Amsterdam Jews reeling from pogrom, unsure of police protection

On Friday, Dutch King Willem-Alexander told Israeli President Isaac Herzog, ‘We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again.’

By Shira Li Bartov, JTA

Late on Thursday night, Esther Voet heard explosions from her home in the center of Amsterdam.

Voet, who is the editor in chief of a Dutch Jewish weekly newspaper, quickly learned that she was hearing heavy fireworks — set off in anger, not celebration. Panicked messages began pouring into her phone from a group chat of Jews across the country who described street beatings. Then came calls from parents who said their children had left a soccer match between the Dutch team Ajax and the Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv that night.

“Parents started to phone, saying, ‘Oh my God, my son is being chased, he’s being attacked,’” Voet told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

At least five people were hospitalized in the assaults after the game, and police reported that 20 to 30 more sustained minor injuries. The police arrested 62 people prior to and during the soccer game on Thursday — before the wave of assaults occurred in the late hours after the game.

About 40 of those people were suspected of disturbing the peace, and subsequently fined and released. Others were suspected of insult, vandalism, possession of illegal fireworks, resisting police and other minor offenses.

Four people who remain in custody, including two minors, were suspected of “public violence” on Thursday. A 26-year-old man was arrested on Friday on suspicion of assault after the police recognized him from footage of the attacks. Meanwhile, Israel sent planes to fly its citizens home.

Tensions in Amsterdam remained high on Sunday: ​​Dutch police moved in and detained dozens of people after hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters defied a three-day ban on demonstrations in the city. The demonstrators, who gathered in the capital’s Dam Square, chanted “Free Palestine” and “Amsterdam says no to genocide.” Police have since extended the ban to Thursday.

Now, the local Jewish community is shaken from attacks that Dutch, Israeli, European and U.S. leaders have denounced as antisemitic, with some calling them a “pogrom” or making direct comparisons to the Holocaust. And police are still struggling to contain the fallout from a clash they say they saw coming, and that has provoked debate in the Netherlands and beyond.

“The Jewish community is a very small club,” Voet tweeted the day after the attacks, estimating the community’s size at a maximum of 45,000. “And we don’t always agree with each other, but when it really has to be, we can move mountains in a very short time.”

She added, “We had to learn that because governments (I won’t mention any names) have proven to be unreliable more than once.”

The Dutch Union of Jewish Students called the incident “a painful reminder of the challenges faced by our Jewish and Israeli community in Amsterdam.”

Tensions were clearly on the horizon ahead of the Ajax-Maccabi match. Amsterdam police chief Peter Holla said the force had been preparing for weeks to control expected disturbances surrounding the match, sending 800 officers on duty.

“Because of an announced pro-Palestine demonstration, combined with the commemoration [of Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom in Germany and Austria], we anticipated risks to public order,” Holla said in a statement. “We prepared the maximum.”

That level of preparation initially appeared to give police a better grip on the tensions. According to police, on Wednesday, after groups of Israelis began arriving in the city, Maccabi fans burned a Palestinian flag on Dam Square and vandalized a taxi. Calls to mobilize taxi drivers against Israelis circulated online and multiple drivers headed to the Holland Casino, where 400 Israeli fans were gathered, but the police prevented major confrontations, according to Holla. Police reported several clashes between rival fans but no major rioting.

But that day many of the following night’s attackers, whose identities have not yet been confirmed, reportedly began planning to assault the Israeli fans, communicating via WhatsApp and Telegram. Messages from a group chat called Buurthuis, associated with the attackers and reported by The Telegraph, describe a “Jew hunt” and call the targets “cancer dogs,” a harsh epithet in the Netherlands. The Telegraph redacted the names of the group members and did not specify which platform they were on.

On Thursday afternoon, when a large number of Maccabi fans gathered at Dam Square, rival groups appeared and fights broke out along with heavy fireworks. The police generally kept the groups apart. Early in the evening, pro-Palestine demonstrators gathered in Anton de Komplein, a square where they were allowed to protest, while police escorted an estimated 1,000 Maccabi fans from Dam Square to the Johan Cruyff Arena for the match. The police continued to attempt to keep groups of opponents separated as the demonstration broke up and protesters went in search of confrontations.

