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Interview

Questions for interview with
Dr. Eliyahu Sapir

The new academic year starts. What does this mean for you as an Israeli scholar at a Dutch university, the University Maastricht (UM), of course also in view of your former experiences at UM?

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.

How do you look as an Israeli citizen at the present Dutch society?

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.

And how do assess Dutch politics, especially with regard to the relationship with the Jewish State?

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.

Please give your comment on the obsession by Dutch activists and also Dutch media on the IDF, a serious case of pure demonization of the normal self-defence of a sovereign state, in short again a monstrous example of naked antisemitism.

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

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J.S. Hoogesteger

2 maanden geleden

Dank u wel mevrouw, dat u zich in het openbaar uitspreekt tegen het antisemitisme. U bent heel moedig. Het is niet te bevatten wat voor “narigheid” er tegenwoordig is in dit Nederland en ik zie de toekomst zeker niet rooskleurig tegemoet. Met vriendelijke groet,
Janneke Hoogesteger

MCJAD VAN DROOGENBROECK

5 maanden geleden

Waarom heeft Amanda mij @X geblokt
aldaar is mijn naam ELF

Sybren Singelsma

9 maanden geleden

Geachte mevrouw Kluveld,

Mijn naam is Sybren Singelsma, historicus, en auteur van het boek De Wrede Vrede.https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fuitgeverijaspekt.nl%2Fproduct%2Fde-wrede-vrede%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBExQjBCeWVJSGdFMGsxNldQSHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5X4k9slofQRsxOc40_NJm_5lP6vBAXT8ob-1j6sG7xTdbbSlwSZjo65szdYA_aem__CyOOy6bCCFBmdoNxwVrmQ&h=AT1cWBpoXETi8PoVMF6r9FO-wIzgV-txgTs59dbH4Vhvtmk72HaKFsDF2-hzYeFYCYpSa7IXjEmMDZv70yOyGpPxfS6h4OXiBaWMbJErDsgaUIqHO2jFXnQrrhJCZpo2Aje94MCIJ5G-8tqECsAntYDYyR1hph2Hvwfl&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT0AZhof06FvxJ7V4ch7N6nTIST8S-3O02mx8m2SmzHqb9i05QeSKEgxuwjg3hiS5lVZoE9Tf6j1UorzSwQccRunkbUE9SWX9bgYjsgyGQ2zMghldYe223chzkaC7DI9iYrvYmTH0ZZAO3knZYqRoF38_CKgR377LmZ56G6YhCw9zbDmyZfl0oayo8u_gysLYrfK1trl4lpO9LefisqW6DM
Ik ga hierin uitgebreid in op 2000 jaar antisemitisme en waarom de holocaust geen incident is maar prodcut van de Europese cultuur. Wellicht iets voor uw site. Hartelijke groet, Sybren Singelsma

Joosje Asser

11 maanden geleden

Bij buitensluiten begint de ellende.
Ik ben ervaringsdeskundige in deze.
Mijn ervaringen zou ik graag willen delen

Daniel Smink

een jaar geleden

Emeritus PKN, niet alleen verbonden met het land Israel, ook met het Joodse volk, niet te scheiden van elkaar. Eens zullen de Gemeente uit de volkeren en het Joodse volk een eenheid zijn,nu al nemen wij een voorschot daarop.

H.A. Samsom

een jaar geleden

Ik sta van harte achter Israël ook al gaan er ook daar wel dingen mis. Het is en blijft Gods volk.

Helena Hageman

een jaar geleden

Vergelding of vergeving..waar kiezen wij Christenen voor?
*May the wicked be shamed for slandering me, but i will talk of Your instructions* Psalm119:78

mark verrips

een jaar geleden

Ik ondersteun de oproep om onopgeefbaar verbonden te blijven met israel maar mis de moeite met het regereingsbeleid om palestijnse gebieden te ontruimen

H.P. schonevel

een jaar geleden

God is getrouw!

Huub van 't Hart

een jaar geleden

Als natuurvereniging KNNV Natuurlijk Rotterdam steunen wij het besluit om geen medewerking te verlenen aan de bouw van studentenwoningen oo de Joodse Begraafplaats. We vonden het toch al geen goed idee om een flat zo dicht op de begraafplaats te bouwen. Wat ons betreft blijft het een groene locatie. Net zozeer zijn wij tegen het vernietigen van ATV Kweeklust naast de Joodse begraafplaats in ruil voor de komst van sportvelden. Ook dat is een aantasting van de rust op de begraafplaats. Het weghalen van de Groene gordel rond de Joodse Begraafplaats maakt deze kwetsbaar voor aanvallen en vernielingen. Bovendien zijn ATV Kweeklust, Joodse Begraafplaats en ATV Toepad groene Parels van biodiversiteit van de stadsnatuur van Rotterdam. Handen af.

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Via onderstaande button komt u in de webwinkel van Nationaal Monument Kamp Amersfoort. Daar kunt u het boek Het vergeten verhaal van de Joodse gevangenen van Kamp Amersfoort bestellen. U steunt daar verder onderzoek mee.

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