A former E.U.-boss who is now a top adviser to the Dutch king and government said on Sunday that right-wing Israelis have “exactly the same reasoning as the Nazis,” prompting local Jews to call him an antisemite who should resign.
Frans Timmermans, a former E.U. top boss and Dutch foreign minister who was recently nominated to the honorary position of minister of state of the Netherlands, made the comments in an interview with the Belgian paper De Morgen.
“The reasoning of the right and the far right in Israel is: ‘We Jews can only survive if the Palestinians are gone.’ That is exactly the same reasoning as that of the Nazis back then: ‘The German people, the Aryan race can only survive if the Jews are gone.’ I find that utterly baffling. Something terrible happened to their grandparents and great-grandparents during the Nazi era: the Holocaust, in which they were annihilated, and now they are doing exactly the same thing to another people,” said Timmermans.
He continued: “In the Middle East, an entire people is currently being exterminated. We watch and remain silent, while Palestinians are literally being driven into the sea and worse.”
Israel’s enemies and critics have maintained that its attack on Hamas in Gaza, in which several tens of thousands of people are widely believed to have died, including at least 19,000 terrorists, constitutes genocide. Israel, the U.S. and others have disputed this claim, which the European Union has not adopted.
Timmermans had been considered a center-left politician before 2023, when he became the political leader of the Labour Party (PvdA) and GreenLeft (GroenLinks) alliance. He stepped down in 2025.
A former first vice-president of the European Commission—a post he held until 2019—Timmermans was praised by many European Jews for standing up to antisemitism, including by saying at many speeches that “without Jews, Europe is not Europe.”
The Central Jewish Board of the Netherlands, CJO, wrote a letter on Monday to Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, asking him to distance himself from the comments of Timmermans, whom Jetten earlier this month had appointed as minister of state. The honorary post lacks executive powers and is reserved for distinguished statesmen, who are to advice the government and king on matters of state.
“Timmermans must step away from the title,” CJO wrote, asking Jetten to reject Timmermans’ comments, which CJO called “antisemitic.”
Silence by Jetten on this matter “would not be understood by our community,” Chanan Hertzberger, the chairman of CJO, wrote to Jetten. “It would strike at the root of commemorating the Holocaust, the greatest crime ever committed on Dutch and European soil,” Hertzberger added.
Esther Voet, editor-in-chief of the NIW (Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad), the main Jewish newspaper of the Netherlands, penned an editorial titled “Frans Timmermans reveals his antisemitic nature,” in which she recalled that in 2015, Timmermans said in a speech that “the new antisemitism is hiding behind anti-Zionism.”
She wrote: “With his anti-Zionism, he unmasks his own antisemitism. This is evident from the IHRA working definition of antisemitism adopted by parliament. He equates Israel with Hitler’s Germany, the Nazis. Israel, a country that since its inception in 1948 has faced armies that had only one goal in mind: to push the Jews into the sea, as Adolf Hitler also wanted.”
