Tel Aviv-born far-right hardliner to serve as Dutch immigration minister

Markuszower, a Tel Aviv-born Dutch senator who on Wednesday was tapped to serve as the country’s immigration minister, fought about politics “with the whole high school” in his left-leaning Jewish community, Markuszower’s father Zvi told the NRC daily in a 2017 profile.

Within his Jewish community, too, Markuszower was never one to mince words. In 2010, Markuszower called in a statement to ban Jewish “traitors” from the community if they supported the UN Goldstone Report that in the previous year had accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza.

In 2018, the Organization of Jewish Communities in the Netherlands, or NIK, decided it could no longer accommodate Markuszower’s divisive remarks. It kicked him off its board for what it called “a long pattern of insults, threatening language and verbal intimidation.”

A leader of the Rights Forum, a pro-Palestinian organization founded by a former prime minister whom Dutch Jewry has accused of antisemitism, on Wednesday called Markuszower “the most unsettling” appointment so far by the four-party coalition led by Wilders and the Party for Freedom. Penned by Berber van der Woude, the op-ed (in Dutch) on the Rights Forum’s website is titled: “Watch out, the Fascists are here.”

In 2010, he dropped out of an election campaign following a warning issued about him by the AIVD secret service, which said he had had contacts with an unnamed foreign intelligence agency. He returned to politics several years later, raising no further AIVD objections and getting selected to serve as a Party for Freedom senator in 2017.