Nathan’s Musings

I have learned a new Dutch word in the past few months (I guess I have learned many new Dutch words, since my ability to speak the language is still not 100% and so continues to improve). But this one is relevant: betutteling. It is used in reference to the new government in The Hague, formed earlier this year following a largely inconclusive election.

Like all other Dutch governments, this one is a coalition. The prime minister is the same as before, Balkenende of the Christian Democrats (CDA), a figure so colourless that boring does not even begin to describe him. The difference is in the coalition partners; in the previous government these were two liberal parties, one strongly free-market and generally right-wing, the other equally free-market but more centrist. Now those two parties have been replaced in government by the Social Democrats and the Christen Unie, a smaller Christian Democrat party with much more emphasis on the “Christian” bit than the more mainstream CDA.

This combination of Christians and Social Democrats is absolutely the worst, damp-squib government one could imagine. The three party leaders spent their first 100 days in office travelling around the country and holding town meetings. This was allegedly because they wanted to listen to the people before formulating the concrete policies of the new government. Whatever happened to political leadership?! I always thought that parliamentary democracy works when politicians set out their proposed policies and people vote for them (or not, as the case may be). The present Dutch government could just as well be replaced by a system of electronic referenda on all issues.

So what new policies have resulted from this new government and their 100-day exercise in focus groups? Well, back to the word above, betutteling. It can best be translated as “nanny state”. Here we have the nanny state on steroids. The government is worried that the Dutch eat too much (so let us prohibit commercials for unhealty food), smoke too much (so let us prohibit smoking in public places, including the famous coffeeshops!), their family life is not good enough (so let us have a ministry of Youth and Family that will spend money on various idiotic initiatives) and so on and on and on. Some of this idiocy has been imported from the USA, other is homegrown.
Fortunately, the Dutch economy is chugging along, in fact more than chugging along. It is positively booming, with unemployment at the lowest levels in decades. At the company I manage we are having trouble recruiting qualified staff, as do most employers in this country right now. Bad for me, but good if you are looking for a job. I only hope that this government is so incompetent that it will not be able to do any significant harm to the economy, simply because it will not be able to formulate any concrete policies.

Oh, and in case you wonder: you will still be able to smoke the joint you buy in the coffeeshop, but it will have to be in a separate room where service is strictly self-service so that the coffeeshop employees do not get exposed to second-hand smoke. I am sure this was one of the major health problems in this country…

This week there has been a lot of focus on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War. As it happens, those glorious days in June 1967 represent some of my earliest childhood memories.

I was 6 years old, living in Communist Poland. Back then, the Soviet block countries had diplomatic relations with Israel, so my father would travel there occasionally to visit his family there (two brothers, a sister and stepmother). For me, as a child, Israel was this mythical place. I had never met any of my uncles or aunt from there; indeed, I had never travelled outside Poland with the exception of a trip to Russia with my mother. Israel was part of the West. It was a place from where we sometimes received a box of oranges, sent by my father’s family–a luxury otherwise not available in Poland in those days.

When my father travelled to Israel, he did not fly. He would travel by train to Paris and then on to Marseilles, and then take a ship to Haifa. I remember being afraid before his trip–not because of Israel, but because travelling by train to France meant crossing East and then West Germany. According to the Communist propaganda which we were fed already in kindergarten, the East Germans were the “good” Germans, our socialist brothers who had all spend World War II covertly resisting Hitler. The West Germans, in contrast, were the “bad” Germans, still Nazis in their heart of hearts, plotting to re-occupy the parts of western Poland that had been “liberated” in 1945 (and where we lived). I remember warning my father to be very careful when the train was crossing the Federal Republic to make sure that the Nazis did not catch him. I may have been only 6, but I knew about the war and the Holocaust.

Of course my father reached Israel safely. He was going to be there for a couple of weeks, I think. My mother and I had no contact with him during his trip–international phone calls were a rarity in those days, and an expensive luxury. The most we could expect was a postcard, and if we were lucky it would reach us before his return. And then, while my father was there, a war broke out! My mother and I would watch the news on state-controlled TV, which of course gave the Arab slant on the war. We were scared to death. Egypt’s president Nasser had talked about pushing all the Jews into the sea…The Communist news had the Arabs scoring successes on the battlefield–and my father was there! I do not remember it clearly, but during the first couple of days I am sure my mother must have harboured fears that she might never see her husband again. This may be difficult for people reading this in 2007 to understand, but keep in mind that this was only 22 years after the end of World War II, that there was no independent media in Poland, there was no Internet–the only source of independent news were the nightly broadcasts by Radio Free Europe, but those were often jammed by the Communist authorities.

But finally the war turned so much against the Arabs that even the Communist media could not hide the truth. The war ended with a cease-fire after 6 days, with Israel in control of huge swathes of Arab lands, having liberated Jerusalem, and only kept from moving on Damascus by US pressure. And then my father came home, telling us about the celebrations in Israel, about his visit to my uncle at the front, and we understood that what had happened was a modern miracle, fully on par with the biblical parting of the Red Sea by Moses. The people that was almost wiped off the face of Europe less than a generation earlier was now strong enough to hold off and defeat 100 million hostile Arabs surrounding them. Jews would never again be marched to their deaths as helpless victims. It is difficult to describe the pride that I felt at the time–even though I had a 100% secular upbringing.

The Six Day War had other (albeit indirect) personal consequences for me. After the war, the Communist countries broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. In Poland, the life became increasingly difficult for Jews. People risked losing their jobs, they would be excluded from the Communist party (membership of which was a pre-requisite for holding down any decent job), Jewish youth would not be admitted to universities and so on. Beginning in 1968, Polish Jews began to emigrate, some to Israel, others to the USA or Scandinavia. In 1969 a family with whom we were close friends left for Denmark. That same year my parents took the decision that they too would leave Poland, and told me about it. I was only 8 but I understood that this was a sensitive topic which I was never to discuss with any of the other children in school. And I kept my mouth shut.

I naturally assumed that Israel would be our new country, and I fantasized about growing up there, becoming a soldier and fighting in a war too. When my parents later told me that we would be going to Denmark, I remember being disappointed. But by the time we actually did emigrate, in 1972, I embraced Denmark and my new hometown Aarhus. In retrospect, this was a great decision.

I finally did make my first visit to Israel in 1974 and have been there several times since–not often enough. And of course, 40 years after the Six Day War, we tend to look differently at the territorial conquests back then. Everyone knows that the lands occupied in 1967 will need to be traded for peace, just like Sinai was traded for peace with Egypt in 1978. But that glorious week in 1967 will always be a miracle to me.