The beginning of a new academic year should be quite ordinary for an academic. You think about your courses, your students, your research, the people you work with. For me, and for many of my pro-Israel Jewish and non-Jewish colleagues, there is unfortunately now another layer to it. We cannot simply forget what has happened at Maastricht over the past three years. We have also learned a great deal from the way our universities and institutions responded. In moments of pressure, institutions reveal their priorities.

We have had masked protesters inside university buildings, occupations, disruptions of classes and events, and situations in which you could not even know who the people behind the masks were. That possibility has not disappeared. People can still enter university spaces with their faces covered, often without meaningful identification or intervention, while university officials tend to describe such incidents as disturbances to be managed rather than breaches of the normal conditions of academic life. Anti-Israel activists have learned that disruption works. They have created a form of deterrence because they understand that the university's overriding objective is often to restore quiet. If creating enough disorder produces concessions, restrictions or institutional caution, then disorder becomes an effective strategy.

I have had meetings with my faculty leadership and with people responsible for my personal safety. I asked for guidance about what I should do and was told that there were no clear guidelines, although these were supposedly being developed at the central level. Two years later, very little of practical significance has followed. For more than a year now, I have generally gone to my faculty when I need to teach, but otherwise I spend much less time there than I once did. That is not normal, and I do not pretend that it is.

But despite all this, those who hoped to intimidate people like me have failed in what I regard as their most important objective. I am not the frightened Jewish academic hiding from his university and colleagues, distancing himself from Israel or paying the required verbal price in the hope of being spared by antisemites. I was openly Jewish and openly Israeli before October 7, and I remain so now. I have never believed that the answer to hostility is to make yourself less visible in order to make other people more comfortable. Nor am I willing to accept the idea that somebody else gets to decide which parts of my identity are acceptable.

That is also why I regard the university's decision to sever or suspend academic relationships with Israeli universities because of their location in the Jewish state as an antisemitic policy. Others may disagree with that characterization, but I do not use the term lightly. Academic institutions should be judged according to what they do academically, not subjected to collective political exclusion because they are Israeli. I remain proudly Jewish and proudly Israeli, and I hope that when universities eventually revise these policies, they will do so before lasting damage has been done to their own academic standing and to relationships that took decades to build.

What concerns me even more, however, is what I see happening to students. I have students and younger people around me who have to think about questions that should have no place in a Dutch university: whether to say that they are Jewish, whether to say that they are Israeli, whether to wear something that identifies them as Jewish, whether speaking openly will change how classmates or lecturers perceive them. That troubles me more than what happens to me personally because I have the position, the experience and the independence to say what I think. A nineteen- or twenty-year-old student is in a very different position. Unfortunately, one lesson many Jewish students are learning from the university environment is that discretion about who they are is the safest form of social behavior.

That is why I do not think the central question should be whether I personally “feel safe.” Of course security matters, and I make sensible judgments about where I go and what is happening around me. But this is not principally a psychological question. It is an institutional one. Can a university maintain the same rules when the person concerned is Jewish or Israeli? Can a Jewish event take place without the institution beginning to treat the event itself as the problem when protesters try to prevent it? Can academics speak publicly without politically selective administrative scrutiny? Can students enter a classroom without calculating which part of themselves they should leave outside?

I do not expect Maastricht University to be pro-Israel. I do not expect my colleagues or students to agree with me about Israel, Gaza or anything else. Universities exist precisely because people disagree. What I expect is something much more basic: equal rules, equal enforcement, academic freedom, protection of teaching and discussion, and confidence that political intimidation will not determine who is allowed to speak and under what conditions.

And despite everything, I still very much enjoy teaching. Most students are not activists. They come to university because they want to learn. In fact, the classroom has become more important to me for precisely that reason. It is one of the places where you can still insist that evidence matters, that arguments have to be defended, that disagreement is normal, and that nobody has to apologize for who they are before entering a discussion.

So I begin this academic year without any illusions about what has happened and without pretending that it has been acceptable. But I also begin it with no intention whatsoever of becoming smaller because of it. I will teach, research, write and speak, and I will do so openly as the same Israeli and Jewish academic I was before October 7. That should be completely unremarkable at a Dutch university. The fact that it has become necessary to say so is itself part of the problem.

