The protest leaders emphasised they have been in opposition to the Israeli president’s presence, not the museum.
The Netherlands opened the Nationwide Holocaust Museum on Sunday with a ceremony presided over by the Dutch king in addition to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, whose presence prompted protest due to Israel’s navy marketing campaign in Gaza.
The museum in Amsterdam tells the tales of among the 102,000 Jews who have been deported from the Netherlands and murdered in Nazi camps, in addition to the historical past of their structural persecution below German World Battle II occupation earlier than the deportations started.
The museum “offers a face and a voice to the Jewish victims of persecution within the Netherlands,” the Dutch King Willem-Alexander mentioned within the tackle on the inaugural ceremony on Sunday. It additionally “reveals us the devastating penalties that antisemitism can have,” he added.
“That’s the reason we should proceed to concentrate on how issues started and the way they went from unhealthy to worse,” the king mentioned. Earlier, the king and the Israeli president visited Amsterdam’s well-known Portuguese Synagogue.
Herzog hailed the Netherlands’s initiative to create a brand new Holocaust museum that he mentioned was a testomony to elevating antisemitism world wide.
“At this pivotal second in time, this establishment sends a transparent highly effective assertion,” Herzog mentioned. “Bear in mind! Bear in mind the horrors born of hatred, antisemitism and racism, and by no means once more enable them to flourish.”
Sunday’s ceremony got here in opposition to a backdrop of Israel’s devastating assaults on Gaza that adopted the lethal incursions by Hamas in southern Israel on 7 October.
1000’s of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered amid tightened safety on the Waterloo Sq. in central Amsterdam, close to the museum and the synagogue, waving Palestinian flags, chanting “By no means once more is now,” and demanding an finish of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and a direct cease-fire in Gaza.
The protest leaders emphasised they have been in opposition to Herzog’s presence, not the museum and what it commemorates.
