A warning from Amsterdam

There has been much said and written about the violence in Amsterdam before and after the football match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax this week, and it’s been interesting, if rather odd, to watch my two worlds of football and antisemitism come together. I’ve been a match-going Man United fan all my life - I’m even writing this on the train to today’s game - which means I’ve seen a lot of football violence, thuggery and generally bad behaviour over the decades. I get the impression a lot of the people opining on Amsterdam can’t necessarily say the same. I may be doing him a disservice, but I doubt Owen Jones - who has issued dozens of tweets and a YouTube video about Amsterdam - has ever been kettled outside Elland Road or Upton Park for his own safety while police tried to disperse mobs of waiting home fans. Watching football nowadays is a lot safer than it was in the 80s and 90s, but still: there are things that happened in Amsterdam that are familiar enough, and others that were totally out of the ordinary.

First, the familiar. Football fans acting up on European aways and getting put in their place by home fans is as old as it gets. And some of the behaviour seen from Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, mainly the day before the match, was truly reprehensible. Pulling down a Palestinian flag was insulting; singing racist songs about Arabs, indefensible. They are not angels, and it is well known that Israeli football has a racism problem in the fanbase of certain clubs.

(Incidentally, some years ago I was told by a senior figure at Kick It Out, the UK’s main football anti-discrimination body, that a proposed trip to advise their counterparts in Israeli football was blocked at the highest level of KIO because of a personal objection to Israel. I’m pleased to say that the current leadership of KIO is much more committed to tackling antisemitism and they now have probably the most extensive programme of antisemitism awareness training of any civil society campaign group).

Anyway, the behaviour of some Maccabi Tel Aviv fans was appalling, but hardly unique. We’ve seen similar from lots of fans of lots of clubs across Europe over the years. What is unusual though - I’m struggling to think of another example anywhere - is for this to be followed by such an extensive, coordinated series of violent ambushes 24 hours after the initial flashpoints, carried out not by rival hooligans from the home club but by local residents, conducted in explicitly racist terms.

Watching some of the videos and reading the accounts of people caught up in the violence, it seems clear that the targets were any and all Maccabi fans, not just men of a certain age who are often considered fair game, or consenting adults, in the unwritten rules of football hooliganism; and anyone who might be mistaken for an Israeli or a Jew, or linked to them in any way. One British man was beaten up by a gang who asked if he was Jewish, and even demanded to see his passport to check, before setting on him because he had “helped a Jew” (he tried to prevent them from kicking another fan who was lying in the gutter having been beaten unconscious).

Dutch police are investigating reports that local taxi drivers used fare apps to identify and locate Israelis. Dutch media is reporting that the violence was planned well in advance on Telegram, before any of the flashpoints now being cited as provocations for the violence even occurred.

This kind of thing, on such a scale, well away from the stadium and - most crucially of all - not involving fans of the home team, just doesn’t happen normally, and the people essentially arguing this is a case of one group of football hooligans provoking a response from rival fans and getting what they deserved are either ignorant or disingenuous.

Also missing the point are the people explaining that because the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were attacked as Israelis, it wasn’t antisemitic as such. The language used by their attackers did not observe such fine distinctions: for them, Israelis, Zionists and Jews were used interchangeably. It is right that academics and others in this field take care over how to accurately describe things, but sometimes we obsess over the precise meaning of academic and political definitions of antisemitism so much that we risk missing the wood for the trees. Violent racists don’t apply similar considered thought in choosing or describing their targets, and rational explanations for an irrational phenomenon like antisemitism will only get us so far.

Having said that, I wouldn’t call the violence in Amsterdam a pogrom, for two reasons. The first is that pogroms usually had the involvement, support or acquiescence of the local authorities, one way or the other. For all that the Amsterdam police don’t seem to have performed especially admirably on Thursday night, this kind of state sanction for anti-Jewish violence is not the case in the Netherlands, or Europe more widely, today. The second reason is that the original pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe involved a completely different order of violence to that seen this week. In Kielce, Poland, in July 1946, 42 Jews were murdered by a mob over the course of a single day. In the most notorious pogrom of all, in Kishinev in 1903, 49 Jews were killed, 500 injured and around 2,000 left homeless. This is not just a difference of degree: the level of violence, death and injury was so different that these events are qualitatively not the same thing. Calling Amsterdam a pogrom diminishes the reality of what actual pogroms were like.

Why, then, are so many Jews calling it a pogrom? The answer to that should be obvious. It is because this week’s violence hints at the antisemitic potential that still resides in European societies. It reminds us that the spirit of the pogrom is still present, even if the reality is not. After a year of increased anti-Jewish hate crimes, violent rhetoric and ever more extreme protest, this outbreak of violence visually resembled what Jews fear most of all: a return to the days of being literally hunted in the streets, in one of the very same locations where this occurred 80 years ago.

It is also a reminder that some of those people in our societies who have thrown in their lot with the Palestinian cause will find ways to justify and excuse anything that befalls Europe’s Jews. It was no surprise to see Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, issuing a weaselly set of excuses for the violence this week - after all, PSC did the same after the October 7 terror attack last year, and if they can excuse that as an understandable response then it’s no big deal to do the same about what happened in Amsterdam.

Of course, the same does not apply in the other direction. We’ve had a year of anti-Jewish violence, Israeli flags being trashed, and equivalently genocidal slogans on anti-Israel marches, but the likes of Jamal and Jones would never concede leeway for angry, insulted Israelis or Jews to go round beating up any Muslims they could get their hands on in response. Nor would the Jewish community leadership ever try to justify or excuse such behaviour.

The past year has been a shocking, destabilising experience for Europe’s Jews, and Amsterdam feels like it could be another step towards an even worse future. But it has also been a clarifying year, in which we have come to learn exactly where we stand; who are our friends and who will abandon and betray us when we need support. The fact that this came in Amsterdam, the city that is synonymous with Anne Frank, should not be lost on anyone.