Itai Bar and Nils Benkman
Anyone who watches the much-discussed Israeli documentary Naza , about the large-scale and structural destruction of Palestinian life, can also discover a Dutch touch. The Israeli army, after all, made use of a data center in the northern part of North Holland.
In the Netherlands, we love highlighting our contributions abroad. Footballers with a Dutch background who shone with Cape Verde at the World Cup, dredgers who helped protect Venice from the sea: when we can mention our little frog country, we beam with pride. But not all Dutch achievements are presented to the world with the same pride.
It is not immediately obvious. But anyone who watches the much-discussed Israeli documentary Naza, about the large-scale and structural destruction of Palestinian life, can also detect a Dutch connection. Data stored in the Netherlands was used to calculate, using electricity generated by Dutch wind turbines, which family in Gaza was going to be murdered.
Where’s Daddy
In the documentary, Israeli soldiers explain how an AI system named ‘Lavender’ identifies suspected militants from large-scale intercepted phone data using pattern recognition. Another system, named ‘Where’s Daddy’, listens to the hacked phones of the children of these alleged Hamas members. When they hear the keywords ‘dad’ and ‘home’, an airstrike is launched to blow up the target, including the family, neighbors, and passersby.
Details about these systems appeared as early as August 2025, barely two years into the genocide, in the British newspaper The Guardian . It revealed that the IDF, the Israeli army, used Microsoft’s cloud services and that over eleven million gigabytes of intercepted phone calls and location data were stored in a data center in the northern part of North Holland. Our cheerfully spinning windmills generated the energy that was used to destroy the lives of countless Palestinians.
The Gaza Strip is part of the Palestinian territories that have been illegally occupied and colonized by Israel for about sixty years. The water and electricity supplies, as well as telecommunications, were installed and are controlled by the occupier. Partly because the Israeli military security services themselves built the systems in Palestinian territory, they can eavesdrop and collect data undisturbed.
The spying on Palestinians has been going on for decades, and the data is not stored for nothing: it is used for executions, attacks, and blackmail of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. That this is happening and that it constitutes a violation of Palestinian rights was already widely known before Microsoft signed a contract with the IDF. And also long before the genocide actually began.
Fighter jets with Dutch parts
The servers in our polders that were used to surveil and murder millions of Palestinians are unfortunately just one example of how our economy profits from genocide and occupation. The airstrikes that leveled entire neighborhoods in Gaza were carried out by F-35 fighting jets with Dutch components.
The fighting dogs trained in Netherlands that are used by the IDF to rape and bite Palestinians to death; tech darling Booking.com that rents out apartments in illegal settlements; our pension funds that invest in complicit companies : the list of stains on our cool entrepreneurial country is long and still growing.
Under public pressure—after giving the IDF the opportunity to transfer their data to another cloud provider—Microsoft has since discontinued these specific services to the Israeli army.
But anyone who has seen the documentary cannot avoid the question of whether that is sufficient, or whether the matter is closed. Accountability for the genocide will have to be provided not only by the perpetrators in Israel, but also by companies and individuals who knowingly and willingly assisted them for years, thereby lining their pockets.
Back to the big screen. As the credits roll, everyone in the theater remains seated, stunned. Perhaps everyone needed some time to process what had just been shown. Or perhaps people were looking expectantly at what perhaps should have been included.
Made possible by the Netherlands.
