The Netherlands is ground zero for Volt Europa, a growing political movement whose progressive, pro-European Union agenda has drawn thousands of left-wing voters across the bloc, including many young Jews.

Yet following the Nov. 7 mass assaults by Arabs on Israelis in Amsterdam, several Jewish Volt Netherlands members have left the pan-European movement in protest of what they consider a failure by it and its leaders—including some Jews—to denounce Muslim antisemitism clearly and unequivocally.

“We see people who supposedly stand up for all minorities but do not do so when it comes to Jews,” two disillusioned ex-party members who are Jewish wrote in a statement last week about leaving Volt, which was founded in 2017 and has placed “Diversity, Inclusion and Equity” high up on its platform.

Volt, which was established in the Netherlands as an international pro-E.U. political movement with affiliated parties in several countries, has other Jewish members who still stand by the movement.

But the Jewish walkout from it encapsulates the growing estrangement of many left-wing Jews in Western Europe from parties and movements that they thought had their back, but which they say have left them in the lurch amid Muslim antisemitism and Israel-related vitriol.

Ariel’s decision to leave developed gradually. The 23-year-old former party member and volunteer spoke to JNS and asked that his last name be withheld from this article, citing safety concerns.

“At first there was silence. Silence on the Volt WhatsApp group,” he said, in describing the response to a long message he wrote on an activists’ group urging others to speak up about the assaults. “Then there was resistance. Claims that the facts are not known” about the assaults, which Ariel and many others call a pogrom. 

“We wanted Volt to be the party where progressive Jews could also feel safe and heard,” Ariel and another Volt Jewish voter, Hadassah, wrote in a letter announcing their departure. But “antisemitism and concerns about our safety are seen as difficult topics to be avoided. When we ask for attention to rising antisemitism, we get platitudes in return. We are told that we should ‘not get caught up in victimhood’ and that we should first ‘go for a drink’ to ‘calmly discuss all the facts.’”

At least 100 Arab men assaulted dozens of Israelis on Nov. 7 as the visitors were returning from a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the local Ajax team. The largest-scale antisemitic event in the Netherlands since the Holocaust, it reminded many local Jews and others of the lead-up to the genocide and shook the feeling of safety and belonging of many Dutch Jews.

The pogrom, in which 25 Israelis were wounded and which featured what the perpetrators called “Jew-hunts” on their instant messaging communications, also shook the political establishment of the Netherlands. It prompted the resignation of Nora Achahbar, the Morocco-born state secretary for benefits and customs, amid a heated debate on criminality and antisemitism among Muslims and the immigration policy that has brought hundreds of thousands of them into the Netherlands.

For Ariel and Hadassah, the decision to leave the party came after a debate about the pogrom in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament. Representing Volt in the debate was Marieke Koekoek, one of two Tweede Kamer lawmakers from the party. She used the word “complex” six times to describe the pogrom, in interventions in which she challenged the connection between the pogrom and immigration. Noting such a connection was making integrated immigrants feel like citizens “on probation,” Koekoek argued.

“It seems that this complex situation is being turned into an integration problem,” she said.

Koekkoek’s framing of the events of Nov. 7 was part of a wider narrative shift, in which some Dutch politicians, especially on the left, attempted to downplay or justify the pogrom by citing chants by Maccabi fans (some were filmed singing: “Let the IDF win” and “F***k the Arabs”) and unconfirmed reports of violence by Israelis.

At a certain point during the Dutch parliamentary debate, Koekkoek was challenged by Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, the Turkey-born leader of the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy.

“Ms. Koekkoek makes it sound like by ‘complex,’ she means there are various aspects here that need understanding. It’s not as complex as she thinks,” said Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, referencing what she described as the taboo of the well-documented prevalence of antisemitism and violence against Jews among Muslims in Europe.

Following the debate in parliament, some Jewish Volt members wondered, “How is it possible that at the parliamentary debate, we felt represented by Yesilgöz, a right-winger, and not by Koekkoek of Volt?” Ariel and Hadassah wrote. The debate made the two “lose all confidence” in Volt, they added. They announced their leaving Volt on Nov. 15 in the letter, which mainstream Dutch media covered prominently.

The debates about the pogrom in parliament, the Amsterdam City Council and the media featured frequent allegations against Israel, including of genocide in Gaza. The City Council voted on Nov. 16 on a resolution making that accusation against Israel. Most Volt representatives on the council voted in favor of it.

The narrative shift around the events of Nov. 7 has alarmed many European Jews and was discussed at length during a conference on antisemitism held in Krakow, Poland, this month by the European Jewish Association. “The fact that Israelis and the Jewish state are being blamed for violence against them shows the depth of the hatred we’re dealing with,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the director of the European Jewish Association. “It shows why we can’t relent in the fight against antisemitism.”

In recent years, and especially since the Hamas onslaught of Oct. 7, 2023, that plunged Israel and its neighbors into an ongoing war, many thousands of European Jews on the left have become politically homeless.

In the United Kingdom, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, a far-left anti-Israel radical, and his antisemitic cronies to the leadership of Labour in 2015 has shaken the confidence of British Jews in a party that used to be their political home. His successor, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has vowed to restore that trust, but the Starmer government’s weapons embargo on Israel is seen as a major backslide.

And in France, the Socialist Party’s recent political alliance with Jean-Luc Melenchon, a far-left populist who has trafficked repeatedly in antisemitic rhetoric, has made support for it impossible for most French Jews.

Back in the Netherlands, Jewish Volt members are not the only ones who feel betrayed by the left. In March, Ronny Naftaniel, a former director of the Center for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) lobby group and a past leader of Dutch Jewry, quit the Dutch Labor Party after 45 years over its objection to the visit in the Netherlands of Israeli President Isaac Herzog for the opening of the Dutch National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam.

Other Dutch Jews have decided to stay.

Itay Garmy, a representative of Volt on the Amsterdam City Council, toed the party line in an interview he gave Ynet on Saturday. He backed Mayor Femke Halsema’s about-face last week after her initial use of the word “pogrom” in speaking about the Nov. 7 assaults, which she has juxtaposed with “racist behavior” by Israelis.

“I agree with her that some use that word to serve their agenda of attacking people,” Garmy said of Halsema, a former leader of the left-wing D66 party. “She says that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu came out with allegations at 3 a.m. without knowing the facts. You can’t say all Muslims are to blame for what happened.”

Ariel said he has “so much respect” for Garmy, who was one of the reasons Ariel joined Volt. Garmy voted against the motion accusing Israel of genocide.

His position is typical of many Jewish politicians on the left, who go along with some policies they are uncomfortable with so they can block others they oppose more staunchly, Ariel said.

Garmy and other Jewish politicians on the left “need to balance the full party guidelines and their own beliefs,” Ariel said. “It’s a tight balance. I wish them success. But my conscience, and that of some other Jews on the left, dictates leaving.”

In a statement to the media following the resignation of the Jewish members, a spokesperson for Volt said it regrets their departures, rejects antisemitism and wishes to “engage in dialogue” with the leavers.