Kneejerk
response, then overcorrection: what the aftermath of the Amsterdam violence
should teach us
Rachel Shabi
Assumptions
were made about clashes between Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and Amsterdam locals –
and the far right took advantage
Sat 16 Nov
2024 07.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/16/amsterdam-violence-maccabi-tel-aviv-far-right
In the
aftermath of a sudden eruption of violence or unrest, there is often a brief,
vital window when the narrative about what actually happened is up for grabs.
Last Friday, the day that street violence between Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv
football fans and local people in Amsterdam made headlines around the world –
with reports of antisemitic “hit-and-run” attacks in the Dutch city – the
decision of the Israeli state to send military planes to airlift fans home, and
of the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, to describe the events as an
“antisemitic pogrom”, were crucial in cementing a particular story. So too were
the words of the Dutch king, who said that his nation had “failed” the Jewish
community as it had during the second world war – when three-quarters of the
Dutch Jewish population were murdered by the Nazis.
But then, as
more evidence emerged, a more complex picture came into view. It was revealed
that from the night before the match onwards, hardline supporters of Maccabi
Tel Aviv – a club with a reputation for racism and hooliganism among some of
its fans – had torn down a Palestinian flag from the facade of a building and
burned it, attacked one taxi with their belts, and vandalised others. Among the
deplorable chants they saw fit to shout on the streets of Amsterdam, home to a
large Muslim community, were: “Let the IDF [Israeli army] win, we will fuck the
Arabs”, “Fuck you Palestine” and “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no
children left there.”
The worst
manifestation of this was an Orwellian doublespeak in plain sight, when footage
of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters attacking local people near Amsterdam Central
Station was captioned as the polar opposite: as a violent attack on Israeli
Jews. (The Guardian made a correction to a package of video footage on Saturday
9 November.) The Dutch photographer who filmed these events is still imploring
news sites to correct the error. Examining the issue in a segment dedicated to
uncovering instances of fake news, France24 this Wednesday reported that the
BBC, Wall Street Journal and CBS News were still running incorrectly captioned
footage.
What
happened in Amsterdam – and, crucially, the media coverage and the political
reactions – felt familiar, following the contours of our harmful and divisive
conversations about antisemitism. Necessary rebuttals to prevailing one-sided
portrayals sought to bring the overt anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism into
view. But in doing so, the antisemitism that was one of the factors in the fray
was often elided or glossed over. The initial, distorted coverage itself
spawned an overcorrective, corralling us into polarised sides: either it was
about thuggish anti-Palestinian hatred, or it was rampant antisemitism, but not
both. Yet an appraisal more befitting a joined-up and coherent anti-racism
would recognise that understandable hostility to the state of Israel during the
ongoing war does sometimes get articulated through antisemitism, and expressed
as violence.
In
Amsterdam, we saw this in the frightening invocation of a “Jew hunt” in a chat
coordinating an attack, and the use of a Dutch racial slur translating as
“cancer Jew”; in the instances where people deemed to look Jewish were stopped
and asked about their nationality, or allegedly forced to say “Free Palestine”
in order to escape assault. This is not happening because criticism of Israel
and anti-Jewish hatred are one and the same. Rather, it is because
antisemitism, as scholars such as Prof David Feldman of Birkbeck, University of
London have argued, can be likened to a reservoir that runs deep across
European societies: a readily available language of prejudice that is drawn on
in moments of provocation, crisis, or tension. The better we understand this as
a social force, the more effectively we are able to counter it.
But there is
another layer to this sorry story. Casting the Amsterdam violence as purely
antisemitism has helped buttress the far right. The Dutch government is
dominated by the Party for Freedom (PVV), helmed by the anti-Islam,
anti-migrant Geert Wilders. And this party is pursuing a well-worn script
deployed by the far right across Europe: championing Israel, pretending to care
about antisemitism, and using both to push rampant Islamophobia. Far-right
parties – often with unsavoury track records on antisemitism – are chasing a
political revival by situating themselves as self-declared defenders of Jewish
communities in a clash-of-civilisations fight with Islam.
Having
effectively received a global seal of approval for his hate- and
bigotry-fuelled misreading of events, Wilders is now threatening to deport and
strip the citizenship of those he deems to have instigated the violence: Dutch
Moroccans. And so the far right’s supposed concern about antisemitism is
rerouted into using the power of the state to deprive another racialised other
of citizenship. As for the Jewish and Muslim communities of Amsterdam, they
have been left fearful, in shock and reeling from the repercussions of
political forces intent on fomenting tensions in pursuit of a migrant- and
Muslim-bashing agenda.
Rachel Shabi
is the author of Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism
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