Dutch lawyer who risked life to save Jewish boy from Nazis returns medal to Israel

Aug 21, 2014

According to Juan Cole, and Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), Henk Zanoli, a 91-year-old Dutch attorney who in 1943 risked his life to save a Jewish boy from the Nazis, has returned to Israel the “Righteous among the Nations” medal awarded him to protest crimes against civilian Palestinians, including a member of his family who died in an Israeli strike in Gaza.

Henk Zanoli

In an anguished letter to the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, Zenoli described the terrible price his family had paid for opposing Nazi tyranny.

“My sister lost her husband, who was executed in the dunes of The Hague for his involvement in the resistance,” he wrote. “My brother lost his Jewish fiancée who was deported, never to return. Against this background, it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza. Murder carried out by the State of Israel.”

Henk Zanoli, second from right, with his family in 1942. Yad Vashem

Zenoli continues: “After the horror of the holocaust my family strongly supported the Jewish people also with regard to their aspirations to build a national home. Over more than six decades I have however slowly come to realize that the Zionist project had from its beginning a racist element in it in aspiring to build a state exclusively for Jews. As a consequence, ethnic cleansing took place at the time of the establishment of your state and your state continues to suppress the Palestinian people on the West Bank and in Gaza who live under Israeli occupation since 1967. The actions of your state in Gaza these days have already resulted in serious accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity…The only way out of the quagmire the Jewish people of Israel have gotten themselves into is by granting all living under the control of the State of Israel the same political rights and social and economic rights and opportunities.”

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