Growing up in Amsterdam’s Jewish community in the 1990s, Gidi Markuszower was ideologically the odd one out for his right-wing tendencies.
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.
But Gidi didn’t mind, his dad added. “He likes it when people disagree with him.”
A hardliner who will likely seek to upend an immigration policy that has resisted multiple overhaul attempts, Gidi Markuszower will almost certainly have plenty of opportunity to hear from detractors.
But Marzkuszower will also represent millions of Dutchmen who support his goal, as demonstrated in last year’s election that elevated Markuszower’s far-right Party for Freedom to power under its anti-Islam, pro-Israel politician Geert Wilders.
The appointment of Markuszower follows unprecedented gains for his party in the Dutch elections and major gains for it and its sister movements across the European Union in last week’s European Parliament elections, as a backlash against mass immigration and other left-wing policies is bolstering the clout of politicians with hawkish (and often pro-Israel) views. Enjoying the support of some European Jews, they alarm others with opposing worldviews and values.
Markuszower in a 2021 speech in parliament called the Dutch immigration policy a “crime against the Dutch people,” and has criticized the arrival to the Netherlands not only hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from the Middle East but also massive spending of tax money on tens of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing war.
“You all, all of you right here, who are not stopping this self-hating policy, you should all be summoned before a tribunal,” Markuszover, a square-shouldered tall man, said then.
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.”
Melchior Vesters, a teacher and award-winning essayist who frequently writes about Jews and Israel, wrote on Facebook: “In Gidi Markuszower, we’re getting a Jewish deputy prime minister and Immigration and Asylum Minister who is even more rabidly anti-asylum seekers than Wilders.” Vesters, who has called Israel a “murder regime and apartheid state,” likened this to a descendant of a Nazi becoming the prime minister of Israel.
Markuszower is to serve with two other politicians as vice prime minister — a title that means bearing some of the leader’s responsibilities when the prime minister is indisposed. Wilders will not be serving as prime minister, ceding the role to Dick Schoof, a counter-terrorism former official. Wilders’ party and its coalition partners have agreed to appoint a nonpartisan individual to prime minister to facilitate their power-sharing deal.
Markuszower has been involved in Jewish community events for years, including by volunteering to provide security for communal events. On one occasion sometime before 2010, police questioned him about his possession of a firearm near a Jewish community facility that he helped guard.
Markuszower, who had practiced shooting at the Maccabi Jewish sports club, had a gun permit but police suspected that he had violated its terms. The case was dropped and Markuszower was neither prosecuted nor faced any other legal consequences.
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.”
Markuszower, who rarely gives interviews to the media, has consistently opted for silence when asked to react to criticism from the left about his policies or qualms about his style. He has declined multiple requests for an interview with The Times of Israel, including after his appointment.
This preference for a low media profile has not spared him from political scandals.
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.
Markuszower “can certainly dish it out, but he’s just as good as taking criticism. He’s got a sportsmanlike attitude to these things,” Esther Voet, the editor-in-chief of the Jewish weekly Nieuw Israelitisch Weekblad, told journalist Joop Soesan on his podcast Thursday. Voet, a political centrist, wished Markuszower “plenty of good luck” in his new position.