After my recent visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau with more than two hundred and fifty European rabbis, I was asked the (usual) question of how it had affected me. My (usual) answer was: not much! My visit to the Hamas Tunnel replica in Eindhoven also left me cold. Am I insensitive, I wondered, is there something wrong with me? Or am I refusing to put myself in the gas chambers and in the Hamas Tunnel, to protect myself from the hell of emotions that would overwhelm me and seriously impair my normal functioning? The answer is clear: emotional self-protection. And yet I go at least once a year, and this year even twice, to see the mountains of human hair, shoes and glasses to show European leaders and politicians what systematic indoctrination and anti-Semitism can lead to. But whether the message gets across depends on the willingness to see and hear. And that is why I am not so sure whether such a trip to Poland is always meaningful for everyone if it has been decided in advance to keep your eyes and ears tightly shut… The same applies to the Replication Hamas Tunnel that stood on 18 September Square in Eindhoven on Friday and will also appear in Wageningen and Maastricht in the coming weeks. The hope is, of course, that people will wake up, but I doubt that many of the sleeping and looking-away majority will open their eyes. And in the meantime, the indoctrination and brainwashing continue unabated. An intelligent and well-educated politician can tell me without batting an eyelid that it has been scientifically proven that the Hebrew language actually belongs to the Palestinian people but was hijacked by the Jews, and that it has also been scientifically proven that the Palestinians are actually the real Jews, but that their Jewish identity has been taken away from them by the current Jews, who therefore turn out not to be Jews. Following this line of reasoning, the current Imam would actually be a rabbi, but whether I am a scientifically proven Imam is not yet entirely clear to me. But it could well be! Does the name Bart Heller ring a bell? If you live in Hilversum, it certainly should.
He was a councillor who resigned because the chief rabbi had declared him an anti-Semite. Then the newspapers said that the chief rabbi had retracted his statement, while the chief rabbi, that is, me, categorically denied ever having accused him of anti-Semitism, and then he was reinstated as councillor. We are now almost friends, and yesterday Bart visited us again, and I just received a WhatsApp message from him:
Hi Binyomin, It was good to catch up with you yesterday afternoon. It’s great that we can have these conversations, despite our profound differences of opinion – or perhaps precisely because of those differences. 😉 The anti-Semitic threats and intimidation you mentioned are disturbing. The debate must be allowed to take place, as heated as it may be, but intimidation and threats have no place in our free, democratic society. Unacceptable! Best regards, Bart.
Meanwhile, I receive a text message with an urgent request to make sure I mention in my speeches and articles that our world is currently full of horrific wars in Yemen, with half a million deaths in the last ten years, 150,000 victims in Sudan, hundreds of thousands in Syria, etc. When Arabs exterminate each other, there is silence and the world looks away.
But does it make sense to mention this? Will anyone listen to me? At the Replica Hamas Tunnel, I met roughly three types of visitors: category one are members of the Jewish community and pro-Israel Christians. They emerge from the tunnel shocked and emotionally moved. Group two sees what it is all about and walks on, uninterested and visibly irritated, because they worship from the River to the Sea. Group three consists of young people who accept the friendly invitation to enter the tunnel, but know absolutely nothing about Jews, Israel, Hamas or Gaza. It is as if they come from another planet, not from this world.
What are we doing about education? Unknown makes unloved. But when schools refuse to pay attention to the Dutch war years of 1940-1945, when a tour of Jewish Zutphen is cancelled, when my participation in a panel on intimacy for the medical faculty of Leiden University is , and if we have seriously failed to point out to the new Dutch citizens in the asylum seekers’ centres that in the Netherlands women are not objects and Jews, dissidents or fellow human beings with a different sexual orientation, then we should not be surprised that the Netherlands has ended up where it is today… My friend Bart completely agrees.
Fortunately, it looks like it’s going to be a beautiful sunny day today, and I’ve already checked in for my flight to Serbia tomorrow morning. But don’t worry, by the time you read this diary, I’ll be back in my beautiful and exceptionally tolerant Netherlands.
