Hebrew.”

‘Life is better here – in terms of education, healthcare, and a well-functioning government’

Economic conditions and Netanyahu’s attempts to gain more control over the Supreme Court are also driving emigration from Israel. The fact that nearly everyone in the Netherlands speaks English and the better work-life balance make the country attractive.

Security concerns in Israel

But the reason cited most often by the Israelis Het Parool spoke with is the security situation in their homeland. Asaf Agranat: “Every time I ran to the shelter, I asked myself: how can I explain this reality to my children when I can barely figure it out myself? And do I even want to?”

Israeli media often depict Europe as a place rife with antisemitism. “The idea is: Europe isn’t safe,” says an Israeli who has lived in the Netherlands for ten years. “The image is one-sided, but not entirely nonsensical. On the other hand, life is better here – in terms of education, healthcare, and a well-functioning government.”

Security concerns in Israel were heightened last summer by American airstrikes on Iran. It is no different with the current war. As an Israeli living in Amstelveen puts it: “Parents want their children to be able to lead a normal life: playing outside happily and not constantly having to run when the air-raid siren goes off.”

An Amsterdam Israeli who arrived a few days after 7 October puts it this way: “Israel is no place for children. We want them to be safe.”

For this article, Het Parool spoke with eleven emigrated Israelis, the vast majority of whom wish to remain anonymous for security reasons.

https://www.parool.nl/international/jewish-community-grows-with-arrival-of-israelis-amsterdam-jews-don-t-understand-why-we-left~b1ba64f4/

New YorkTimes: "A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today"

Joden zijn de meest onzekere mensen die ik ken. En zoals zo vaak leidt die existentiële onzekerheid tot veel agressief uiterlijk vertoon om die onzekerheid te maskeren.:

A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today

July 6, 2026

I have a letter that my father wrote to the rabbi at Temple Sinai in New Orleans, where he was a third-generation member, 60 years ago. We were part of the local Jewish establishment; our family had arrived in Louisiana from Germany back in 1836. I was 12, the age when Jewish boys would typically be preparing for a bar mitzvah.

My father was upset about a national publication for Jewish children, called World Over, that I had brought home from the temple’s Sunday school. He had two objections: First, World Over was “pretty strong Zionist or Israeli propaganda,” and second, it contained “open criticism of American policy in Vietnam.”

Not long after this, my Jewish education came to an end; maybe most American Jewish boys my age were going to be bar mitzvahs, but not I. For years after that, my family never did anything explicitly Jewish. Our preferred way of being Jewish was disappearing.

Back then, World Over represented the direction in which American Judaism was heading. Politically, most American Jews were liberal Democrats (and still are). Most were also ardently Zionist, and they considered that to be a liberal stance — to them it meant supporting a fragile social-democratic nation established as a home for refugees, which had wrested its independence from the British Empire and immediately had to defend itself against the hostile armies of the surrounding countries.

My father, who considered himself a Southern gentleman, was neither liberal nor Zionist, so he was deeply uncomfortable with the standard-issue American Jewish positions of the day.

Over the years, I have moved toward the way of being Jewish that my father rejected. But today, my way of being Jewish stands as another orphaned version of American Jewishness, as my father’s very different version was all those years ago. With jarring suddenness, it now seems no longer possible to be at once comfortably Jewish, and also Zionist, and also liberal, and also fully accepted outside the Jewish world.

Jewish America is in a kind of collective identity crisis, as the new contours of our place in the world, since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s brutally conducted subsequent wars, have emerged. Open antisemitism has awakened from one of its periodic slumbers.

I have spent the past few years researching my family’s history, going back to our roots in Germany in the late 18th century. What that has made clear to me is how fraught the project of Jewish membership in the wider world has always been.

For most of Jewish history, a great majority of Jews have lived in separate, self-contained, observant Jewish communities. Then, with the coming of the Enlightenment, in parts of Western Europe, Jews were gradually — the word will sound strange in 21st-century America — “emancipated,” meaning that the ubiquitous restrictions on where we could live, what work we could do, where we could study and what rights we had were lifted or at least loosened.

This process was always controversial, externally and internally. The relatively few non-Jews who were champions of Jewish emancipation — people like the German historian Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, the author of “On the Civil Improvement of the Jews” (1781) — usually saw the Jewish character as having been warped by centuries of oppression, and wanted Jews to change as the price of acceptance. We would adopt last names. We would cease to engage in our traditional occupations of peddling, trading and money lending. We would give up our custom of de facto self-regulation and submit to the full authority of the state.

