Jewish community leaders in the Netherlands issued a plaintive warning on Thursday concerning the continuing rise of antisemitism in the country, declaring: “We have had enough.”

In common with other EU member states, antisemitism has risen precipitously in the Netherlands since the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel, with an 800 percent increase in the number of incidents recorded in the weeks immediately following the terrorist organization’s atrocities. Approximately 30,000 Jews live in the Netherlands.

Amazing, isn’t it? On October 7, 3,000 Hamas killers smashed into Israel on motorcycles, cars, and paragliders. They attacked a Nova dance party, and 22 kibbutzim. They smashed in the heads of babies with rifle butts, they burned children alive, they gang-raped, tortured, and murdered young women, they sliced the breasts off women and the genitalia off men, they gouged out eyes, they murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, and after all that, what was the result? 

After a few weeks of expressions of solidarity with, and sympathy for, Israel, the world turned on Israel once the IDF had entered northern Gaza. Overnight, the Jewish state became the villain, while Hamas, that had committed all those unspeakable crimes, became the darling of anti-Israel protests on campuses and in the streets of major cities. 

For Hamas’ atrocities were forgotten; the terror group was seen as the chief defender of the Palestinian “resistance,” against the apartheid settler-colonial genocidal state of Israel.

High profile incidents this year [in the Netherlands] have included an angry demonstration by pro-Hamas activists outside a new museum dedicated to the Holocaust, the disruption of a concert by a popular Dutch singer who has family ties to Israel, and the vicious harassment of a Jewish woman resident in an Amsterdam suburb by neighbors who discovered that her daughter serves in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Speaking to the newspaper De Telegraaf, Chanan Hertzberger — the chair of the CJO Jewish communal organization — revealed that his son had been beaten up by antisemites after he played in a soccer match. “Our youth is no longer safe at educational institutions: they are canceled, attacked, intimidated,” Hertzberger said. 

“It is rife and we have had enough. We are normal Dutch people and also want to be considered and treated as such. Our civil liberties are at stake; more and more Jews feel threatened and intimidated and are hiding Jewish symbols.”

Hertzberger slammed Dutch politicians for offering assurances in private but doing little to stem the antisemitic tide in public. “Where are the Ministers of Education, Mariëlle Paul and Robbert Dijkgraaf?” he asked. 

He also criticized former deputy prime minister Wouter Koolmees, who took over as the CEO of Netherlands Railways (NS) last October, for failing to prevent supporters of Hamas from blockading 15 train stations around the country in a series of protests during January and February.

“I was in contact with Koolmees about the sit-ins at the stations. He shows good will, but cannot do anything about it, he says. But can he at least openly say that he has major problems with those actions?” Hertzberger continued.

That might lead to voters demanding that the government take much firmer steps, both to remove the demonstrators, and to punish them with prison sentences and steep fines that are likely to change their behavior. But publicly, Koolmees said nothing.