I have lived in the Netherlands long enough that I no longer look at it simply as an Israeli observing another country. I teach Dutch students, work inside Dutch institutions and follow Dutch politics closely. What strikes me today is a profound contradiction: the Netherlands remains one of the wealthiest, safest and best-organized societies in the world, yet it increasingly struggles to govern itself. The problem is not a lack of resources, expertise or institutions. It is the growing difficulty of converting all that capacity into decisions and outcomes.

You see it everywhere. A wealthy country has a housing shortage approaching 400,000 homes. Migration has dominated politics for years without producing a durable settlement. Groningen, the benefits scandal, nitrogen, asylum reception and the electricity grid are very different problems, but there is a family resemblance: enormous administrative activity, elaborate procedures and endless consultation, yet remarkable difficulty actually closing a file. The Dutch state has become extremely good at processing problems and less convincing at solving them.

That is reflected in political trust. In 2025, only 21 percent expressed substantial trust in politicians and 25 percent in the Tweede Kamer, the lowest levels in the CBS series, while trust in civil servants and municipalities remained considerably higher. That distinction is revealing. The Dutch have not simply lost confidence in the state. Many have lost confidence in the ability of national politics to set priorities, make difficult choices and accept responsibility for the consequences.

The old Dutch genius was compromise. But compromise worked particularly well during periods in which politics could distribute gains. Increasingly, Dutch politics is about scarcity: housing, healthcare personnel, electricity-grid capacity, physical space, migration, agriculture, climate, defense and an ageing population. These objectives cannot all be maximized simultaneously. Eventually somebody has to choose, and somebody has to hear no. A political culture exceptionally skilled at accommodation finds that much more difficult.

And this creates a temptation: when governing becomes difficult, symbolic politics becomes attractive. That is one reason I think Israel occupies a disproportionate amount of Dutch political attention. I do not mean that Israel and Gaza are unimportant. Of course Dutch politicians should address serious international questions. But Israel offers something that housing, migration, healthcare or Groningen do not: a high symbolic return at comparatively low domestic political cost. You can pass a motion, demand sanctions, suspend cooperation, prohibit a product or issue a condemnation. You can demonstrate decisiveness and moral seriousness immediately. You cannot build 400,000 houses with a parliamentary motion, repair administrative failure with a declaration, or solve the pressures of an ageing society through a boycott.

I do not assume cynicism on the part of individual politicians. The structural incentive is more interesting. A political system struggling to demonstrate agency at home naturally gravitates towards arenas in which agency can be displayed more cheaply abroad. Israel has become one of those arenas. Moral positioning begins to substitute for governing.

Even what happened with Eurovision is telling. AVROTROS withdrew over Israel's continued participation and has already announced that it will remain outside the 2027 contest. Whatever one's position on Israel, one does not need to be a sociologist to see the significance of a song contest becoming yet another institution expected to adjudicate geopolitics. Universities, broadcasters, cultural institutions and other organizations increasingly feel compelled to demonstrate not merely competence within their own sphere, but the correct moral position on conflicts far outside it. Politics begins to colonize institutions whose original purpose was something else.

There are quieter signals too. More Netherlands-born people are leaving than returning. I would certainly not call that an exodus, because people emigrate for many reasons. But combined with housing problems, declining political trust and uncertainty among younger people, it deserves attention. A wealthy society should ask why material success increasingly coexists with weaker confidence that the future at home will be better.

This is also how I understand what has happened around Israel and Dutch Jews since October 7. Israel did not create these Dutch problems. It exposed them. It entered a society already struggling with authority, institutional confidence, identity, migration and increasingly moralized politics.

So I would not describe the Netherlands as a society in decline. That is too easy. I see something more interesting and potentially more serious: a highly successful society whose governing habits were developed for conditions that are disappearing. Consensus becomes less effective when scarcity requires prioritization. Procedure becomes dangerous when it replaces responsibility. Tolerance becomes fragile when differences can no longer simply be negotiated away. And moral politics becomes particularly seductive when practical government becomes difficult.

That, to me, is the Dutch paradox today: a country with enormous capacity that increasingly struggles to choose, and a political culture that sometimes compensates for its difficulty in exercising power at home by demonstrating virtue abroad. Israel has become one of the clearest places where that substitution can be seen.