Such opportunities were available, or even attractive, to only a few Jews. The traditional Jewish community, with its all-encompassing rituals and sense of solidarity, could be a comfortable place, one that not everyone longed to escape, if that became an option. “There were locks inside the ghetto gates in most cases before there were locks outside,” the historian Salo Baron wrote in a famous essay in 1928.

The familiar categories of Judaism — Reform, Conservative, Orthodox — arose, first in Europe and then in the United States, out of disagreements about exactly what post-Enlightenment Judaism would entail. Reform Judaism, aimed at revising Jewish practice so that it would seem less strange to outsiders and would be more consistent with prosperous non-Jewish life, immediately engendered, in reaction, the stricter versions of Judaism.

These disagreements among Jews were over profound questions, pitting particularism against universalism. Are we properly understood as a people, a proto-nation, with a highly distinctive way of life, or as another of the many ethnic groups in the American melting pot, one that happens also to have a religious tradition? Long before the establishment of the state of Israel, debates over Zionism were a way of arguing about this.

My father was an adherent of the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, the founding document of American Reform Judaism. One of its central precepts was this: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine … nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”

This renunciation of all-encompassing Jewish identity tied to a physical place was never especially popular with Eastern European-origin Jews who were then arriving in the United States and soon would become the American Jewish majority; back then, the idea of living as fully accepted Americans adhering to universal values was a fantasy that only prosperous German Jews could entertain. Even the Reform movement had dropped its opposition to Zionism by the late 1930s, because the rise of the Nazis made it obvious that the future of Jews in Europe was bleak.

In the New Orleans of my childhood, where change in all forms was not welcomed, we lived in an anachronistic Pittsburgh Platform bubble. Maintaining it was, increasingly, hard work: The Holocaust and Israel didn’t comport with our preferred version of the Jewish condition, so we tried not to talk about them. Elsewhere, Jewish America was overwhelmingly Zionist.

The American Jewish majority is now having its own struggle over the compatibility of Jewish identity and mainstream life. By the last decades of the 20th century, Jews whose families had come from Eastern Europe had become mainly middle class while continuing to think of themselves as being on the side of the underdog. (German Jews’ political comfort zone was something closer to elite liberalism, of a kind that is familiar today even as German Jews as a strong category are not.)

The old barriers that for decades had governed where you could live and work and study and socialize were falling; a 20th-century, American version of Jewish emancipation was underway. It has seemed for half a century or more that one could achieve — through being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant — the blended status that has persistently eluded Jews.

This set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and “Zionist” has become an epithet, something it’s unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles. Politicians running in Democratic primaries are routinely prompted to distance themselves from Israel, and, often, from the idea of an explicitly Jewish nation-state; in the Republican Party, politicians feel pressure from the extreme anti-Israel turn taken recently by conservatives like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, who command large audiences that include many of their voters.

From the outside, this may seem to be a problem with a straightforward solution: America’s old-line Jewish organizations need only drop their unqualified, criticism-silencing embrace of the Israeli government’s actions. Then younger-generation Jews can lead us into a new non-Zionist version of American Jewishness, one that regards Theodor Herzl’s embrace of political Zionism as a relatively recent and eminently correctable mistake in Jewish history. From the inside, though, the situation looks very different, and not nearly that simple.

I have made a decades-long journey from my exit from Temple Sinai to being an engaged member of a Conservative congregation in New York, which it’s fair to describe as observant and mainly on the left politically. The return to power of Benjamin Netanyahu, at the head of a far-right coalition, in 2022 was a devastating blow, compounded by his government’s failure to prevent the Oct. 7 attack and its conduct of the wars that followed.

But the idea that a psychological divorce from Israel is possible seems fanciful. Almost half of all Jews live there; many members of my congregation have Israeli friends and relatives. Most of us are regular visitors. It’s hard to imagine a week going by on our resolutely apolitical internal email list, heavily devoted to recommendations of plumbers or electricians, that doesn’t mention Israel as a routine aspect of life’s logistics.

