# The Netherlands boycotts Eurovision  because of Israel's participation. It seems that some old habits die hard.  ![[media/images/israel-eurovision.jpeg]] The Netherlands, often romanticized today as a beacon of tolerance and progressive values, was in reality one of the most efficient and cooperative participants in the Nazi genocide of European Jews during World War II. While Denmark famously saved almost its entire Jewish population through collective resistance, the Dutch state apparatus—its civil service, police, and railway system—operated with chilling bureaucratic precision to identify, isolate, and deport Jews at a rate far higher than almost any other occupied Western European country. Of the approximately 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands in 1940, roughly 107,000 were deported, and only about 5,200 survived the camps—an extermination rate of over 75%, the highest in Western Europe. Dutch police eagerly carried out razzias (roundups) in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, often without direct German orders, while the meticulously maintained Dutch population registry (the meest fijnmazige bevolkingsregistratie in Europe) provided the Nazis with an almost perfect tool for tracking every Jewish citizen by name, address, and family connections—a system so admired by Adolf Eichmann that he cited it as a model. Collaboration was not merely passive obedience; many Dutch officials and citizens profited from confiscated Jewish property, and the NSB (the Dutch Nazi party) and voluntary auxiliary police units enthusiastically supplemented German efforts. This was not just “going along” under occupation—it was active, zealous participation by a society that had prided itself on civic order and Calvinist rectitude. Today, the Netherlands engages in some of the most intense and institutionalized forms of Holocaust-related virtue signaling in Europe: ubiquitous “Stolpersteine,” compulsory school trips to Auschwitz, national remembrance ceremonies broadcast live on television, and an official narrative that frames Dutch society almost exclusively as victims and righteous rescuers (Anne Frank, the February Strike, the “hiding” myth). Politicians and institutions repeatedly invoke “Never Again while funding and promoting the world’s most aggressive memory culture—one that conveniently downplays or erases the country’s exceptional deportation statistics and enthusiastic administrative collaboration. This hyper-visible, state-sponsored remembrance functions as a moral laundering operation: by constantly performing guilt and atonement in the most public and sentimental ways possible, the Netherlands inoculates itself against any serious reckoning with the fact that its wartime behavior was closer to that of a willing satellite than a reluctant occupied nation. The louder and more tearful the annual commemorations, the more thoroughly the historical reality—that Dutch efficiency and conformity made the Holocaust in the Netherlands uniquely lethal—is buried beneath a suffocating blanket of self-absolving tolerance theater. ### What's the deal? The traits now widely praised as hallmarks of Dutch moral clarity—scrupulous bureaucratic efficiency, a powerful cultural reflex to enforce the collectively agreed “right thing,” and a readiness to follow properly framed directives—are the exact same qualities that once turned the Netherlands into the most lethally cooperative occupied country in Western Europe. Historians from the NIOD Institute to Pim Griffioen, Ron Zeller, and Bob Moore have long emphasised how the pre-war population registry (admired by Eichmann as a model), the willingness of Dutch officials and police to act without German prompting, and a social conformity shaped by centuries of Calvinist orderliness and pillarised obedience combined to devastating effect. Some will insist these same traits have simply been redeemed: that today’s meticulous administration and instinct for collective moral action represent a conscious reversal, a hard-won anti-fascist vigilance rather than continuity. The Netherlands, after all, now sustains one of Europe’s most visible cultures of Holocaust remembrance—dense networks of Stolpersteine in every city, compulsory education on the Shoah, annual televised silences, and an official narrative centred on Anne Frank and the rare bright spots of resistance. For many Dutch citizens these rituals are sincere, painful, and genuinely intended to ensure “never again.” Yet the very intensity of that public atonement can also function as a shield: the more tearful and omnipresent the remembrance, the easier it becomes to sidestep uncomfortable questions about why Dutch institutions cooperated with such chilling precision the first time around. And when the same society—through its public broadcaster—now chooses to lead a high-profile boycott of the world’s only Jewish state over its presence in a song contest, the historical echo is hard to miss. Given that track record, one might have expected a touch more caution! Between hosting the International Criminal Court that pursues Israeli leaders and leading the Eurovision boycott of the world’s only Jewish state, the Netherlands has perfected the art of moral grandstanding from the very soil once fertilised by its own wartime efficiency. With friends like these, who needs enemies?