In the aftermath of a sudden eruption of violence or unrest, there is often a brief, vital window when the narrative about what actually happened is up for grabs. Last Friday, the day that street violence between Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans and local people in Amsterdam made headlines around the world – with reports of antisemitic “hit-and-run” attacks in the Dutch city – the decision of the Israeli state to send military planes to airlift fans home, and of the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, to describe the events as an “antisemitic pogrom”, were crucial in cementing a particular story. So too were the words of the Dutch king, who said that his nation had “failed” the Jewish community as it had during the second world war – when three-quarters of the Dutch Jewish population were murdered by the Nazis.
But then, as more evidence emerged, a more complex picture came into view. It was revealed that from the night before the match onwards, hardline supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv – a club with a reputation for racism and hooliganism among some of its fans – had torn down a Palestinian flag from the facade of a building and burned it, attacked one taxi with their belts, and vandalised others. Among the deplorable chants they saw fit to shout on the streets of Amsterdam, home to a large Muslim community, were: “Let the IDF [Israeli army] win, we will fuck the Arabs”, “Fuck you Palestine” and “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there.”
Their words bring into focus the elephant in the room. Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, which has now killed upwards of 45,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, displaced most of the population and decimated the besieged territory with such ferocity as to render it uninhabitable. After a year in which many western politicians and commentators have seemed more concerned with, say, campus protests against the war than with the apocalyptic carnage in Gaza, historically illiterate pronunciations of a “pogrom” in the Dutch capital seemed to follow the same script: overlooking or downplaying Israeli violence.
The worst manifestation of this was an Orwellian doublespeak in plain sight, when footage of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters attacking local people near Amsterdam Central Station was captioned as the polar opposite: as a violent attack on Israeli Jews. (The Guardian made a correction to a package of video footage on Saturday 9 November.) The Dutch photographer who filmed these events is still imploring news sites to correct the error. Examining the issue in a segment dedicated to uncovering instances of fake news, France24 this Wednesday reported that the BBC, Wall Street Journal and CBS News were still running incorrectly captioned footage.
What happened in Amsterdam – and, crucially, the media coverage and the political reactions – felt familiar, following the contours of our harmful and divisive conversations about antisemitism. Necessary rebuttals to prevailing one-sided portrayals sought to bring the overt anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism into view. But in doing so, the antisemitism that was one of the factors in the fray was often elided or glossed over. The initial, distorted coverage itself spawned an overcorrective, corralling us into polarised sides: either it was about thuggish anti-Palestinian hatred, or it was rampant antisemitism, but not both. Yet an appraisal more befitting a joined-up and coherent anti-racism would recognise that understandable hostility to the state of Israel during the ongoing war does sometimes get articulated through antisemitism, and expressed as violence.
In Amsterdam, we saw this in the frightening invocation of a “Jew hunt” in a chat coordinating an attack, and the use of a Dutch racial slur translating as “cancer Jew”; in the instances where people deemed to look Jewish were stopped and asked about their nationality, or allegedly forced to say “Free Palestine” in order to escape assault. This is not happening because criticism of Israel and anti-Jewish hatred are one and the same. Rather, it is because antisemitism, as scholars such as Prof David Feldman of Birkbeck, University of London have argued, can be likened to a reservoir that runs deep across European societies: a readily available language of prejudice that is drawn on in moments of provocation, crisis, or tension. The better we understand this as a social force, the more effectively we are able to counter it.
But there is another layer to this sorry story. Casting the Amsterdam violence as purely antisemitism has helped buttress the far right. The Dutch government is dominated by the Party for Freedom (PVV), helmed by the anti-Islam, anti-migrant Geert Wilders. And this party is pursuing a well-worn script deployed by the far right across Europe: championing Israel, pretending to care about antisemitism, and using both to push rampant Islamophobia. Far-right parties – often with unsavoury track records on antisemitism – are chasing a political revival by situating themselves as self-declared defenders of Jewish communities in a clash-of-civilisations fight with Islam.
Having effectively received a global seal of approval for his hate- and bigotry-fuelled misreading of events, Wilders is now threatening to deport and strip the citizenship of those he deems to have instigated the violence: Dutch Moroccans. And so the far right’s supposed concern about antisemitism is rerouted into using the power of the state to deprive another racialised other of citizenship. As for the Jewish and Muslim communities of Amsterdam, they have been left fearful, in shock and reeling from the repercussions of political forces intent on fomenting tensions in pursuit of a migrant- and Muslim-bashing agenda.
Rachel Shabi is the author of Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism
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