Hooligans
On Wednesday night, November 6, bands of supporters of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv roamed through Amsterdam, waving national and team colors. Though they were ostensibly there to attend a UEFA Europa League match between Maccabi and Ajax of Amsterdam, they took to the streets and chanted “Death to the Arabs” and “Why are there no schools in Gaza? Because there are no children”, celebrating the slaughter their nations has carried out over the course of nearly fourteen months. They attacked and destroyed a taxi, tore down one Palestinian flag and burned another. In short, they acted as if they were home in Israel where, protected by the police and army, any and every form of racist language and violence is permitted. The display of Palestinian flags is forbidden in Israel, and the fans acted as if Amsterdam was an occupied city and that Israeli mores and laws ruled. They acted like a combination of soccer hooligans and right-wing terrorists. In acting this way, the Israeli fans taunted Amsterdamers, particularly Arab Amsterdamers, and in tense times received the response they should have expected. Was this antisemitic violence or anti-Israeli violence? This is an entirely valid question, since there are no reports of Dutch Jewish citizens or sites being attacked. For Arabs, the enemy had shown its face in their hometown, and that enemy is Israel.
The next night the Maccabi fans learned they weren’t in Israel, and a gang of hooligans, many of them from Amsterdam’s Arab community, beat Israelis where they found them, and when they didn’t find them sought them out. Some Israelis were injured, few seriously, and five were hospitalized. Videos of mobs chasing Israelis and beating and kicking them circulated widely. They are unpleasant, but they hardly reach the level of a pogrom. The government intervened and arrested the perpetrators. If the incident had nothing of a pogrom, even as a soccer riot this was a minor fracas. If this was a world-shattering event, as it would soon be depicted, what do we call the Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985, when thirty-nine Italian fans of Juventus were attacked and killed by English fans of Liverpool? But when it comes to Israel all sense of measure and reasonableness evades the Western conscience. The specter of Hitler must immediately be invoked.
And indeed, the cry of “pogrom” issued from all corners of the press and political world. The Dutch government apologized and expressed shame for what had occurred. El Al, the Israeli airline, made rescue flights available. The Israeli fans were told to stay in their hotel rooms. Right-wing politicians in the Netherlands used the incident as a pretext to condemn Muslim residents of the country. The egregious Brett Stephens in the New York Times compared the night’s events to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which forty-nine Jews were killed in a spree that went on for two weeks. He insisted that this was “yet further proof of the rise of antisemitism in Europe.” Though no one asked for it, Stephens offered his advice to the Jews of the entire continent: “My advice to Europe’s besieged Jewish communities: Remember what Kishinev foreshadowed — and please get out while you still can.” To call this an overreaction is an underreaction. Where should they go, according to Stephens? “If a reminder were ever needed of why Israel, for all of its travails, came into existence in the first place, this latest pogrom was it.” I know that if as a Jew I were seeking safety the first place I’d chose to go would be a theocratic, authoritarian, racist state that has itself had to evacuate a substantial chunk of its territory for safety reasons. Comparing the incidents of Thursday night to a pogrom like Kishinev’s is an insult to those truly martyred for their faith. But any incident, however minor, is fodder for those who seek excuses for defending Israel, for demonizing those who oppose it, and for excusing its murderous wars. On the vast scale of all that has occurred on and after October 7 the “Amsterdam Pogrom” is a blip. And yet the reaction to it reveals so much about we in the West.
I read Saturday, less than forty-eight hours after the events, that Israel’s National Security Council has assured its citizens who are tourists in Holland that it’s safe to circulate. I also read that in the preceding twenty-four hours nineteen people had been killed and ninety-one wounded in Israeli attacks in Lebanon. And as I wrote this on Sunday morning, twenty more Lebanese have been killed, and thirty-six in Gaza, about which there is no outrage, nary a peep in the Western press. The past year the world has displayed more than its usual share of hypocrisy. 43,000 dead Arabs have been justified in the name of the deaths of 1200 Israelis, and that thrifty-five to one ratio is not disproportionate enough for Israel and its backers. One can only be sickened that a dozen Israeli hooligans getting their asses kicked in a a beating they provoked is of more importance, is more worthy of lamentation, than the deaths of men, women, and children because they are Arabs, for whom no escape is possible.
by Mitch Abidor