What concerns me about Dutch politics toward Israel is not criticism. States criticize one another all the time, including close partners. The more serious problem is that Israel is increasingly discussed in Dutch politics through a very narrow moral frame, while the strategic relationship is pushed into the background.

That is difficult to reconcile with the Netherlands’ own description of the world. The current government says that Dutch security depends increasingly on cyber resilience, intelligence, technological capacity, defense innovation, counterterrorism and reducing strategic dependencies. It also says Europe needs stronger partnerships with trusted countries in precisely these areas. The Dutch government itself identifies cooperation with Israel in cybersecurity, high technology, life sciences and innovation as beneficial to Dutch competitiveness and knowledge capacity.

That should produce a serious strategic debate. Instead, Israel is increasingly discussed in terms of the next sanction, restriction, suspension or boycott. The Netherlands has initiated European sanctions against Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and is pursuing further measures; the present coalition agreement also explicitly maintains sanctions against members and associates of the Netanyahu government until specified conditions are met. Parliament has repeatedly debated broader economic and personal sanctions, including proposals in July 2026 that exposed significant disagreement even among the governing parties.

The analytical problem is not whether any individual measure can be defended. It is what happens when measures accumulate into a governing logic. At some point a relationship stops being considered in terms of what both countries need from one another and starts being considered primarily in terms of how much pressure one side can exert on the other.

That is especially striking now. Europe is rearming because of Russia. Iran is treated by the Dutch government itself as a source of subversive and security threats. Cyberwarfare, terrorism, technological dependence and intelligence capacity are becoming central questions of European security. These are exactly the fields in which Israel possesses capabilities, experience and technology that are relevant to Dutch and European interests.

Foreign policy therefore requires a longer memory than the news cycle. The question is not only what statement the Netherlands wishes to make today. It is what relationships the Netherlands will need five, ten or twenty years from now.

There is another issue that I think Dutch politicians should examine very carefully. October 7 was not simply an atrocity. It was also a strategic gambit by Hamas. One purpose of terrorism is to influence the behavior of audiences far beyond the immediate victims. If the long-term sequence is that a terrorist attack produces a war, and the war subsequently produces growing diplomatic isolation of the state that was attacked, then that sequence becomes part of the strategic environment. Other actors observe incentives too. That does not determine what Dutch policy should be, but responsible policymakers have to include it in their calculation.

The Netherlands has traditionally understood something that small trading states cannot afford to forget: foreign policy is not a morality play. It is the disciplined management of interests, alliances, risks and principles in a world in which none of them can be considered separately.

What I find striking about the Israel debate is therefore not that Dutch politicians have moral views. They should. It is that moral judgment can sometimes appear to replace strategic analysis rather than inform it. The debate asks repeatedly what message should be sent to Israel. It asks much less often what message Dutch policy sends to Hamas, Iran, other armed organizations, potential partners, or states watching how Europe treats allies under attack.

There is a simple test for serious foreign policy: after taking a measure, ask not only whether it expressed your values, but what it changed, what incentives it created, what capabilities it weakened, what relationships it damaged, and whether the Netherlands is better positioned as a result. That is the standard I would apply to Israel as I would to any other state.

My concern is therefore not that Dutch politics has become insufficiently friendly toward Israel. It is more fundamental: Israel has increasingly become an arena for Dutch moral positioning at precisely the moment when the international environment requires harder strategic thinking. A foreign policy that knows what it wishes to condemn today but has not seriously considered which relationships it will need tomorrow is not strategy. It is politics without a time horizon.

What concerns me is not simply hostility toward Israel. It is the extent to which Israel has become an exception to some of the intellectual rules by which Dutch and Western society normally claim to operate.

The story often begins when Israel responds. October 7, the hostages, Hamas's strategy, Iran and the regional environment gradually recede, while Israel remains at the center as if it alone possesses meaningful agency. Once causality is organized that way, the moral conclusion is largely determined before the analysis begins.

The same happens with evidence. Allegations against Israel can move very quickly from claim to headline and from headline to accepted frame. Corrections rarely travel with the same force. Israeli evidence is often discounted precisely because it is Israeli. The issue is then no longer merely disagreement about facts. The identity of the actor has begun to determine the evidentiary standard.

