A month before the violent riots targeting Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam, Dutch media exposed a troubling trend of local police officers refusing to safeguard Jewish and Israeli sites across the country.
The revelation first emerged in NIW (Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad), a prominent Jewish newspaper, which reported that a growing number of officers were claiming that protecting Jewish and Israeli sites presented them with a "moral dilemma" and "conscientious concerns."
Two veteran officers voiced their alarm about the police command's increasing tolerance of such refusals. "We have colleagues who are now declining to protect facilities or events linked to the community. They cite 'moral dilemmas,' and I'm witnessing a growing tendency to accommodate these objections. This truly marks the beginning of the end for us as a police force," Michael Theeboom, a local officer, told NIW.
"Our command appears increasingly hesitant to take a decisive stance on this matter, particularly since the outbreak of war in the Middle East. We're drastically departing from our collective responsibility; this requires continued open dialogue," Marcel de Weerd, another police officer, said.
The controversy gained national attention when De Telegraaf, a leading Dutch newspaper, picked up the story, with additional police sources expressing deep concern about growing extremism within the Dutch police force and widening divisions within the organization entrusted with public safety.
A report released six months ago by CIDI, the Netherlands' leading antisemitism monitoring organization, revealed that antisemitic incidents surged by 250% over the previous year, with 379 documented cases in 2023, up from 155 in 2022.
While authorities received more than 1,500 reports of antisemitic incidents, only 379 cases met the criteria for definitive classification as antisemitism. The 2023 figures represent the highest number of incidents recorded in the four decades since the organization began publishing its annual report.
