Man Returns Righteous Among the Nations Award to

Israel after Israeli Killings of Palestinian Family Members

It was recently reported that a Dutch citizen by the name of Henk Zanoli returned his Righteous Among the Nations Award back to the state of Israel following the IDF’s killing of six family members in Gaza.

As the New York Times explains,

“In 1943, Henk Zanoli took a dangerous train trip, slipping past Nazi guards and checkpoints to smuggle a Jewish boy from Amsterdam to the Dutch village of Eemnes. There, the Zanoli family, already under suspicion for resisting the Nazi occupation, hid the boy in their home for two years. The boy would be the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.

Seventy-one years later, on July 20, an Israeli airstrike flattened a house in the Gaza Strip, killing six of Mr. Zanoli’s relatives by marriage. His grandniece, a Dutch diplomat, is married to a Palestinian economist, Ismail Ziadah, who lost three brothers, a sister-in-law, a nephew and his father’s first wife in the attack.”

He spoke out against what he said was “[m]urder carried out by the state of Israel.” In his statements, he is quoted as saying

“It is with great sorrow that I herewith returning the medal I received as an honour and a token of appreciation from the State of Israel for the efforts and risks taken by my mother and her family in saving the life of a Jewish boy during the German occupation[.]”

Some in and outside Israel have criticized what they see as “anti-semitism,” saying that people are challenging Israel’s brutal killings in Gaza based on this reason. However, as we well know, one can speak out against Israel’s policies without being anti-Semitic. And, it seems that Zanoli said as much, saying that

“I gave back my medal because I didn’t agree with what the state of Israel is doing to my family and to the Palestinians on the whole,” Mr. Zanoli said in an interview Friday in his spare but elegant apartment, adding that his decision was a statement “only against the state of Israel, not the Israeli people.”

This is yet another voice speaking out against the horrific actions by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza, and by returning his medal, it is evident that he is making a very powerful statement against such human rights abuses. Through this conflict, citizens around the world are continuing to express their outrage at what is transpiring in Gaza on account of Israel’s attacks that have killed 1962 Palestinians.