Her diadem, her jacket, her sandals, her bag: everything to Sonja Haauet is red, referring to Sunday’s third ‘red line protest’ on Sunday. The 74-year-old former teacher Dutch demonstrates on Thursday with a dozen others for the station of Zaandam-like two years every week. They wave with Palestinian flags, drummed on brought cooking pots and show photos of emaciated children to passers -by.
Indignation about the genocide remains necessary, says Hauet. She raises her hands: “Gaza is the greatest moral matter of our time! Of course, benefits and the price of the gas are also important, but babies are killed here. How is this not the most important subject in the election campaign?” And yes, that also blames the PvdA, the party of which she has been ‘in heart and soul’ for decades, currently also a board member at PvdA Zaanstad. At the Red Line Protest, she expects the presence of ‘all decent parties’.
Sunday’s red line demonstration is a march through Amsterdam, from the Museumplein. In the middle of the election campaign, the dozens of social and aid organizations behind the protest hope for an even higher turnout than in the two previous editions, which attracted around 100,000 and 150,000 participants respectively. Does this kind of mass protest make sense? What can the Netherlands undertake against Israel? And how have citizens’ views shifted in recent months?
Attitude of the Dutch
More and more Dutch people reject the attitude of the government with regard to Israel: 59 percent in April, 65 percent in September. This is apparent from Ipsos I&O research. The number of Dutch people who feel “involved” in the conflict is also increasing. “The cabinet pretends to do something with that feeling in society,” says Oxfam Novib director Michiel Servaes, one of the red line organizers. “There are two Israeli ministers on a sanction list. But those are small steps, actually nothing has changed. The Netherlands still buys massive weapons in Israel and does not join the growing group of countries that Palestine recognizes.”
The great demonstration was consciously organized on the first Sunday of the election recess of the Lower House, says Servaes. “This is how we perform the pressure on parties. This theme must remain on the agenda in the campaign.” Does the use of the protest are changing, now that the government suspends support for parts of the EU association agreement with Israel and thinks about a trade ban with illegal settlements on the West Bank? And does Trump’s peace plan have an effect on the demonstration? “I don’t believe that Hamas and Israel will adhere to this,” says Servaes. “And if you think that a kind of colonial administration in which Palestinians play is not a role, you have not understood it.”
In fact, the Gaza war has not fundamentally changed the attitude of the Dutch towards Israel, says Israel-Palestina expert Peter Malcontent from Utrecht University. “Around the six -day war in 1967, a large part of the Dutch population was responsible for guilt feelings about the Holocaust, but since the 1970s the popularity of the country has fallen due to increasing attention for the oppression of Palestinians.” What Malcontent does see changing: the willingness of people to pronounce is “of a totally different order than we have ever experienced.” “The aversion to Israeli violence has reached the capillaries of society, whole families with children come to the streets.”
Large-scale protest works more easily than ‘smaller’ actions such as occupations or sit-ins, sees political sociologist at the University of Amsterdam Hilla Dayan. She is affiliated with Gate 48, a foundation of critical Israelis in the Netherlands. “It can give ordinary citizens to know that they are merging into a mass.”
“In a democratic society, there should be a mutual binding consultation between the citizens and the state. Massademonstrations serve exactly that goal,” says Dayan. “The fact that the political elite does not listen to the massive call to take action against the genocide now damages our democracy.”
“Although most Dutch people think that politics is doing too little, the current cabinet goes beyond all previous cabinets,” is ald by historian Malcontent, “for example by wanting to partially suspend the Trade Convention with Israel.” According to Malcontent, foreign ministers usually have little room for movement due to a lack of European consensus and a pro-Israeli chamber majority taken by the bank. “At the same time it appears clear, if you take international law, the Constitution and Dutch human rights policy as a benchmark that we do far too little.”
Voting behavior
Although a survey of Motivaction shows that almost half of the Dutchmen let ‘Gaza’ be taken into account in determining their voice, respondents from IPSOS I&O research give domestic topics such as the economy or the housing market priority time and time again. “Only with thinking and SGP voters, and to a lesser extent with GroenLinks-PvdA voters, does Gaza really play a role in voting behavior,” says Ipsos I&O researcher Peter Kanne.
“The Dutch are usually very concerned with themselves,” says Kanne. He also points to the role of media and politics itself – voters in research give the topics “back” about which they hear on TV. “Many parties make a priority of topics such as housing or migration. It is up to political leaders to not only keep international topics in Foreign Affairs, but to make politics.”
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