Europe has discovered a new threat to the international rules-based order: the souvenir in your suitcase.
Since September 22, travelers arriving at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol may have their luggage searched, possessions confiscated, and names referred to the Public Prosecution Service if their bags contain an item made in an Israeli settlement.
It does not matter whether the item is a gift, a personal keepsake, or a purchase made years before the ban. Dutch customs officers are instructed to consult European postal codes to determine whether an olive-wood trinket or a jar of face cream carries a prohibited address.
A bottle of wine, an heirloom, a household item: somewhere along its production chain lies the wrong postal code. Europe’s moral conscience can now, it seems, be settled at the baggage carousel.
This policy is presented as an objective defense of international law. Before applauding, we should ask two questions: Why this exceptional zeal? And why does the historical memory that animates it run so reliably in only one direction?
The geography of this moral fervor warrants scrutiny. During the Nazi occupation, three-quarters of the Netherlands’ Jewish population was systematically murdered.
That catastrophe was enabled not only by foreign occupiers but also by the quiet, methodical cooperation of Dutch civil servants, municipal clerks, and police officers who processed forms and enforced decrees without asking what justice required.
This history does not disqualify Dutch citizens today from debating foreign policy. It does, however, counsel profound humility – not bureaucratic zeal – when their country criminalizes Jewish presence through economic policy.
Japan offers a revealing contrast. Although allied with Nazi Germany, it did not share Europe’s centuries of anti-Jewish persecution. Although Japan has sanctioned four settlers accused of violence, sanctioning individuals accused of violence is a far cry from confiscating an ordinary traveler’s keepsake because of its place of manufacture. The contrast does not prove motive.
Does it invite a question: why does this particular enthusiasm for policing Jewish addresses flourish among governments on a continent with such a terrible history of doing precisely that?
Consider how historical reality is treated under this doctrine.
Hebron’s Jewish history
Consider Hebron. On August 24, 1929, Arab rioters attacked the city’s ancient, unarmed Jewish community, killing 67 people, ransacking synagogues, and forcing the survivors into exile. Israel did not yet exist; there was no “occupation” and no 1967 military victory. Jews were murdered in their homes nearly two decades before the modern state was established.
Jewish property subsequently passed into other hands. The historic wholesale-market site became a web of disputed titles and municipal tenancies. Deeds matter. Title matters. But so does the violent history that explains why the rightful owners were missing from those homes in the first place.
Boycott advocacy relies on a convenient historical trick: the expelled Jew recedes into an irrelevant past, while the returning Jew re-emerges as an illegal aggressor. The expulsion becomes mere background noise; the return becomes the crime.
Gush Etzion reveals this absurdity in stark relief. In the 1920s and 1930s, Jewish pioneers purchased land in the Judean hills. In May 1948, the bloc was besieged by Jordan’s Arab Legion and local irregulars.
At Kfar Etzion, the defenders were massacred after surrendering; the surviving pioneers of the neighboring kibbutzim were marched into Jordanian captivity. Every home was flattened; every orchard uprooted. In 1967, the surviving children of those massacred defenders returned to rebuild their parents’ homes.
Purchase. Massacre. Expulsion. Return.
Under the Dutch customs regime, that entire saga is collapsed into a forbidden postal code. In the eyes of European officialdom, the original land purchase deserves a footnote, the massacre warrants a polite silence, and the returning orphan deserves an official customs seizure.
Jerusalem makes this selective amnesia impossible to defend.
Trade-ban advocates speak of “Arab east Jerusalem” as though the city’s municipal divisions were fixed at Mount Sinai. Yet the 1905 Ottoman census records Jewish families throughout the Old City, far beyond what is now called the Jewish Quarter.
French historian Vincent Lemire found that al-Wad – today considered the heart of the “Muslim Quarter” – had 388 Jewish heads of household and 383 Muslim heads of household. Nearly one-third of the Old City’s Jewish families lived in the area now known as the Muslim Quarter.
The 1905 census does not claim an absolute Jewish majority across every stone of the Old City, but it dismantles the fiction that current neighborhood borders are eternal ethnic boundaries.
It was the riots of 1929 and 1936, followed by Jordan’s 1948 ethnic cleansing and dynamiting of the Old City’s synagogues, that rendered these districts free of Jews. A tourist map is not a title deed. Nor does the expulsion of a Jewish community erase its history or settle the ownership of its homes.
There is, of course, a separate legal question: international law bars an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory.
That distinction concerns state policy, not private property claims. Proving pre-1948 Jewish ownership does not settle every geopolitical question. But neither can state policy justify treating Jewish dispossession as an administrative irrelevance.
If wrongful displacement is the standard, it must apply to all who suffered it. If property rights are sacred, title deeds must be examined regardless of the faith of the holder. If restitution is the goal, European chancelleries must explain what remedies exist for the dispossessed Jews of Hebron, Gush Etzion, and Jerusalem.
Otherwise, the moral rule being established is as grotesque as it is simple: cleanse Jews from a land, hold it long enough, and international law will certify their return as an outrage.
“International law” is not an incantation that exempts a society from moral reasoning. Europe’s own history is an enduring reminder that injustice has often dressed itself in spotless legal terminology, backed by registries, tribunals, and diligent customs officials.
The government in The Hague is free to debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But before its customs inspectors sift through private luggage for traces of Jewish labor in Judea, Dutch officials should ask themselves how their definition of international justice came to ratify the expulsions of the past while punishing the returns of the present.