‘Antisemitic hit-and-run squads’: Amsterdam temporarily bans demonstrations after Israeli soccer fans attacked by street mobs
Deborah Lipstadt and others said the violence, which followed a Maccabi Tel Aviv vs. Ajax soccer game, recalled pogroms
Supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv hold Israeli and team flags at Dam Square ahead of the Europa League football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv Nov. 7. Photo by Jeroen Jumelet/ANP/AFP via Getty Images
By Louis Keene November 8, 2024
Amsterdam police arrested 62 people in the aftermath of attacks on Israeli soccer fans Friday after a game between a Dutch team, Ajax, and Maccabi Tel Aviv. The city also banned demonstrations for three days after what its mayor called “antisemitic hit-and-run squads” injured at least 10 Israeli citizens.
“In several places in the city, supporters were attacked, abused and pelted with fireworks. Riot police had to intervene several times, protect Israeli supporters and escort them to hotels,” said Amsterdam officials. Mayor Femke Halsema described youths on scooters crisscrossing the city in search of Israeli fans, punching and kicking them and then fleeing quickly to evade police.
Videos circulating on social media by accounts including the Israeli embassy in the United States appeared to show Israeli soccer fans being chased and attacked in the streets by men shouting “Free Palestine” and other slogans. One showed a man on the ground fending off blows as his assailants shouted “this is for the children.” Another clip showed a man crying “I’m not Jewish” as he was punched. A third video, showing men fleeing the person recording it, is captioned in Dutch, “Watch and enjoy six Zionists chased away by two.”
Adi Reuben, a 24-year-old Maccabi Tel Aviv fan told the BBC he was kicked on the floor by more than 10 young men who confronted him when he was walking to his hotel. “They shouted ‘Jewish, Jewish, IDF, IDF’,” Reuben said, referring to the Israeli military. He said assailants broke his nose and left him with blurred vision, but that he decided not to take a cab to the hospital because he had heard that taxi drivers were involved in the attacks.
Both the Israeli and Dutch governments called the attacks antisemitic, and Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the United States special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, said the violence was “terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom.”
“We have seen these very troubling reports,” UN human rights office spokesman Jeremy Laurence said, adding that Dutch officials had launched an investigation into the attacks.
“The harsh pictures of the assault on our citizens in Amsterdam will not be overlooked,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. Netanyahu “views the horrifying incident with utmost gravity,” it continued, “and demands that the Dutch government and security forces take vigorous and swift action against the rioters, and ensure the safety of our citizens.”
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog spoke with Dutch King Willem-Alexander on Friday, and said in a news release that the king had “condemned the attack in the strongest terms, comparing it to the Dutch failure to protect Jews during the Holocaust.” The foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said he would travel to the Netherlands on Friday to meet with his Dutch counterpart as well as Israelis and other Jews in the country. El Al said it was sending two planes Friday afternoon to ferry Israelis home free of charge.
Thousands of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters had traveled to Amsterdam for the team’s Europa League match against Ajax, the local football club. The mood in the city was tense even before the game, with clashes between fans on Wednesday resulting in at least two arrests.
But the scale of the violence increased dramatically after Thursday’s game, which Ajax won 5-0. Videos variously depicted large groups brawling, individuals being followed and ganged up on, and, in one instance, a van running over a pedestrian. The vast majority of the clips showed Israelis on the receiving end of the violence.
Much of the footage circulating Thursday seemed to have been both recorded and posted on social media by the attackers themselves.
The videos from Amsterdam are horrific - a nightmare come to life. pic.twitter.com/XaBme6Z2ly
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) November 8, 2024
What caused the violence?
Ajax is a football club with Jewish history — Amsterdam was home to the majority of the country’s Jews prior to the Holocaust, and Ajax fans, nodding to the team’s roots, have in the past waved Israeli flags at their games. Some interactions between Maccabi and Ajax fans have been friendly; a video posted before the game showed an Ajax fan being carried by Maccabi fans singing “Hava Nagila.”
It was unclear what set off Thursday’s violence or how long after the game it began. Some Amsterdam locals said the Israeli fans had spent the previous two days instigating.
Two videos shot Wednesday showed Israeli fans climbing walls to pull Palestinian flags down from second-story windows; in one of the clips, scores of Israelis gathered below cheered as the flag was burned on the street. Maccabi hooligans also sang an anti-Arab chant Thursday as they entered the stadium.
Other footage seemed to show Israelis engaging in violence themselves. One dashboard camera clip posted Wednesday night by a Dutch taxi driver appeared to show a Maccabi fan smashing a taxi with an iron chain. Another video — it was unclear whether it was shot Wednesday or Thursday — appeared to show about 50 Israeli fans doing the chasing.
There was also disagreement online about what was happening in some of the videos. One was widely shared on Jewish social media accounts as evidence of a mob attack against Israelis, but the woman who recorded the video said it showed Maccabi supporters ganging up on a Dutch man.
But many of the clips clearly showed Israelis being attacked, unprovoked, in the streets, and were shared gleefully by pro-Palestinian accounts on X and Instagram. Many of the victims were wearing yellow, the Maccabi team’s color.
One video showed men jumping out of a van to tackle a man walking alone, then kicking him as he lay on the ground.
The Israeli embassy in the U.S. said on X that the Israeli fans were “ambushed.”
‘A pogrom in action’
Haaretz reported that the Israel Defense Forces had banned its personnel from traveling to the Netherlands until further notice.
Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister, called what was happening a “pogrom in action.” It happened two days before the 86th anniversary anniversary of one of the worst pogroms in history, Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) — when rioters burned and looted Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues in Germany and Austria, killing at least 100, in 1938.
Horrified by the attacks tonight in Amsterdam, which are terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom. I am also deeply disturbed by how long the reported attacks lasted and call on the government to conduct a thorough investigation into security force intervention and on how these…
— Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt (@StateSEAS) November 8, 2024
The leader of the Netherlands’ far-right Party for Freedom, Geert Wilders, denounced the incident on social media. Wilders, a hard-right populist known for crusading against Islam and immigrants, led his party to success in last year’s national elections.
“Looks like a Jew hunt in the streets of Amsterdam,” Wilders tweeted. “Arrest and deport the multicultural scum that attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in our streets. Ashamed that this can happen in the Netherlands. Totally unacceptable.”
There were signs that the events would resound internationally. U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, tweeted that he and other Jewish members of Congress would be discussing the Amsterdam violence on Friday with the Dutch ambassador.
In Jerusalem, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial issued a statement Friday morning calling the “pogrom” in Amsterdam “a stark reminder of the persistent threat posed by antisemitism to our communities.”
“Antisemitism cannot be thwarted by words alone,” said Yad Vashem’s chair, Dani Dayan. “We call upon world leaders to recognize and take immediate and decisive action to fight against antisemitism and hate before the disease metastasizes to catastrophic proportions. History has shown us we cannot afford to be complacent.”
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, called the images “shocking and deeply shameful for Europe,” particularly on the eve of the Kristallnacht anniversary. “Just like back then in 1938 security forces and the police have stood idly by and watched these pogrom-like conditions,” he said in a statement. “If the EU member states and their governments do not adequately protect Europe’s legal interests, they endanger the entire European democratic project and give the radicals and extremists a good excuse to carry on and to move us into an unfree society.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the proportion of Amsterdam that was Jewish prior to the Holocaust. The city had roughly 75,000 Jews before the war, accounting for the majority of the country’s Jews but composing less than 10% of the city’s total population, not more than half. Also, it misstated the affiliation of U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman. He represents a district in California, not Illinois.
JTA contributed to this report.
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