On 13 April 2002, a demonstration was held in Amsterdam in protest at Israeli military operations in the West Bank. Under the heading ‘Stop the war against the Palestinians’ it drew approximately 20,000 people, a huge number by Dutch standards. Observers were struck by the numbers of Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch protesters; one of them even spoke of a demonstration with ‘a distinct Islamic character’. A Turkish-born Muslim activist was of a different opinion: most protesters were Dutch. Although impressed by the large crowd with people of all persuasions who marched ‘as one body’, he was disillusioned by the number of ‘our Turkish Muslims’ present. Not that Palestine was a Muslim issue, according to him, but those who considered themselves Muslim should be the first to take it up. He found himself demonstrating alongside Turkish and Kurdish leftists whom, he confessed, he preferred over the apathetic and gutless conservative Turks. At least these leftists knew how to side with the oppressed against imperialism. This lament illustrates the strong anti-Israel protest tradition among Turkish leftist activists in the Netherlands, which still continued at a time when Palestine had come to be seen as a Muslim issue.

In the 1970s and 1980s, protesting against Israel was largely a leftist affair in the Netherlands. Demonstrations against Israel featured representatives of various leftist parties and organisations, including leftist migrant associations. This changed in the 1990s, when religiously inspired organisations introduced novel frames and forms of protest. For a small number of Muslim organisations the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became an important issue which could also be used to mobilise their followers. This shift reflected the advent of political Islam in the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s. The first signs of this change were observed in the Netherlands a few years after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

In Turkey itself, antisemitism was an integral part of religious-nationalist and ultranationalist ideologies. With the arrival of Turkish migrants in the Netherlands these ideologies came to be represented locally. From the start of labour migration from Turkey to the Netherlands in 1964 until 1975 about 63,000 Turkish migrants settled in the Netherlands, the majority foreign labourers.