Israel is also frequently judged against an imagined form of warfare in which military necessity, uncertainty, enemy strategy and tragic consequences somehow disappear. Civilian suffering is terrible, but suffering itself cannot tell us what objective was pursued, what alternatives existed, what precautions were possible or what the adversary was doing. When those questions disappear, destruction itself becomes proof of guilt.

That is what demonization looks like intellectually. Israel becomes a moral category into which almost anything can be inserted: colonialism, racism, genocide, oppression, and so on. And eventually the framework becomes unfalsifiable. If Israel acts, it confirms the accusation. If it refrains, that is tactical. If it presents evidence, that is propaganda. If contrary evidence appears, that is manipulation. A proposition that survives every conceivable fact is no longer analysis. It is belief.

The danger is that the principles being weakened here are not Israeli principles. They are liberal ones: evidence before judgment, equal standards, individual rather than collective responsibility, historical accuracy, and the willingness to allow facts to overturn conclusions. You cannot suspend these standards for one disliked country or one disliked group and assume they will remain untouched everywhere else.

And the categories do travel. Jews in the Netherlands are asked to condemn, dissociate or explain themselves. Israeli identity becomes something requiring justification. Jewish history is inverted through Nazi analogies. Jews are effectively asked to pass a political test in order to remain socially acceptable. Europe should recognize the danger in that immediately. One of the central achievements of the post-war liberal order was precisely the rejection of collective guilt.

Journalism has a special responsibility here because its purpose is to preserve distinctions when public emotion tries to erase them. An allegation is not a fact. A civilian death does not by itself establish intent. A terrible outcome does not tell us what alternatives existed. An enemy does not cease to have agency because acknowledging its choices makes the story less morally satisfying. If those distinctions collapse on the issue where public passions are strongest, journalism fails exactly where it is most necessary.

So I see the fixation on the IDF as a test for Dutch and Western society. Can we retain causality when the images are terrible? Can we require evidence when an allegation confirms what we already believe? Can we apply the same standards when doing so is unpopular?

Western values are not tested when we apply them to people we admire. They are tested when we are tempted to create an exception. And once a society becomes comfortable creating exceptions to its own principles, the question is no longer only who the exception was created for. It is who will be placed inside it next.

Yes, I am in contact with other Israeli and Jewish academics in the Netherlands, and there is considerable recognition when we compare experiences. The details differ by university, faculty and personal position, but certain patterns recur: greater caution about speaking openly, uncertainty about how institutions will react when Israel is involved, and the sense that rules that appear clear in ordinary circumstances can suddenly become negotiable under political pressure.

People respond differently. Some confront institutions directly, some withdraw from the subject, and some try to negotiate arrangements that allow them to continue working. I understand that instinct, although there is a danger when negotiation itself legitimizes the new reality. An institution can then point to consultation and dialogue while the underlying question, why an Israeli or Jewish academic had to negotiate for ordinary treatment in the first place, quietly disappears.

But I think the larger problem is not individual strategy. It is fragmentation. Israeli and Jewish academics in the Netherlands are scattered across institutions, disciplines and cities. There is no strong national academic network that routinely collects experiences, shares information, identifies recurring institutional practices, provides expertise or speaks when a pattern becomes visible. As a result, people often encounter the same problem separately and experience it as an individual case.

That matters enormously. An isolated academic enters a meeting with a university administration as one employee describing one experience. The university has institutional memory, lawyers, communications staff, procedures and knowledge accumulated across cases. The individual usually knows only what happened to him or her. Without networks, the asymmetry of information alone is substantial.

It also allows institutions to individualize structural problems. One person experienced a misunderstanding. Another had a difficult department. A third encountered an unfortunate incident. Each case can be explained separately, and therefore the pattern never quite has to be acknowledged. What is missing is the infrastructure that allows people to say: no, this has happened at several universities, in similar ways, under similar procedures, with similar consequences.

Networks also matter for younger academics. Senior people can speak publicly with relatively little professional risk. A PhD candidate, postdoc or temporary lecturer lives in a world of supervisors, references, networks and future appointments. They may therefore become silent long before anyone formally asks them to be silent. Academic freedom can erode very efficiently through anticipation.

