As the Amsterdam Jewish community joined with local officials to commemorate the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht at the city’s Portuguese-Jewish synagogue—established by Jews who escaped the Inquisition—a pogrom was taking place outside. Following a soccer match between the Dutch club Ajax and the visiting Maccabi Tel Aviv, Jewish and Israeli fans of the visiting club were ambushed and beaten in the city’s streets and alleys.
Footage shows an Israeli soccer fan being struck by a car, cartwheeling across the windshield. More footage shows the scene in downtown Amsterdam, where Israelis are pleading with their assailants, “not Jewish, not Jewish.” And they are beaten mercilessly.
Watch footage of the violence here:
In video of other attacks last night, a victim is struck and lies injured on the ground, seemingly unconscious. A father can be seen fleeing with his son. A man jumps into one of Amsterdam’s canals to escape his assailants. In the recording, where he is forced to say “Free Palestine,” his assailants laugh and jeer that he is a “cancer Jew”—a classic slur in Dutch, where both diseases and the Jewish ethnicity are deployed as put-downs.
Much about the origins of the attack are still unclear, but early reports suggest that it was carried out by youth gangs from the Dutch Moroccan and Dutch Turkish community, and was orchestrated in advance. Visiting Israelis report being ambushed by groups of 10 to 15 masked assailants in various alleys. Fleeing Israelis told Channel 12’s Elad Simchayoff that “Amsterdam police instructed [Israelis] not to go by taxis. Police officers told fans that taxi drivers in the city are helping organize the riots and assisting the gangs.”
Before the local authorities meaningfully intervened by dispersing the rioters and arresting assailants, Israel announced it would send two planes and a rescue team to Amsterdam to extract trapped Israelis. (Israel ultimately recalled the mission.) “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again,” the Dutch king Willem-Alexander reportedly said to Israel’s President Isaac Herzog in a phone call on Friday morning.
The shame these events bring to Amsterdam—where 75 percent of Amsterdam’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, and which takes pride in being the city of Anne Frank who, despite her betrayal and murder, has been embraced by the city as an emblem of its liberal, postwar attitude of tolerance—should be lost on no one.
Many are shocked, wondering how this could happen in the Netherlands.
To me, their bafflement is what’s shocking.
I grew up in The Hague, where real and abundant antisemitism, from epithets in the street to physical threats to the community’s safety, was part of our daily life. As a young boy, I vividly recall how The Hague's football hooligans—viciously opposed to Ajax, Amsterdam’s “Jewish” team—walked the streets under a banner reading “We’re hunting for Jews.” (Indeed, for my entire life, football stadiums in my home country have been filled with lurid chants like “Hamas, Hamas, all the Jews on gas!” and “My dad was in the commandos, my mom was in the SS, we like to burn Jews, because Jews burn the best.”)
In high school, second- or third-generation Moroccan kids would point and hiss “Psst, psst, that’s a Jew, that’s a Jew!” as they passed by on their bikes.
But most impactful were the myriad security measures our community had to undertake. Seen from the front, The Hague synagogue is not recognizable, two thick green doors presenting a closed facade to the street. Behind these doors are glass doors that open only once additional permission is given. All the windows are made of bulletproof glass. A permanent police post guards the synagogue. In Amsterdam, the Jewish primary school has even more dystopian levels of protection, hidden behind several layers of metal spikes and fencing. From the outside, the view of the school is entirely closed off. (Even as I write this, I feel uncomfortably conscious of not revealing any sensitive security details.)
Self-protection was a constant—and to me, natural—part of Jewish life. Leading youngsters to a summer camp in northern Friesland meant bringing a dedicated security team and, when possible, keeping quiet the fact that it was Jewish children gathering here.
Violent, antisemitic assaults have become increasingly regular occurrences. In May, a student at the University of Amsterdam, a young man, was assaulted by a protester in a keffiyeh, struck in the head with a wooden plank. In August, a statue of Anne Frank was defaced—for the second time—with anti-Israel graffiti. Today, walking around with a kippah in the Netherlands is an act that requires bravery.
