Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism – Crimes against Palestinians have been covered up by planting forests at the crime scenes. These forests have been given the names of heroes of the 20th century, including Ader’s parents.
The heroic Aders hid Jews from the German occupying forces in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. Bastiaan Jan Ader and his wife Johanna are believed to have helped at least 200 Jews escape during World War Two. However, their son was horrified to discover that his father’s name was placed on a monument built on the site of a Palestinian village destroyed by Zionists and now hidden beneath a young forest.
In an interview, Dutch diplomat , Erik Ader told Mick Napier, the co-founder of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign that the monument is a gross abuse of his father’s memory and that his family name has been exploited to cover up “an [Israeli] act of ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. The former Netherlands ambassador to Norway told Dutch public broadcaster NOS that although he cannot ask his father what he would have thought about “his name being connected to this injustice” — he was executed by the Nazis in 1944 for helping Jews to escape from the Holocaust — it is not difficult to guess, “knowing what he stood for”.
Mick Napier explained that the JNF-built monument sits in a forest planted on the ruins of Bayt Natiff, a Palestinian village about 13 miles south-west of Jerusalem which was destroyed by the nascent Israel Defence Forces (IDF) during the Zionist state’s “War of Independence” in 1948.
“The JNF exists to facilitate a huge crime, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,” said Napier. “In this case, however, it manages a double outrage: drawing a veil over the Zionist ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from their homes in Bayt Natiff and, as part of this effort, trying to co-opt the legacy of Reverend Bastiaan Ader, a man who died opposing the racist oppression and murder of Jews.”
In addition to asking for his father’s name to be removed from the monument, Ader has gifted 1,100 olive trees for a new forest, which will be named after his father, near a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank. This is his way of trying to make amends for the similar number of pine trees planted by the JNF in his family’s name to conceal the remains of Bayt Natiff.
Bayt Natiff was once home to between 2,150 and 2,400 Palestinians living in 350 homes, which were all destroyed. None of the villagers were allowed to return; they became refugees in Jordan or the West Bank, where many of their descendants still live. Israel also denies them their legitimate right to return to their land.
