Albert Verlinde and Onno Hoes came back from Israel just in time. Shortly after their scheduled flight, the airspace was closed because of the war with Iran. “Yes, it’s very coincidental,” said “the man of”.
After Albert Verlinde, his husband Onno Hoes now also appears as a talk show guest at SBS 6. The gentlemen were relieved to be in the Netherlands again, because it didn’t matter much if they had been stuck in Israel. “Yes, it’s very coincidental, because we had booked the device for Thursday afternoon,” said VVD prominent Onno in The Oranjezomer.
Last flight
Albert and Onno felt it coming. “We actually made jokes in the device:” Who knows this is the last device, “but okay, you all do that a bit jokingly. In retrospect it turned out to be the last device, because the airspace was closed at night. So that was very intense.”
“I am very happy that I have been there. I mainly went on a family visit. We have been there for twelve days, Albert and I. I have a lot of family living there, we have had fantastic beautiful conversations. We have a lot of publicity here, we discuss a lot with each other, but I thought: what do people think about it?”
Large trauma
Onno was curious about that. “On the one hand you see the warmth with the people for each other and for their country for which they are fighting, but also that they are all pretty traumatized in the back of their heads so gradually with all those wars again and again. You know when you go to live there that your enemies have around you.”
That is the price you pay for it, according to Onno. “But it has become very intense with that entire Gaza war. In the beginning everyone understood it, but after that it became increasingly difficult to explain to each other. There are also many demonstrations against it.”
Lifferring
Albert and Onno also went to the site of the NOVA festival in the Negev desert in Israel, where Hamas committed an attack. “You just want to be there to get a kind of feeling with it. That was super large. We also visited the kibbutz. It was a very emotional journey, but beautiful.”
Hamas has to release the last fifty hostages, Onno concludes. “As a person I don’t understand that Hamas does not release those hostages. It will start for me. If you do, then Israel has nothing to say anymore to bomb.”