The
violence in Amsterdam showed just how polarising – and radicalising – the
Middle East conflict has been
Dave Rich
It should be
possible to campaign for Palestinian freedom, condemn racist Israeli football
fans and still show unequivocal solidarity with European Jews
Sat 16 Nov
2024 08.00 GMT
The
president of the United States does not normally tweet, as he did last week,
about football fans fighting in a European city. But as reactions to the
violence in Amsterdam have shown, this was no ordinary outburst of football
hooliganism, but another polarising moment in the debate about antisemitism.
The trouble
in Amsterdam after the Europa League game between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv was
not even a traditional fight between rival football fans. I’ve been watching
football since the 1970s and, like many others, have become attuned to the
bizarre subculture of football violence.
Maccabi Tel
Aviv fans have a poor reputation in Israeli football and the behaviour of some
of their number before the match in Amsterdam shows why. According to police,
fans tore down a Palestinian flag and burned it, shouting, “Fuck you,
Palestine”, attacked a taxi, and vandalised others.
After the
match, however, events took a very different turn. In the city centre far from
the stadium, what the mayor, Femke Halsema, has described as violent “hit and
run” attacks on Israeli supporters by groups of local people took place. These
were not football fans engaging in the usual inter-hooligan punch-ups, but
rather a coordinated series of antisemitic assaults. Messages on Telegram and
WhatsApp called for a “Jew hunt”. Taxi drivers allegedly used their apps to
locate targets. Random people were stopped in the street and ordered to produce
their passports to prove whether they were Israeli.
The trouble
in the city has continued into this week, long after the Israeli fans have
departed. On Monday night, a tram was set on fire by groups armed with sticks
and firecrackers. In Berlin, a Jewish youth team was reportedly chased off the
pitch by a knife-wielding mob shouting “Free Palestine” and “Fucking Jews”.
A police
officer kneels with two people helping a person lying on the ground with a wall
of officers in the background
The official
report by Amsterdam authorities concluded that the trouble was “a toxic
cocktail of antisemitism, football hooliganism and anger over the war in
Palestine and Israel and other parts of the Middle East”. Looking at the
reactions to these events, it seems that many people are seeing only the
ingredient in that cocktail that confirms their worst fears, or reinforces
their prejudices.
Some have
described the events in Amsterdam as a pogrom. The sight of Jews in a European
city being asked for their papers before getting beaten to the ground, in the
city of Anne Frank, no less, sends the chill of history down the spine.
Holocaust survivors are fewer in number, but their children and grandchildren,
now adults themselves, live in the shadow of what happened to their own
families.
You may
think this is an overreaction. In the most notorious pogrom of all, in Kishinev
in 1903, 49 Jews were killed, more than 500 injured and about 2,000 left
homeless. The violence in Amsterdam was on such a lesser scale that calling it
a pogrom feels misleading, as if it diminishes the horror of that older
history; but I wonder whether focusing on such detail risks missing the wood
for the trees. Amsterdam carried a whiff of those times, as if the spirit of
the pogrom is stirring deep in the soul of Europe. There is genuine alarm among
European Jews who have been battered by more than a year of violent and
rhetorical attacks on their communities, and soaring online hate. In the past
decade Jews have been murdered in France, Denmark and Belgium, so this is no
idle fear.
Debate over
whether the violence towards the Maccabi fans in Amsterdam was antisemitic or
“merely” anti-Israel is of no practical consequence, given how readily those
categories are blended by the people leading the assault on European Jewish
life. The rioters in Amsterdam described their victims variously as Jews,
Zionists and Israelis as they attacked them, as if to remind us all that
violent mobs care little for academic distinctions. Meanwhile, the far-right
politician Geert Wilders was quick as ever to exploit the incident as a
platform for his own divisive, anti-Muslim views, to the benefit of neither
Jews nor Muslims.
Some
pro-Palestinian voices have preferred to focus on the racist thuggery of
Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, as if this negates any need to acknowledge the
antisemitism that emanates from parts of their own movement. Social media posts
and YouTube videos push a narrative of equivocation, of they-had-it-coming, of
what did you expect to happen when racist genocidal Israelis come to Europe?
Naturally they do not extend the same dubious understanding in the opposite
direction. Only a fool or a knave would truly believe that the racism of
Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, or the violence of their assailants, justifies or
excuses the other.
It’s a
reminder that this issue has greater polarising, and radicalising, potency than
any other. It should be possible to campaign for Palestinian freedom, condemn
racist Israeli football fans, and still show genuine, unequivocal solidarity
with European Jews who are once more being squeezed out of public life. If
antisemitism is a sign of a deeper malaise then red lights are flashing all
over Europe, but it seems that after more than a year of death and destruction
in the Middle East, too many people have closed their eyes to what is happening
within our own lands.
Dave Rich is
director of policy at the Community Security Trust and the author of Everyday
Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into Our World – And How You Can Change it
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