Meet Max Koedood. He is a Dutch-language teacher, author and self-described philosopher who runs paid language courses for foreign residents, using what he calls a “natural method” based on learning Dutch through context rather than grammar drills.
Koedood has made political conformity on the genocide libel against Israel an entrance requirement for his language classes. When an Israeli living in the Netherlands sought admission, Koedood treated acceptance of the genocide accusation as a moral test. “Denying a genocide I think is one of the worst things you can do in life,” he told the applicant. “I want only opposers of the genocide and the genocide is a given.” The recorded exchange can be heard here.
Koedood explicitly tied the test to the applicant’s Israeli identity. “This is important to me because there are Palestinians in the community and I’ve spoken to people from Israel before that completely were not agreeing with me. So I need to check if we’re on the same page with this, if you really oppose what your government is doing. I need to know before we continue.” He later confirmed, “Of course I asked this, because I knew that he was from Israel.”
The prospective student explained that his uncle had been killed during the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led massacre and that he did not believe the ensuing Gaza war constituted genocide. He said possible war crimes should be investigated and those responsible prosecuted, but refused to accept deliberate Israeli genocide “as a given.”
Koedood rejected that answer. When the student then said the genocide charge still required investigation, Koedood cut him off: “It was investigated. You’re denying. I don’t like it. I wish you the best in another school. Good luck.”
CIDI, the Dutch organization that monitors antisemitism, publicized the recording and subsequently brought the case to the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights, raising concerns that the student had been discriminated against because of his views and identity.
The case raises legal questions as well. Dutch equal-treatment law protects against discrimination based on nationality and political opinion, while the General Equal Treatment Act prohibits such distinctions in the provision of goods and services. The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights has previously found that a private company violated the law when it refused a prospective customer because of his political beliefs.
The Koedood episode is part of a larger cautionary story unfolding in the Netherlands. In November 2024, Israelis were hunted and beaten in the streets of Amsterdam after a soccer match. In the CAMERA documentary Echoes of Kristallnacht: The 2024 Amsterdam “Jew Hunt”, the attacks were examined alongside the myths that rapidly emerged to rationalize them, shifting attention from the targeting of Jews and Israelis to accusations against the victims themselves. The violence unfolded amid a climate in which increasingly extreme accusations against Israel had become commonplace.
That climate has not disappeared. CIDI reported that antisemitic incidents in the Netherlands remained at historically high levels in 2025 after reaching a record in 2024, with Dutch Jews increasingly being held collectively responsible for accusations of wrongdoing by Israel.
Koedood’s language-school test illustrates how such normalization works in everyday life. The genocide accusation has moved beyond demonstrations and political slogans. For him, it has become an established moral fact that an Israeli must affirm before being admitted to a Dutch class. An accusation is repeated until it becomes an assumed truth. The assumed truth becomes a moral test. Those who refuse to repeat it become morally suspect and can be excluded. That is how a libel works its way from rhetoric into ordinary life.
