The recent attacks on Jewish targets are still being investigated by Dutch authorities. The new Prime Minister Rob Jetten denounced antisemitic attacks, the Minister of Justice David van Weel updated parliament, and many people expressed shock over the attack on the Netherlands’ small Jewish community. But that is not all that happened.

Ongoing investigation

As of now, several people have been detained for an attack on a synagogue in Rotterdam. The clip of the arson attack displays a message in Arabic and it was claimed by a new group that caught intelligence services unawares. However, experts pointed out Arabic spelling errors in the original message uploaded to social media. For now, it is not clear who sponsored the perpetrators, but Dutch authorities are suspecting Iranian handlers. It would fit the profile, as the Iranian theocracy tends to make use of criminal elements that cannot easily be traced to them. In Israel, it emerged that Iranians have tried to lure in various Israelis through payment. Moreover, it is very common in the Dutch drug crime scene that youngsters are paid a few hundred euros to carry out comparable attacks.

While the investigation continues, social media has become a battleground rife with speculation once again. And then one prominent voice decided to insert a new possibility: what if Israel was behind the attacks? The author: Anja Meulenbelt.

Meulenbelt is the latest recipient of the P.C. Hooft Award, the most prestigious literary prize in the Netherlands. Her selection surprised quite a number of her colleagues, as well as the author herself. She stated that she had not expected that “the elites” would ever grant her this honor – yet, that did not prevent her from accepting it. Meulenbelt’s surprise is understandable, because she is a far-left activist.

A devout Marxist, Meulenbelt decided to get involved with the Palestinian cause, since visiting Gaza in the 1990s. She was married to a Palestinian and has written several books about Gaza. On X, Meulenbelt argued that since the investigation into the identity of the instigators was ongoing, it would be wise to consider the “Zionists,” as an option, too. Far-left activists tend to refer to Zionists, as they do not recognize the State of Israel, thus borrowing from the rhetoric used by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian theocracy. She was careful not to accuse Israel outright, but shrewdly planted the seed that it could very well have been the culprit. Pretending to speak with gravitas and an extraordinary command of history, she pointed readers toward two sources: Avi Shlaim – misspelled as “Schlaim” – and Dutch historian and politician Chris de Ploeg. Not surprisingly, both authors identify as staunch anti-Zionists. Moreover, Meulenbelt questioned whether these should be considered attacks at all.

First of all, even in a hypothetical situation where Israel could be the culprit, that does not change the nature of the events. These were attacks on Jewish targets. There is no need to question this.

But the most important reference is to Shlaim, the venerated British-Israeli historian. Though he has provided more and more surprising claims in the last two years, Meulenbelt is clearly referring to his autobiography, which was published months before October 7th. In that book, Shlaim argued that some of the 1950-1951 bombings that targeted the Iraqi Jewish community in Baghdad were authorized by Israel, in an attempt to encourage Jews to leave Iraq. An interesting theory, but there is one issue: it has been exposed as tremendously flimsy by other historians.

In his autobiography, Shlaim claimed that Iraqi Zionists were responsible for the deadly bombing of the courtyard of the Massouda Shemtob synagogue in Baghdad in January, 1951. In that attack, four Jews were killed and........

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