Last Thursday, footage and reports emerged regarding violence against Israeli fans of football club Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam, with some assailants asking people if they were Jewish and making antisemitic statements. The most disturbing video I saw was of a man being beaten up while repeatedly pleading “I’m not Jewish, I’m not Jewish”. Seeing this inevitably brings with it trauma for many Jewish people, particularly given the history of European antisemitism.
Almost immediately, pro-Israel Jewish groups and the Israeli president himself started making analogies to the Holocaust and called the incident a “pogrom”. One image circulating on social media is particularly stark: it depicts a young Anne Frank with a yellow star titled “1939” and another young girl wearing the Maccabi Tel Aviv logo, which happens to be a yellow star, reading “2024”. Below the image is text that reads “Never again is Now!”. The clear implication is that this is yet another example of Jewish people facing the same type of persecution as they did in 1939 Europe.
However, these analogies to pogroms and the Holocaust obscure reality. And this incident is another crucial reminder that until global leaders and the media are honest about the truth of events such as this, both anti-Palestinian racism and antisemitism will continue to flourish.
Prior to the organised attacks against them, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans had engaged in their own racist riots on the streets of Amsterdam. Video footage shows mobs tearing down images of Palestinian flags from people’s houses, all while singing “Fuck you, fuck you, Palestine”. Images circulating on social media show Maccabi fans assaulting and damaging the car of a taxi driver.
On the way to the football match, footage depicts Maccabi supporters singing racist and genocidal chants of “Let the IDF win! We will fuck the Arabs” and “Death to Arabs”. As Al Jazeera reports, the Maccabi supporters also chanted anti-Arab slogans such as “Fuck you Palestine” and “No children left in Gaza”, according to videos verified by Reuters and eyewitnesses Al Jazeera spoke to.
In the context of Israel’s slaughter of countless Palestinians in Gaza — the real death toll of which is likely far higher than the official 44,000 — these statements have real-world implications. In the north of Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians currently endure starvation, disease and have no access to medical care. The chant “Finish the Arabs” is clearly genocidal. The chant “There are no more children in Gaza” is all the more harrowing given that children aged five to nine years old are the most represented among Gazans killed by Israel.
Statements by pro-Israel Jewish groups around the world — including in Australia, as well as by Israeli officials — that refer to the violence against Israeli supporters as a “pogrom” conveniently leave out these racist and violent acts by Maccabi supporters. While nothing can justify antisemitic slurs and acts of violence, this context, of racialised violence going both ways, and being started by Maccabi fans themselves, makes the Holocaust and pogrom analogies impossible to justify.
As a scholar of pogroms and antisemitism, Dr Brendan McGeever, said on X:
Pogroms were violent acts by sections of the majority population against a racialised minority lacking in rights or state protection … pogroms occurred against Jews in regions of Europe where they were structurally discriminated against, where laws prohibiting their full participation in civic and political life, and where Jews were deemed to be carriers of alien values and ideology.
In this case, although antisemitism throughout Europe is clearly rising, Jews are not lacking in state protection. Dutch authorities reacted swiftly to the violence against the Maccabi supporters. Dozens were arrested and statements were made across Europe calling out the violence as antisemitic. The Dutch prime minister flew home early from a European Union summit and the minister of justice and security promised to track down and prosecute the perpetrators. Dutch King Willem-Alexander, as well as US President Joe Biden and Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong, all called out the antisemitic attacks.
The racist actions and genocidal chants of the Maccabi supporters, in contrast, resulted in no arrests or global calls of condemnation. Instead, right-wing Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders, the head of the largest party in the Dutch Parliament, made racist demands on social media that “criminal Muslims” be deported. Yesterday, Israel’s foreign minister met with Wilders and the Dutch justice minister.
Calling this violence against Israeli soccer fans a “pogrom” distracts from global events that actually reflect the meaning of this word. As stated by McGeever, “The analogy of the pogrom leads us to imagine a world populated in perpetuity by beleaguered Jews and their powerful enemies. The reality today is different, as Israel’s devastating war on Gaza shows, a war described by respected scholars of the Holocaust as a genocide.”
Indeed, the term pogrom can far more accurately be used to describe the ongoing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Armed by the state of Israel, messianic settlers in the West Bank are currently subjecting Palestinians to escalating levels of state-sanctioned violence. This includes open fire on Palestinians in broad daylight, entering and setting fire to homes and Palestinian communities to drive them out, and slaughtering livestock. At the same time as violence in Amsterdam erupted, Israel made explicit its plan to prevent Palestinians from returning to their homes in northern Gaza, thereby completing their ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the area.
The attacks against Maccabi fans should be condemned. This incident demonstrates the very real danger that can come with conflating Jewish identity with support for the state of Israel, a conflation sadly encouraged by Israel and its supporters. Some reported shouts by attackers of the Israeli soccer fans, such as “Jewish, Jewish, IDF, IDF”, provide a clear example of the harm that can result from this conflation.
The pervasive narrative that all Jews support Israel is not only incorrect — many Jews like myself abhor Israel’s continued violence against Palestinians — it increases racism against both Palestinians and Jews. Palestinians and their supporters are painted as inherently antisemitic if they oppose Israel’s atrocities. And as this incident shows, antisemitism against Jews, blaming all of us for Israel’s human rights abuses, also thrives.
Truthfully reporting on incidents like this is crucial to combat anti-Palestinian racism and antisemitism. A like-for-like comparison of a Sky News report on the attacks, showing before and after the story was edited, is a powerful example of distorted reportage that leaves out anti-Palestinian racism by the Maccabi supporters.
Reporting incidents with full context must come hand in hand with global leaders and the media condemning acts of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, as well as drawing a clear line between Jews and support for Israel. Otherwise both anti-Palestinian racism and antisemitism will continue to flourish.