And there is another reason this matters. Jewish and Israeli academics should not have to organize merely in order to defend themselves. A serious network could also be intellectually productive: exchanging research, building collaborations, mentoring younger scholars and strengthening connections with colleagues abroad. The fact that collective organization becomes necessary for protection is itself evidence that something in the academic environment has changed.

So yes, there are common experiences. But what strikes me most is how often people are still dealing with them individually. When recurring experiences remain private, institutions can treat them as exceptions. Once people are connected, the same experiences become information. And information is much harder to administratively explain away.

I would not pretend that there is one Israeli academic view of the Netherlands. Israeli universities are large, argumentative institutions, and academics differ enormously. But I do think something has changed in the reputation of Dutch universities.

Dutch science still has considerable prestige. Israeli researchers know that the Netherlands has excellent universities, strong laboratories, serious scholars and an unusually international academic system. None of that disappears because of political disagreements.

What is being damaged is something different: institutional trust. For an academic partnership, scientific quality is only one requirement. You also need to know that the institution on the other side will remain a reliable partner when political pressure arrives. And that is precisely where Dutch universities have created uncertainty.

Maastricht suspended its strategic relationship with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The University of Amsterdam decided not to enter new institutional collaborations with Israeli universities and has sought possibilities to withdraw from existing Horizon collaborations. These are not marginal developments. They tell Israeli academics that a partnership that was academically valuable yesterday can become politically unacceptable tomorrow, not because the quality of the research changed, but because the nationality of the institution became politically contested.

That changes behavior long before any formal boycott reaches an individual scholar. If I am an Israeli scientist choosing between several European partners for a ten-year project, I now have to ask a question that previously would have seemed absurd: will this university still stand behind the collaboration if activists occupy a building or the political climate changes? Once that question has entered the calculation, reputational damage has already occurred.

And there is an irony here. Universities often defend these decisions by distinguishing between institutions and individual academics. But universities are institutions. Laboratories need agreements, students need exchanges, researchers need infrastructure, grants require consortia. You cannot progressively exclude the institution while reassuring the individuals inside it that they remain welcome and expect nothing fundamental to change.

What Israeli academics also notice, I think, is selectivity. Dutch universities cooperate across a world full of war, authoritarianism and grave human-rights problems. Yet Israel has become the object of an extraordinary infrastructure of committees, ethical assessments, special procedures and political scrutiny. Even when universities insist that they are applying universal principles, the visible concentration on one country inevitably raises the question of whether those principles are actually universal in application.

That matters because academic reputation is accumulated slowly and can be lost surprisingly quickly. A university may think it is sending a political signal to Israel. Israeli academics may receive a different signal: that Dutch academic cooperation is conditional upon domestic political circumstances over which neither scholar has any control.

The long-term consequence may therefore be much less dramatic than a public boycott and much more serious. Good researchers simply stop calling. Consortia form elsewhere. Students choose other destinations. Relationships that took twenty years to build are not renewed. There is no announcement, no demonstration and no headline. The network quietly reroutes itself.

That is the danger Dutch universities may underestimate. Scientific excellence can survive political activism. Institutional reliability cannot survive indefinitely once partners begin to believe that academic relationships are provisional.

And when trust disappears from an international academic relationship, no committee can vote it back into existence.

Yes, I think that is an important difference. Germany certainly has not solved antisemitism in academia, but Jewish academics there have built something that is still largely missing in the Netherlands: collective infrastructure. The Netzwerk Jüdischer Hochschullehrender was founded after October 7 as an organized voice for Jewish academics in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. German universities are also developing a wider institutional architecture around the problem. The German Rectors' Conference now runs a federally supported network connecting university antisemitism officers, with the explicit aim of sharing knowledge, building expertise and developing institutional responses.

That matters because a network does much more than provide emotional support. It creates institutional memory. If something happens at one university, people elsewhere know about it. Patterns can be recognized. Legal and administrative knowledge accumulates. Younger academics know whom to call. University leaders also know that they are no longer dealing with one isolated member of staff whose experience can be treated as a local misunderstanding.

