World Jewish News

Police in Holland investigate smashing of windows of kosher restaurant

Police are investigating the smashing of the windows of a kosher restaurant in Amsterdam by a man wearing a Palestinian flag, JTA reported.

The incident at HaCarmel restaurant occurred Thursday morning, hours after U.S. President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The AT5 television station showed a video of the incident, in which a man holding a large stick while holding a Palestinian flag and wearing a Palestinian keffiyah scarf on his head smashes the window and kicks down the restaurant’s doors as passersby and two police officers look on.

In the video, the officers wait as the man breaks into the restaurant and then returns to the street holding an Israeli flag that he took from inside, which he throws at their feet. They then overpower and arrest him.

Police said the man, which a spokesperson defined as a “pro-Palestinian activist,” was 29-year-old foreigner with a temporary residence permit. Police would not indicate his nationality, the WNL television channel reported. The suspect is scheduled to be released Wednesday as per the maximum detainment period afforded by the law for suspects arrested for alleged vandalism, WNL reported.

Shocking! It is unbelievable that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is playing out here, and against the Jewish Dutch community,” the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, the Dutch Jewish community’s watchdog on anti-Semitic incidents, tweeted.

The incident at HaCarmel came days after a report by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam showing a drop in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in 2016 from 57 incidents in 2015 to 35 incidents last year.

Both figures recorded by the Anne Frank House are substantially lower than those recorded by the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, which documented in those years 126 and 109 incidents, respectively.

“The number of deliberate anti-Semitic incidents dropped,” the Anne Frank House said in a statement, “because it correlates to the scale of major violence in Israel. As there was no such violence in 2016, the drop in anti-Semitic incident in the Netherlands that year comes as no surprise.”

EJP