Amsterdam police officers clash with protestors during a demonstration on Dam Square on Nov. 10, which took place during an emergency ordinance and demonstration ban in the city following tensions and violence surrounding supporters of Israeli soccer club Maccabi Tel Aviv.ROBIN VAN LONKHUIJSEN/AFP/Getty Images
The man on the ground, terror in his eyes, looked up at his attackers. “I’m not Jewish,” he pleaded. “I’m not Jewish!”
In Amsterdam last week, hordes went after fans of an Israeli soccer club, Maccabi Tel Aviv, as well as others they thought might be Israeli or Jewish. “That’s Gaza,” one person yelled as a man was dragged on the cobblestone streets. “Now you know how it feels, eh?”
Israelis were holed up in a casino (where a security guard was fired, after alerting a chat group that he would let them know if more Israelis showed up) as outside, young men on foot, scooters and e-bikes beat people up and demanded to see their passports. This was an organized attack – a “Jew hunt,” as one driver called it. Calls went out on social media and in a chat group used by taxi drivers. Five people were hospitalized and dozens more injured, some with broken legs.
And what does the world say? The Israelis started it. They deserved it. The Jews were to blame.
A bunch of Maccabi fans did indeed act reprehensibly before this attack. A Palestinian flag was torn down and set on fire. A taxi was vandalized, its Muslim driver inside. And there was this obscene chant: “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there.” Truly grotesque.
But if you think that justifies the beatings and terror that ensued, you have some tough questions to ask yourself.
Here’s one: consider all the times the Israeli flag has been desecrated over the past 13 months – ripped down, stomped on, burned – by protesters calling for Israel’s destruction. Consider how many times people have yelled “Go back to Poland!” (where the Holocaust wiped out 90 per cent of the Jewish population). Or how people have celebrated the “resistance” of Oct. 7, 2023 (when more than 1,200 people in Israel were murdered, more than 250 taken hostage, and girls and women were sexually assaulted). Cursing Jews, Israel, even Canada.
Would it have been okay, after even one of these occasions, for angry young Jewish (or simply Canadian) men to take to the streets and attack anyone they thought might be part of that group – anyone wearing a keffiyeh, say? Or anyone they thought might be Muslim? Would it have been okay for them to punch and kick them, demand to see their passports, terrorize a city through the night?
Of course not.
Others dismissed what happened in Amsterdam as just more soccer hooliganism, the kind of thing that happens all the time. That is incredibly naïve. These events must be viewed in context of the alarming rise in antisemitism in Europe – even before Israel’s war in Gaza, but staggeringly worse since. Some European Jewish organizations have reported a more than 400-per-cent increase in antisemitic incidents since October, 2023.
This is Europe, where soccer clubs use antisemitic chants and Jewish symbols to mock their opponents. “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!” is one such chant.
The attack in Amsterdam coincided with the country’s commemoration of 1938′s Kristallnacht, when Jewish businesses, homes, synagogues, cemeteries and people were attacked throughout Germany, Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia. About 30,000 Jewish males were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Arnold Goldschmidt was one of them. He was taken by the Nazis and marched away, sent to Buchenwald. Along the way, people spit in his face. He was 16.
The Nazis – who made the Jews themselves pay for the damage – blamed it all on the actions of a 17-year-old Polish Jew who had shot a German diplomat in Paris, anguished that his parents had been exiled from Germany, living in limbo. The Nazis blamed Kristallnacht – with more than 1,400 synagogues burned, 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses vandalized and looted, and 91 Jews killed (that’s the official death count; it’s believed hundreds more died) – on the Jewish guy. Sound familiar?
Of course, the supposed justification for Kristallnacht was a pretext for a highly organized attack. Of course, what happened in Amsterdam was a dark night of extreme antisemitism, fuelled by anger over the war in Gaza. It has continued. On Monday night, rioters set a tram on fire, and yelled about cancerous Jews.
Here’s a hopeful thought: the people who did this are thugs, just as the Nazis were thugs. But on Kristallnacht, they were government-sponsored thugs, organized and supported by the men in charge.
The antisemites running rampant through Amsterdam have been condemned by the city’s mayor, the country’s prime minister and the king of the Netherlands. I’m taking some heart in that. But the gaslighting and victim-blaming – arguing that this was not antisemitism, that the Jews started it and deserved it – that is just heartbreaking.