Geert Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV) in the Netherlands, is a well-known philosemite, possibly due to the fact that he lived in Israel during his formative years when he was a teenager.
In the following clip from Dutch TV, the interviewer uses Mr. Wilders’ experiences in Israel as the jumping-off point for a discussion about his views on the Jewish state and the war in Gaza.
Many thanks to Gary Fouse for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:
Video transcript:
| 00:00 | Mr. Wilders, you have lived in Israel. That was a long time ago, you were 17 then? | |
| 00:06 | Yes, from 17 to about 19, a long time ago… | |
| 00:10 | We have photos from around that time. | |
| 00:13 | Look, um… —Yes. —I see it… | |
| 00:17 | Is that about how you looked around that time? —Since that’s me, | |
| 00:21 | I couldn’t deny it. I shouldn’t say it, but that’s me, absolutely. | |
| 00:24 | But I mean do you think back a lot on that time, because it is there where everything | |
| 00:28 | is happening now, and I can imagine that now with everything that you are thinking back. | |
| 00:32 | Of course because also in that time terrorists came out of Jordan. | |
| 00:37 | It was the start of the 1980s when they came into Israel | |
| 00:40 | and tried to murder people, innocent people. | |
| 00:45 | And when you now see the images from the terrible terrorist attacks by Hamas, | |
| 00:48 | then I think back on the kind of support Israel needs, | |
| 00:53 | because they are sitting surrounded by countries, but also by people in their own country | |
| 00:58 | who are after only one thing, and that is the destruction of the state of Israel. | |
| 01:02 | You know, the most important political point, perhaps, is that it is not a conflict over land. | |
| 01:05 | Israel has always tried; they gave Gaza to the Palestinians. | |
| 01:09 | Now we see the misery, so it is an ideological conflict, | |
| 01:13 | not a conflict over land. When you give up land, you don’t solve the problem. | |
| 01:17 | It is an ideology between… between… the people who want to destroy the state of Israel, | |
| 01:22 | and even the Jews in Israel, and that is the nature of the conflict, and we must never forget that. |