On Nov. 7, street attacks broke out in Amsterdam following a soccer match between local club AFC Ajax and the visiting Maccabi Tel Aviv. The ensuing violence went quickly viral, with online communities on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict sharing disturbing videos: pro-Palestine supporters were seen brutally beating and stomping Israeli fans, while harassing non-Israelis and bullying them into chanting “Free Palestine”. Maccabi supporters, meanwhile, were caught on tape chanting “Death to Arabs” and tearing down Palestinian flags from people’s homes.
With a fuzzy timetable of how events unfolded and emotions running high, The CJN’s sports podcasters, James Hirsh and Gabe Pulver, hosts of the Menschwarmers podcast, wanted to weigh in on what we know—and don’t know—about what some Jewish communities are calling a modern-day pogrom.
The following is a transcript of their conversation on the latest podcast. Click here to listen to the full episode.
Gabe Pulver: Jamie, I wasn’t sure which one of us was going to lead off the story, but I think we could split it. In other words, let’s go Dutch.
James Hirsh: So I should say that there’s limits to our reportage. We’ve been reading along with everybody else about what’s been going on in Amsterdam. Just to give some basic background on it, Maccabi Tel Aviv was playing Ajax in a Europa League group stage game in Amsterdam. Ajax actually has a reputation as being sort of the Jewish Dutch team—
GP: For Dutch Jews, this was like, the moment. This is the game. It’s a big deal for any sort of Northern European Jew. I think a lot of German fans who are Jewish, with Jewish families, support Ajax for that same reason—Estonia, Finland, in that area.
JH: That’s right. There was a large number of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters, largely from Israel, who travelled to Amsterdam to watch the game. There was some ongoing provocation between Israeli fans and, let’s say, anti-Israel supporters.
GP: So what’s really interesting about this is, it doesn’t seem to be a clash between Ajax fans and Maccabi fans. It is a clash between Maccabi fans and the general Amsterdam protest scene.
JH: Yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, it doesn’t seem like Amsterdam Jews were targeted, but Israeli fans were. Other people who were just in the vicinity who were not Jewish, who were accused of helping the Israeli fans or thought they were Jews, seemed to have been attacked. Ultimately, five people were hospitalized. I think I saw reports of another several dozen had minor injuries. Israel ended up sending several flights back to Amsterdam to evacuate all the Israeli fans.
People have reported this as being a pogrom. I think that’s fairly strong language. And, look, on the other side, people have said, “These are just soccer hooligans; no story here.” I don’t think that’s the case either.
GP: It’s got to be somewhere in the middle.
JH: This clearly seems to be a unique situation. It did occur around the anniversary of Kristallnacht, which seems to have been top of mind for the Dutch authorities, and there seems to have been some significant security failures. The stories are still coming out about it as we’re talking.
GP: Yes, we’re still learning. It’s interesting to see some of the reactions. There’s been, surprisingly, wall-to-wall coverage in the BBC of this situation. They have a pretty solid “soccer hooliganism” beat. And soccer violence is a tale as old as time in Europe—I mean, about as old as antisemitism is soccer violence. And where the twain shall meet in Amsterdam this week, as you said, it’s not necessarily soccer hooligans, but people who are looking for a fight against people who are willing to give it to them. Throw a little antisemitism in the mix, and it escalates a lot quicker.
JH: Yeah, I think that’s fair. Look, I’m not trying to split hairs here. I do think there was a specific focus on the fact that it was an Israeli team and there were Israeli fans. Again, I’m not suggesting that this wasn’t motivated by antisemitism. There was provocation to some degree, it seems like, from the Maccabi fans. There is history of them being provocative, shouting slogans, singing songs… Whether that is a reasonable basis for a physical attack, I would come down strongly on side of “No, of course not.” I think this was an organized antisemitic attack, there’s no other way to put it. Anything else is commentary.
A salient element of this has been the silence of UEFA, FIFA, the governing bodies of sports, because they don’t really care. Honestly, I think they would feel more at ease just banning Israel altogether. There’s lots of pushback on that. But because there’s a lot of constituent countries that are composed of people who don’t care much for Israel, historically, and maybe right now more than ever, there’s not a lot of support for Israel or Israeli teams.
And that’s troubling. This is very much in the sadly increasing narrative of simply being Israeli in the world, or being Jewish in the world, being too difficult for people to handle. It will lead to some direct pushback from other elements of society. To quote Dave Baddiel, it does really feel like a “Jews don’t count” moment. If this were fans of a Nigerian team coming to play in Amsterdam and they were attacked in this way, with anti-African or anti-migrant or anti-Nigerian slogans, the global pushback on this would be overwhelming.
GP: So I want to quote something David Baddiel said about this two days ago, where he said, a lot of people here—here being Twitter—feeling the need to insist that throwing into canals, attempted stabbings, head stomping and hunting down of Jews this week in Amsterdam is provoked by the bad behaviour of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans… Well, good to know that in this instance, everyone is okay with disproportionate retaliatory violence.
JH: Yeah, I think that sums it up well. I would say it is the most significant instance of antisemitism and soccer that hasn’t been provoked by, let’s say, white supremacist ideology. And we’ve talked about that on this podcast several times—we’ve had Dave Gass on, soccer journalist and reporter, to talk about antisemitism in soccer. It has mostly been of the skinhead variety, right? You know, English skinheads taking the mickey out of Tottenham supporters.
GP: Good use of “taking the mickey”. But yes, there are never-ending stories of some second-tier Greek soccer player heil-Hitlering the crowd after scoring a goal. Like, that always happens.
JH: But this was not that. This was from a purportedly pro-Palestinian sentiment. So anyway, there’s a limit to what we can say about this. Obviously, I think our listeners know what side we are on of this.
GP: The side of the Jews.
JH: It’s worth understanding the caveats and knowing about this, but unfortunately, I think this is something we’re gonna have to continue to talk about in the coming years. We talked about it a little bit with the Olympics—international sports brings the worst out of people sometimes.
GP: And it’s important to remember also that soccer games have been used as a cover for violence for a very, very, very long time, and will continue to be so. It’s entirely possible that those who are, as I mentioned, looking for antisemitic violence use the Israelis being in town for the soccer game as the opportunity. That’s sort of what I was getting at earlier. And I think that could be an explanation for a lot of this violence.
