Debunking the Amsterdam “Pogrom”
Photograph Source: Michael Leonardi
In early November, according to many news reports, a group of anti-Semitic boys with a “North African appearance” brutally attacked Israeli citizens who came to Amsterdam to support their football team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, during a game with the Dutch team Ajax.
But that’s not the whole story of what happened last week in Amsterdam.
On November 4, the international action group Week4Palestine asked Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema to ban the upcoming match on the grounds that among the Maccabi fans are (ex-)soldiers of the Israeli army “who are trained in (extreme) violence.” Two days later, the unrest started in the center of the Dutch capital. Maccabi supporters, recognizable by their yellow club colors, chanted on the escalators of the metro: “The IDF will win, fuck the Arabs.” Another slogan they used was ‘There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left.” They pulled down a Palestinian flag from a facade and burned another. They assaulted taxi drivers.
The unrest continued the next day as Maccabi supporters clashed with a group of men in dark clothing, some on scooters. Police Commissioner Peter Holla reported that there were “fights on both sides, hit & run actions.” At the end of the afternoon, groups of boys with “a North African appearance,” almost all dressed in black, gathered around the stadium. One group said that they came there to stand up to hypocrisy: “Where were the police yesterday when the Maccabi supporters were beating our taxi drivers?”
Before the match, there was a moment of silence for those who died in the recent Spanish floods. The stadium remains nearly silent, except for a small section where Maccabi supporters were seated.
After the match—which Ajax won 5-0—fights broke out as Maccabi supporters walked through the city center. Rioters attacked and abused these supporters. Around midnight, Maccabi supporters were escorted to their hotels, while a few injured were treated in hospitals for minor injuries and released. Some 62 rioters were arrested—with only four of them still in jail this week—and the town started to calm down.
Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Saar called his Dutch counterpart Casper Veldkamp to arrange the dispatch of planes to bring home the Israeli fans, which Veldkamp promised to facilitate. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, wrote on X about “a violent incident” against Israeli citizens in Amsterdam and demanded that the Dutch government act against the rioters. The Israeli army wanted to send a rescue mission with transport aircraft. Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders wrote on X that “a pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam” has taken place with “Muslims with Palestinian flags hunting down Jews.” He demanded that Amsterdam’s mayor resign.
From here, the rhetoric escalated. Israeli President Isaac Herzog adopted Wilders’ term “pogrom” on X (Mairav Zonszein, an analyst at the Crisis Group, an independent NGO, calls it “absurd” to compare the violence in Amsterdam to pogroms). Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, stressed that he was shocked by the anti-Semitic attacks on Israel citizens, and Israeli Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir spoke of “lynching incidents.”
The Maccabi Football Club, meanwhile, announced that its fans could fly back free of charge on Israeli planes, two of which were regular scheduled flights. Some of the Maccabi fans who earned free tickets home had previously been involved in racist incidents in Israel, including cursing at the team’s Palestinian and Arab players and pressuring the team to oust them. The more hardcore members, who qualify as football hooligans, had also previously attacked protesters demonstrating against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In politically more neutral situations, they would have been simply a socially disruptive group celebrating violent macho ritualism and deeply suspicious of “enemy” teams. In the current moment, characterized by deep divisions and war, they have taken a step further by identifying enemies beyond simply the opposing teams.
Consider, for instance, the example of a soccer match on May 13, 1990 in what was still Yugoslavia when the Zagreb club Dinamo hosted Belgrade’s Crvena Zvezda. The atmosphere was already tense in the city and in the country. It all started with verbal offenses and escalated to physical violence, injuring 79 police officers and 59 spectators. Afterward, Croatian reports accused Serbian fans of starting the violence at the match, while Serbian commentators offered the opposite version. Not long after that, a real war between Croatia and Serbia began, with serious weapons and long-lasting consequences.
Similarly, in Amsterdam, the Maccabi supporters were not innocent victims. By provoking a situation that turned violent, they gave state actors a political opportunity to politicize the divisions and mistrust, first and foremost Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders. Attributing “the growing hatred of Jews” to “Islamization,” he urged Minister of Justice David van Weel to take more action: “Why don’t you send this scum out of the country? Where are the proposals to denaturalize criminal Muslims?” With that statement, Wilders broke his promise after last year’s elections to put his anti-Islam positions “temporarily on hold” in order to make himself socially acceptable as a possible coalition partner. Now he believes that his political position is strong enough to accuse the previous government: “The VVD governed for 10 years and looked the other way for 10 years. We weren’t allowed to talk about Islam as a source of anti-Semitism and they didn’t dare kick criminals out of the country. And now we have a Jew hunt in Amsterdam. And now they’re lecturing me.”
Wilders is just one of the Muslim haters and dangerous alpha males in the political arena. His proclamations sound very much like those of his friend across the ocean, president-elect Donald Trump. Trump has another group to deal with, 11 million undocumented immigrants, mostly from South America: “Really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here.” For Wilders, Muslims are the “scum of the country” and should be deported. For Trump, the undocumented, no matter why they came, are “murderers” that have to be kicked across the border.
Many of those who support the outbursts of Wilders are, besides some hard-core Islamophobes, the ones who still feel guilty because of their own country’s contribution to Jewish suffering in World War II. Anna Frank aside, most Dutch left their Jewish neighbors to the mercy of the Nazis. Out of 79,000 Jews living in Amsterdam in 1941, today there are only 15,000. When The Dutch king condemned the recent violence, he compared it to the Dutch failure to protect Jews during the Holocaust: “Our history has taught us how intimidation goes from bad to worse, with horrific consequences. Jews must be able to feel safe in the Netherlands, everywhere and at all times.” That is of course correct, but the same should apply to Muslims and everybody else in the Netherlands today.
What happened in Amsterdam is not a simple clash between football fans, which is a common occurrence everywhere. It is also not a simple clash between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Rather, it’s the result of unresolved political tensions, propaganda, manipulation, wars, scapegoating, and name-calling. Those who demand an end to the war and the protection of Palestinian civilians are often branded as anti-Semites. Those who consider the militant wing of Hamas to be terrorists are often declared to be Islamophobes. Common citizens behave as if they must choose sides, as if one side has to be absolutely right, which can boil down to equating every legitimate critique of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza with anti-Semitism and every critique of the brutal Hamas attack on Israel with Islamophobia. More nuanced interpretations are necessary, for instance those offered by the Jewish Dutch writer Benjamin Moser on his Instagram profile.
The Maccabi supporters are not a peaceful group of football fans and, even less, representative examples of the Jewish population anywhere, certainly not in Amsterdam. The boys with a “North African appearance” are not unprovoked thugs who like to fight just for a fun of it. Nor are they representatives of the Muslim population. But now the Jews are starting to feel uneasy, thanks to the proliferation of false reports. Wilders and others like him are frightening and manipulating people by spreading the flames of provocation, provoking Islamophobia and anti-Semitism alike. And violence, as the example from former Yugoslavia suggests, inevitably follows.
This first appeared on FPIF.
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