THE LOE DE JONG LECTURE THAT UNDERMINES ITSELF
Published on 1 April 2026
On 25 March 2026, writer Adriaan van Dis delivered the inaugural Loe de Jong Lecture in The Hague, during the National Conference on Holocaust Education. The lecture is an initiative of the National Coordinator for Combating Antisemitism, conceived as an annual national moment of reflection on the significance of Holocaust education. One week later, the Israeli parliament voted to legalise the death penalty for Palestinians, legislation whose codification of race-based punishment is reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. Even apartheid South Africa, against which Van Dis protested in his youth, never legally codified the death penalty along racial lines.
One might assume that the core of Holocaust education is captured in the phrase ‘never again for anyone’. After reading Van Dis’ lecture, I find myself doubting that assumption.
Van Dis speaks of victims of antisemitism, the bombardment of Gaza, the ongoing bombing of Lebanon, and the Hamas attack of October 7th. He argues against holding individuals responsible for the policies of their governments. Noble thoughts. The bombardment of Gaza is mentioned, but presented in isolation from the historical timeline of colonial occupation and the Nakba that preceded it. The Hamas attack of October 7th is thereby severed from the colonial occupation that gave rise to it.
Also striking is the way Van Dis frames the pro-Palestinian student protests: as a threat to the campus lives of Jewish students and academics. He fails to acknowledge that these students, amongst them many Jewish students, were protesting colonial state violence, specifically the complicity of the Dutch government in said violence, and were therefore not protesting against the Jewish community. Nor does he mention that those same students were met with the full weight of the state apparatus concretely resulting in extreme police violence and criminal prosecution. Van Dis ignores both the core of their protest and the fact that student protestors themselves became victims of profound state violence.
Van Dis also isolates the Netanyahu government as responsible for the mass killing of Palestinians, thereby detaching the genocide from decades of Israeli apartheid policy and uninterrupted ethnic cleansing. Moreover, he explicitly refuses to use the word ‘genocide’ when referring to the mass killing of the Palestinian population — this despite reports from Amnesty International and the United Nations, which established in 2024 and 2025 respectively that a genocide is indeed taking place.
Refusal to name a genocide a genocide is not neutral. Genocide denial serves an important practical purpose: it creates a moral vacuum that prevents effective international legal and political action and therefore creates circumstances for the genocide to continue. Without international sanctions, Israel’s apartheid policy grows deadlier and more efficient with each passing year, the recent legalisation of the death penalty for Palestinians alone illustrates that trajectory. A lecture intended to ‘advance Holocaust education’ that does not acknowledge this undermines its own raison d’etre.
In this light, it is telling to look back at Van Dis’ notorious 1985 interview with journalist Willem Oltmans. In that interview, Van Dis systematically and in distinctly colonial fashion sought to discredit Oltmans, who had been reporting on the leaders of the former Dutch colonies and who frequently disagreed with the policy of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Van Dis did so by implicitly accusing Oltmans of being bribed by foreign governments, including Suriname, Indonesia and the Soviet Union, and by suggesting that his reporting was motivated by a ‘fascination with brown dictators’, which references to Sukarno’s ethnicity and Oltmans’ homosexuality. Forty years after that televised spectacle, Van Dis’ geopolitical perspective appears little changed; only the tone is milder, and the frame has become Holocaust education.
The same Oltmans interviewed by van Dis in 1985, went on record in 2002 to state the following on the Palestinian resistance: ‘Those Palestinian boys may be referred to as terrorists here, but I call them Freedom Fighters. When we blew up a train between Den Dolder and Amersfoort during the war, Hitler called us terrorists. But we were Freedom Fighters.’ Oltmans, who supported the resistance against the German occupation, was unafraid to place things in due historical context. This courage is absent entirely from the inaugural Loe de Jong Lecture.
‘Never again’ only carries weight and meaning if it applies to everyone. Without effective international action against Israel’s apartheid policy — of which the recently legalised death penalty for Palestinians is only the latest expression — the genocide will continue and antisemitism in society will only continue to grow. A lecture on Holocaust education that genuinely seeks to connect and to prevent genocide requires voices that understand the workings of colonialism-, persecution- and racism from lived experience. An annual moment of reflection that refuses to acknowledge the currently ongoing genocide is not reflection. It is a political contribution to its repetition.