Many American Jews grew up (unlike me) in a world of Jewish day schools, Jewish summer camps, gap years studying in Israel between high school and college, little blue tin boxes in which a few coins for Israel would be deposited just before the Sabbath. In many American Jewish families that fled Europe, it was the luck of the draw whether they wound up in the United States or Israel. Thriving synagogues where Israel isn’t mentioned, where the Israeli flag isn’t displayed, where the congregation doesn’t say a weekly prayer to the Jewish state, are rare, even in the Reform movement. This lived experience makes it clear why a Washington Post poll last year showed that three-quarters of American Jews agree that Israel is “vital for the long-term future of the Jewish people,” even as the poll respondents were also harshly critical of the Netanyahu government.

Most political movements fail. Zionism’s success in establishing a Jewish state wasn’t inevitable — nothing is — but it’s easier to understand in the context not only of the mass murder of Jews in Europe and, after World War II and into the 1970s, our expulsion from most of the Middle East and North Africa, but also of Jewish tradition.

The main story line of the Hebrew Bible is of an exiled people’s search for a homeland. Long before Herzl, Jews prayed facing Jerusalem, and at least notionally longed for the rebuilding of the Temple there. Zionism touched a deep collective yearning for self-determination, for self-protection, for freedom from perpetual outsider status. All this makes the idea that Israel and Zionism can easily be factored out of American Jewish life seem almost fantastical. It asks us to give up a portion of our souls.

The American liberal Jewish majority has rapidly entered an environment of increasing violent attacks on synagogues and other Jewish institutions, ubiquitous conspiratorial and obsessively anti-Israel demagogues with mass followings, heightened intramural tensions with Israelis, forced choices between Zionism and membership in the progressive world and often bitter private conflicts within congregations and families. Whatever sense of serene belonging we once had is rapidly disappearing. What do we do now?

It helps to begin by adjusting expectations. It’s an illusion to think that Jewishness can ever be entirely comfortable or that our identity can be made to comport seamlessly with some set of universal ideals. We are, historically and also in the present, much more outsiders than insiders. It should not be surprising to have that made manifest again now.

The way of being Jewish that I have found, after a long journey, is to be more observant, and more particularist, than I was raised to be. The way I was raised didn’t last, because it jettisoned too much ritual and too much solidarity. A life of Jewish practice and a sense of shared peoplehood is, for me, a foundational source of joy and structure and meaning, which in no way precludes discussions of all the issues that are roiling the Jewish world right now — which, believe me, we never stop arguing about.

My own advice for the perplexed among liberal American Jews would be, first, participate actively in the religious life of the community. That will connect you deeply to your people, back through time and everywhere in the world in the present. Second, and inextricably linked, study the Torah and the other essential texts.

There you will encounter anything but a world of simple moral verities. Our patriarchs and matriarchs were all deeply flawed people, and the consistent failings of our people were collective as well as individual. Understanding that makes for a much better vantage point from which to contemplate the situation of Israel today than being subjected to litmus tests about Zionism from people who don’t understand how deeply embedded it is in most Jewish hearts.

Like many aging sons, I find myself reflecting on my similarities and differences with my father. On the surface, we wound up in quite different places, geographically, politically and Jewishly. But we both, in the end, have been Jews who occupy a liminal space: almost belonging, but not quite. These days, that feels like an inescapable collective destiny.

Nicholas Lemann is the author of “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries.”

Source photographs by Bettmann, Ira Gay Sealy, Underwood Archives, Fairfax Media Archives, william karel and Nocella/Getty Images

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/opinion/jewish-america-identity.html?login=email&auth=login-email

"Israel no longer has the right to say it's acting in self-defense."

𝐌𝐚𝐥𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐦

@Malcolm_Pal9

"Israel no longer has the right to say it's acting in self-defense." NORMAN FINKELSTEIN.

8:56 p.m. · 8 jul. 2026

https://x.com/Malcolm_Pal9/status/2074930519184441740

Chris Hedges: "the state of America this 4th of July."

 

Chris Hedges

@ChrisLynnHedges

I recently went on

@AJEnglish

to discuss the state of America this 4th of July. The reality is that we are on a track towards despotic rule — not all of our democratic systems have crumbled entirely, but none ever do immediately. The shift to authoritarianism is a process that unfolds, and here in the United States, the structures holding in place our democratic systems have been being rolled back for a long time. With Trump, that roll back has only been accelerated.

11:06 p.m. · 7 jul. 2026

·

18,5K

Weergaven

https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/2074601031867265318