Dutch Jews on Thursday said they documented 281 antisemitic incidents last year, a sharp decrease from the 421 record high documented in 2024.
While lower than 2024 and 2023, the 2025 tally still represents a major increase over any of those documented in the decade preceding 2023, wrote the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, or CIDI, the Jewish community watchdog that published its annual report on Thursday.
The highest tally before 2023 was 183 cases in 2021. From 2012 to 2022, the annual average tally of antisemitic incidents documented by CIDI was 138.
“Since Oct. 7, 2023, CIDI has consistently observed that the war between Israel and Hamas is leading to increased antisemitism in the Netherlands, with Dutch Jews often being held collectively responsible for Israel’s policies,” CIDI wrote. “To circumvent criminal liability, the term ‘Zionists’ is increasingly used where ‘Jews’ is actually intended. Anti-Zionism is regularly employed as an excuse for antisemitic statements and threats.”
Although anti-Zionist expressions are not included in the report, CIDI wrote, “it is increasingly evident that the dividing line between the two phenomena is becoming blurred,” CIDI wrote.
On April 27, the Dutch national holiday of King’s Day, two men assaulted a Jewish man in a pub after he said he was Jewish and Israeli, CIDI wrote in a chapter on individual incidents. One of the men grabbed the Jewish man by the neck and dragged him outside, where the attacker kicked and punched the victim in the face. The report did not say where the incident happened.
In another incident, a man punched a Jewish man in the face at a café during a discussion about the war in Gaza. The attacker shouted: “You cancer Jews” and “Dirty Jews,” according to the report. It listed four assaults, 57 cases of verbal abuse on the street or in public (“real-life incidents”), 45 cases of vandalism, and 148 written threats or insults, among other categories.
Several violent incidents included in the annual report for 2024, which was published in 2025, happened on Nov. 7-8 of that year.
On those dates, hundreds of Muslim men participated in a series of attacks on Israelis who were in Amsterdam for a soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the local AFC Ajax club. In coordinating the attacks on instant messaging platforms and online, several perpetrators referred to the action as a “Jew hunt” and used antisemitic rhetoric.
The assaults underlined for many both the level of hostility toward Jews within Muslim immigrant populations, and perpetrators’ ability to use technology to coordinate attacks in real time while bypassing authorities.
The Netherlands, where the Nazis and their collaborators murdered at least 75% of the Jewish population of about 140,000 people during the Holocaust, is now home to about 40,000 Jews.
