I’m drawing a red line, too 1/2
Why We Must Always See the Beginning Behind Every Red Line
Last Sunday, November 8, another massive procession wound its way through Amsterdam: according to the organizers, more than 200,000 people—many dressed in red—marched around Vondelpark. Thirteen organizations participated, including Oxfam Novib, Amnesty International, and Save the Children. What unites all these people is their outrage over Israel’s policies, and especially those of Netanyahu. In this piece, I also want to draw a red line, but with a different meaning.
I understand that outrage. Anyone who sees images of children, women, and men being pulled from the rubble is left speechless. According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, more than 71,000 people have been killed since October 2023. No one knows exactly how many of them were combatants; there is no reliable breakdown. Behind every number is a human being who belonged to someone.
Yet I can’t help but feel that the debate often looks only in one direction. So let’s not forget how it all began. On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters invaded Israel. They killed more than 1,200 people, the vast majority of whom were civilians: young people at a festival, families, and the elderly in their kibbutzim and villages. According to a UN report, there are reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence also took place during these attacks. A total of 251 people were taken hostage and brought to Gaza. Among the victims were Jews, but also Muslims, Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze—people of at least 33 nationalities. This was not an attack on a government. It was an attack on people trying to live their lives.
Afterward, the Netanyahu government decided to eradicate Hamas. That effort failed, though Hamas was severely weakened. Israel claims that Hamas has hidden its weapons, tunnels, and rocket launchers in places where civilians gather, such as hospitals and schools; Hamas denies this. For me, this represents a second red line: anyone who fights among civilians puts those civilians in danger, and no one should be allowed to excuse that.
Fear close at hand
Meanwhile, right around the corner, fear is growing. In 2024, the CIDI recorded a record 421 antisemitic incidents. In 2025, the number was 281—a decrease, but still far higher than in the years prior to 2023. Frits Barend, a journalist and television presenter, described in April what it’s like to go to synagogue as a Jew:
“When I walk out of the synagogue, I have to go straight to my car. We’re not even allowed to stand together in groups of more than three people. Jewish schools and synagogues are heavily guarded. What other religious community experiences that?”
I also hear about Jewish musical performances and speakers being barred from venues or canceled out of fear of hostility. I read in the newspaper that a pastor, after giving a lecture on Israel and his biblical perspective on it, had to walk to his car under threat. Upon arrival, he discovered that someone had slashed his tires.
I don’t want to blame all the demonstrators for this. Most of those who marched on Sunday did so out of compassion for innocent victims, and I recognize that. But it’s also true that NOS reported on a small group carrying banners that read
We support Hamas. The organization said it could not entirely rule out such participants. And I saw a man with a sign stating that all Jews must leave the Netherlands. How appalling that anyone would think that way. It’s a mindset we’re all too familiar with. Hitler thought the same way, and of the approximately 140,000 Jews who lived in our country before the war, about three-quarters were murdered. That must never happen again.
A promise to Abraham
Then I think of a passage from the Bible. God told Abraham—the forefather of the Jews and, through Ishmael, also of the Muslims—that he would become a great and mighty nation and that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him (Genesis 18:18). In Genesis 22:18, it is repeated: through his descendants, all the nations of the earth will be blessed, because Abraham obeyed God’s voice. Take a moment to let that sink in. All the nations.
I wondered: how do we see evidence of that? I set out to find the answer, and I ended up at our examination rooms and the phone in our back pocket.
A blessing in the exam room
Paul Ehrlich received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1908 for his work on immunity. He coined the term “magic bullet”—a remedy that targets the disease while sparing healthy tissue—thereby giving chemotherapy its name and direction. Gertrude Elion received the Nobel Prize in 1988, along with two colleagues, for a method of designing drugs that targets the disease itself. One of her drugs, mercaptopurine, became a key component in the treatment of childhood leukemia. In the past, this disease was almost always fatal, but thanks to combinations of drugs, it is now curable for most children. Harold Varmus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989, along with Michael Bishop, for their insight that cancer genes are hidden within our own healthy cells and can go awry. And Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover, together with Irwin Rose, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004 for their discovery of how cells break down proteins. That work helped pave the way for drugs to treat a form of bone marrow cancer.
What does that mean for us? I looked at the figures from the IKNL. About half of all Dutch people will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime: 47 percent of women and 54 percent of men. In 1990, it was still about one in three; we’re living longer, and cancer mainly occurs later in life. If you apply those percentages to a crowd of 200,000 people, that amounts to nearly 100,000 people. That’s just an example, because a crowd demonstration isn’t a cross-section of the Netherlands. And I’m not even counting the parents, partners, children, and friends. Almost everyone knows someone they love who has been diagnosed with cancer. Of course, not every patient has received a treatment developed by these specific researchers, but the knowledge on which our cancer care is based has grown in part thanks to them.
Read Part 2 here
@wimvanputten