As the situation worsened over the years—motivating some, including me, to move, others to adjust, and so many to worry—one of the most painful aspects was the way the Jewish community was gaslit. Dutch society repeatedly told its post-Holocaust Jewish remnant—and itself—that “never again” was not merely a concrete promise, but a core concept of modern Dutch morality. However, the dominant culture of the country’s immigrant communities has proven manifestly hostile to that worldview—and to Jews.
For the North Africans living in Holland, the dominant Jewish story of the twentieth century is not Auschwitz, it is Israel, which in their distorted conception is an illegitimate, one-directional criminal enterprise directed at an innocent population. Nor—and this is crucial—is this merely an attitude about a conflict. They believe it is the crime of the twentieth century, conferring ultimate guilt on the Jewish people. “Palestine” is a phrase felt to carry the gravity of “Holocaust,” grotesquely inverting the perception of the Jewish experience.
For Holland’s Jewry, this reality has been palpable for decades. Yet nothing—no politician, no policy—has altered this reality. In the aftermath of every single violent attack—as will most likely be the case now—the political answer has been a room-temperature broth of subsidies, youth centers, dialogue forums, visits to Islamic pensioners clubs, and interfaith dialogue.
So it did not surprise me when international media outlets, like The Associated Press and The New York Times, covered this widespread attack as if it was the unfortunate, but perhaps expected, result of the Israeli fans’ conduct before and during the match, such as reportedly taunting Ajax fans with inappropriate slogans. Further, the AP wrote, the attack followed a Palestinian flag being “torn down from a building in Amsterdam on Wednesday,” and the rioters were angry because “authorities banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration near the stadium.” The Times originally pinned the attack on differences over sport and on taunts, as “violence tied to a match between Dutch and Israeli teams,” and reported that “the tensions in the hours leading up to the violence” was in part caused by “one man [being heard] saying in Hebrew, ‘The people of Israel live,’ while others shout[ed] anti-Palestinian chants using expletives.” (The Times has apparently stealth-edited its reporting numerous times since publication.)
In other words, if all you read were the initial reports, you might think that the Israelis started it, or at least had it coming.
More footage of the antisemitic violence in Amsterdam:
What the reporters and media fail to understand is that this was an attack on Israeli football fans, but not one carried out by football hooligans. The Ajax team is itself Jewish friendly—fans of Amsterdam’s Ajax are affectionately (and sometimes not-so affectionately) referred to as “super Jews,” and Ajax is understood as the “Jewish team,” so it would make little sense that Ajax supporters would attack Jews or Israelis for their ethnicity—even if they are fans of an opposing team.
No, this was straightforward: According to the accounts of witnesses and victims, it was an attack by immigrant, Muslim communities against Israelis and Jews.
Between 1977 and 2002, more than 700,000 immigrants and refugees from Islamic countries settled in the Netherlands, now making up about 5 percent of the Dutch population. For decades, issues surrounding the integration of these minorities have riled passions and dominated Dutch politics—first in the form of the assassinated populist leader Pim Fortuyn; then filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in broad daylight 20 years ago this month; and most recently Geert Wilders, who lives under permanent police protection.
In other words, modern antisemitism in the Netherlands has, for the past several decades, been an affliction of the immigrant and secular communities, which few care to do anything about. In secular Dutch society, teachers find it increasingly difficult to teach the country’s recent history—its complicity in the Holocaust—in schools with large immigrant communities. (As the Algemeen Dagblad related as early as 2015, if a teacher says “Holocaust,” students reply, “That’s all bullshit” and “You are on the side of the Jews.”)
The most alarming thing of all is the transformation of the people who are meant to protect us: the police. Just last month, Dutch police officers indicated they would not be comfortable guarding Jewish institutions over their “moral objections” to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
Surely the dark irony of the Dutch refusing to protect their country’s Jews—citizens or visitors—would not be lost on anyone. But lost, it seems to be. Will a pogrom in 2024 be sufficiently horrific to wake Europe up?
David de Bruijn is a lecturer in the philosophy department at Auburn University. Follow him on X @DMDeBruijn.
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