JTA – A former prime minister of the Netherlands, Dries van Agt, said in an interview for a recently aired documentary that Israeli settlers poisoned their Palestinian neighbors in 2015, criticizing Dutch Jews, who he says Centuries old anti – Jewish blood is perpetuating the libel .
B’Salem, the leading Israeli organization dedicated to documenting alleged human rights violations, said it was not aware of the incident described by van Agut.
“The colonists who had conquered the hill a week or two earlier would come at night to knock on their doors, receiving maximum intimidation, to ask them to leave and they refused,” van Agt said. Said in an interview for a documentary on Vidyut which was aired by broadcaster KRO-NCRV in November. “And then one morning something terrible happened: the olive groves and the botanical gardens below – the colonists always took to the top hills – were filled with poison. And a three-year-old child became very ill. It was only because of that. Had drank milk of poisonous goat. He was poisoned.”
Van Agt, 90, then started crying and apologized for his emotional state. He told that the incident happened in 2015 near Nablus.
His interviewer, Frans Bromet, insisted: “These things, they are not uncommon.” Van Agt replied: “Oh, no. That’s what the wonderful people of the Peace Organization say. It happens all the time in occupied territory.”
B’Tselem spokesman Dror Sadot told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that his group was aware of a case of alleged poisoning by settlers in 2005, which resulted in no human casualties.
Example: A Palestinian farmer stands in front of one of his cut olive groves on May 5, 2020, in the northern West Bank village of As-Savia. (Yash Deen)
CIDI, the Netherlands’ main watchdog on anti-Semitism, accused van Agt, who served as prime minister from 1977 to 1982, of spreading a blood libel. Chairman Ronnie Eisenman criticized KRO-NCRV for airing the documentary “without examining the basic accuracy” of Van Agt’s claims.
Author Kees Broer, who has written extensively about anti-Israel sentiment in the Netherlands, wrote on his website that Van Agt is helping to spread a common conspiracy theory.
Van Agt has countered allegations of anti-Semitism since the 1970s, saying they are a result of his support for the Palestinians. In 2008, he compared Israel to Nazi Germany and spoke at a rally in Rotterdam that featured a televised address by a leader of Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel and others.
Van Agt has also stated that the Jews “should have been given a piece of land” in Germany instead of Israel. In 2017, he praised the Dutch Labor Party for being “good for the Palestinians despite a strong Jewish lobby”, according to the Central Jewish Board of the Netherlands, or CJO. And as Minister of Justice in the 1970s, he cited his “Aryan” roots in explaining his plan to pardon four Nazi war criminals for health reasons.
Van Agt went on to explain to a journalist that his predecessor, who was Jewish, had also reportedly supported the pardon, but failed to realize it. Van Agt had a slim chance of succeeding where his predecessor, Carol Pollock, failed because he is “only an Aryan”, he told the journalist. The criminals were not released during Van Agt’s tenure.
The CJO called Van Agt an anti-Semitic for the first time publicly in 2017.
KRO-NCRV did not respond to a request for comment sent to its spokesperson.
Rights Forum, a pro-Palestinian organization founded by van Agt, said it forwarded the JTA’s request for comment to van Agt. He did not respond in time for publication of this article.