The Netherlands does not yet have anything comparable at that scale, at least not that I am aware of. We have Jewish organizations, informal contacts and individuals who know one another, but academically the landscape remains fragmented. That creates a serious asymmetry. Universities are organized institutions, while the academics dealing with them are usually isolated individuals. And isolation has consequences. If ten academics at ten universities encounter variations of the same problem but never compare notes, there are ten incidents. Once they are connected, there may be one pattern. That difference is enormous.

A network also changes the psychology. Younger scholars do not have to decide alone whether speaking will damage their careers. Senior academics do not have to reinvent the same arguments or procedures at every institution. And universities can no longer so easily convert structural questions into private conversations behind closed doors.

But I would want such a network to be more than a defensive organization. Jewish academic life should not be organized entirely around antisemitism. It should also create intellectual exchange, mentoring, research collaboration, links with Israeli universities and a stronger presence of Jewish scholarship in Dutch academic life.

That, to me, is the real lesson from Germany. A community becomes much harder to marginalize once its members can convert individual experience into shared knowledge, and shared knowledge into institutional presence. The Netherlands has many Jewish academics. What it still largely lacks is the structure that allows them to act as an academic community.

I have lived in the Netherlands for many years. My academic career is here, I have taught thousands of students here, and I have invested a great deal in Dutch academic and public life. So I do intend to stay. But staying somewhere is not the same as belonging there, and institutions should understand that distinction. People can remain physically present while gradually withdrawing their trust, their identification and their willingness to invest themselves in the place around them. Formal departure often comes much later.

That is also why, if you ask me what I wish for, my answer is perhaps counterintuitive: I do not want to go back to October 6. October 6 now represents a world that felt more comfortable because we knew less about it. October 7 and everything that followed did not create all the weaknesses we have seen in our universities, institutions and society. It exposed them. We learned what happens when institutions are placed under pressure, which principles survive, which become negotiable, who remains protected and who is expected to adapt. Once you know that, returning to October 6 would not mean returning to innocence. It would mean returning to ignorance.

There is something precise about this in Proverbs 28:13. King Solomon, the wisest of men, gives us essentially a two-stage model: recognition and repair. What is concealed cannot be repaired. First you acknowledge what happened; then you change what produced it.

Recognition comes first, and that is the stage institutions are often most tempted to avoid. It requires more than saying that mistakes were made or that everyone went through a difficult period or “learning curves”. It requires asking harder questions. What did we tolerate? Where did intimidation work? When were rules applied differently because enforcing them had become politically inconvenient? Why did Jewish and Israeli students and academics begin calculating whether visibility was worth the cost? Why were Israeli universities subjected to forms of exclusion that would have seemed extraordinary in other cases? Which decisions were wrong, and who was responsible for them? Without that recognition, what is called reconciliation is often only amnesia with better language.

Then comes repair. Repair is not another statement about inclusion, another working group, or another declaration that lessons have been learned. It means reversing policies that should not have been adopted. Restoring equal standards where they were abandoned. Rebuilding academic relationships damaged by political pressure. Establishing rules that are clear before the next crisis and enforcing them when enforcement becomes uncomfortable. It means ensuring that institutional consequences fall on those who violate academic norms rather than on those whose presence becomes controversial because somebody threatens disruption.

That is what I would like to see in the Netherlands more broadly as well. Not a recovery of the comforting national self-image that existed before October 7, but something more mature. The Netherlands has now been given information about itself: about the limits of tolerance without enforcement, about the vulnerability of consensus to intimidation, about the difference between commemorating antisemitism and recognizing it when it appears in contemporary language, and about how quickly institutions can translate political pressure into administrative normality. The dangerous response would be to restore appearances and call that recovery.

Personally, I have no intention of becoming less Jewish, less Israeli or less outspoken in order to make that restoration easier. Academically, I want to continue teaching, researching and writing. But I also think universities themselves now deserve much more scrutiny. They are not merely places from which society is observed. They are institutions with interests, incentives, hierarchies, blind spots and the capacity to fail.

So yes, I intend to stay. But I do not want the Netherlands of October 6 back. October 6 was not a better reality. It was a less informed one. We know more now. The only serious question is whether institutions will use that knowledge.