Rotterdam – An investigation by Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad discovered that Dutch government officials and the current Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher persuaded officials to continue making higher pension payments to Israeli-Dutch citizens residing in illegal West Bank settlements.
In official documents published by the newspaper, government officials appear to have been aware (for years) that they were violating a 2006 law, limiting recipients from receiving a full tax-exempt pension if they live in an area deemed illegally occupied.
Like with other countries, the Netherlands has a social security pension agreement with Israel and recognizes its sovereignty. The sovereignty that the Netherlands recognizes pertains to Israel’s boarders of 1967. Therefore, the Dutch government does not recognize the West Bank, Golan Heights and East Jerusalem as being a part of Israel. Under the 2006 Dutch pension law, any eligible recipient living within those occupied areas should not receive the full pension amount and are required to pay taxes over the income they do receive.
The NRC reported that in 2013, Asscher, the acting minister of social affairs, requested that the SVB, the independent organ responsible for paying social security pensions, distribute full pension payments to Jewish-Dutch citizens living in the West Bank, who had applied for the benefits prior to 2015. He also requested that the SVB exempt them from paying any taxes over their income. Victims of War World II also receive a war compensation on top of their social security pension.
SVB 2013 Fraud Audit
The NRC claimed that the Netherlands Ministry of Social Affairs, headed by Asscher, first stated that they didn’t instruct the SVB to continue making full pension payments to Jewish-Dutch recipients living in illegal West Bank settlements. The ministry also stated that they didn’t want to cut the disputed pensions. After publication of the NRC article, Asscher admitted during an interview that he was informed in 2014 by the SVB that 28 of the pensioners “lived outside of Israel” and 20 others lived in Israel. When reviewing those 28 cases, Asscher concluded that 11 of those cases should have had a reduction in the amount of pension they received. But, when he realized that 7 of those 11 individuals were World War II Holocaust survivors, he instructed the SVB to continue making the payments as they were already doing. “From those 11 people, there were 7 who were survivors of the Holocaust, from concentration camps. I thought due to mistakes made with the implementation it wasn’t righteous to cut the pensions of these old people,” stated Asscher during an interview.
The SVB, on the other hand, told the NRC that they and the ministry were aware of dilemma surroundings the pensions since 2006. The NRC states that SVB employees were not allowed to conduct fraud audits of the Israeli pensioners addresses. “The leadership of the ministry didn’t want us doing anything in Israel. Prior to going you had to give them the address that you wanted to visit and you weren’t allowed to go into the occupied areas,” stated a government official to the NRC.
The NRC believes that the Ministry of Social Affairs made its stands clear on how they wanted the SVB to deal with the so-called “West Bank pension dilemma”. “It was a gray area. But, one thing was clear. You didn’t touch Israel,” stated a source from the SVB to the NRC. In 2013, the SVB was under new leadership and conducted an investigation on 49 pension recipients, that were registered with them, as living in Israel. The investigation found that 28 of the pensioners had listed ‘Israel’ as their place of residency, while in reality they lived in occupied territory. By listing Israel as their place of residency, they avoided detection and received a full pension. “What we found frightened me,” stated one of the SVB investigators to the NRC.
The NRC reported that at the end of 2015, 81 Jewish-Dutch pension receptions lived within the occupied areas of the West Bank.
West Bank vs. Western Sahara
The law that Dutch officials passed in 2006 was introduced to combat pension fraud abroad. Besides illegal Israeli settlements, the Dutch government also doesn’t recognize Western Sahara as being a part of Morocco. During the 1960s, the Dutch government began a guest worker recruitment campaign in Morocco. Currently, there are approximately 380,000 Moroccan-Dutch citizens living in the Netherlands. An important number of these Moroccan-Dutch have returned to Morocco.
Earlier this month, the Dutch government reached an agreement with Morocco to lower welfare payments at the end of 2016 for widow(s)(-ers), disabled workers and children’s compensation payments to parents of children who were born in the Netherlands. The agreement will not affect current welfare recipients living in Morocco; their payments will remain the same. Except for a clause that ends compensation payments to parents of children born in the Netherlands, by 2026. Social security pension payments will not be effected by the agreement and will remain the same. The new benefit agreements will take effect on October 1 and will only effect new applicants.
At the end of 2015, the Moroccan government refused to agree to the terms unless the Netherlands recognized the Western Sahara as part of Morocco, which would extend the Netherlands social benefits to Dutch residents living their. The Dutch refused and stated that they would cancel the entire social security treaty if they couldn’t come to an agreement by January 2016. Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb helped broker the deal between the two countries.
During a debate in the Dutch parliament this week, Asscher was grilled by parliamentarian Selçuk Öztürk who asked if he felt his stands regarding the disputed pensions was fair in regards to the elderly living in the Western Sahara. Asscher explained that he couldn’t find similar situations among the elderly living in Western Sahara in conjunction with the elderly living in illegal West Bank settlements. “In Morocco there are two pensioners that are war victims and they don’t live in the Western Sahara. There are 7-pensioners living in the Western Sahara, but they didn’t get shortened on their pension because they fall under an old clause and some are married,” said Asscher.
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