The unrest boiled further as Maccabi supporters were captured chanting anti-Arab, expletive-laden chants on their way to the match, including a song with the words, “Let the IDF win, f— the Arabs.” During the soccer game, the team’s supporters whistled loudly during a minute of silence for more than 200 people killed in Spain’s recent floods.

Then, on Thursday night, chants and skirmishes escalated sharply into large-scale physical violence, as gangs tracked down and assaulted hundreds of Maccabi fans leaving the match.

Groups of Maccabi supporters were targeted in hit-and-run attacks over several hours. Videos shared widely on social media, mainly taken by the attackers, showed people fleeing, being beaten and in one case being rammed by a car. One video shared by Stand With Us Netherlands showed a man unsuccessfully trying to avert blows by yelling, “I’m not Jewish.”

Some fans told the BBC that they were ordered to show their passports before being beaten. Two Jewish British men said they intervened in an assault to help an Israeli man to his feet, telling the attackers they were British, but they were still punched for “helping the Jew.”

Israeli eyewitness accounts say the gangs were largely made up of Arabs, and media noted that a large number of Turkish fans were in Amsterdam, where a local team was also playing a team from Turkey.

Voet offered her home to people seeking shelter from the streets in the city center. Joining forces with a colleague, who drove through Amsterdam picking up Israelis frightened to walk outside, Voet hosted 10 people in her home between 1 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Friday afternoon. One man there was injured from being kicked.

The police chief acknowledged that his force was not initially prepared to deal with the challenge.

“My shock lies mainly in the fact that one of the largest deployments that we as Amsterdam police — with national assistance — have made in a year failed to prevent this violence,” said Holla, adding, “It is extremely difficult for the police to act against this kind of flash mob scattered throughout the city.”

Dutch officials are now investigating whether they had received any warnings from Israeli authorities before the game.

Voet said she was angry but “not surprised” by the violence, which she connected with a surge of antisemitic incidents in the Netherlands since the Gaza war broke out with Hamas’ invasion on Oct. 7, 2023. European surveys have documented sharp rises in both antisemitism and Islamophobia across the continent over recent years and, at least in the case of antisemitism, particularly since Oct. 7.

On Friday, Dutch King WIllem-Alexander told Israeli President Isaac Herzog, “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again.”

But locally, politicians are sparring over which side started the fight. Geert Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom — a far-right, anti-Muslim party and the largest in the Dutch parliament — called authorities to “arrest and deport the multicultural scum that attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in our streets.” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar traveled to Amsterdam to meet with Wilders on Friday.

Meanwhile, Stephan van Baarle, the head of a small pro-immigrant party called DENK, rebuked his colleagues in government for “hypocritical reactions” and said that violence could have been prevented if Maccabi supporters were not allowed to “go about their hatred and provocations with impunity.” That echoed users on social media who accused the Israelis of “losing a fight they started.”

“No one should be beaten up or discriminated against,” Van Baarle said in a video posted to the party’s YouTube channel. “But then also tackle those idiots who glorify the genocide in Gaza and shout death to the Arabs. Don’t look away when Israeli hooligans destroy Palestinian flags and attack a taxi driver.”

Jazie Veldhuyzen, a left-wing Amsterdam city council member, was among the protesters arrested and released on Sunday. He said that unrest should have been expected when Maccabi was invited to the city, based on a history of racist incidents among a subset of the team’s supporters. He cited reports of violence committed by Maccabi fans in Greece and in Israel, and argued that just by coming to Amsterdam, the team provoked attacks.

“The ultras [a group of diehard Maccabi fans] attacked a pro-Palestinian activist in Greece last March, and they are also known in Israel to attack protesters against Netanyahu,” Veldhuyzen told JTA. “So in a city where you have pro-Palestinian demonstrations, of course you can expect clashes to happen.”

Voet rejected the idea that Israeli fans were to blame for Thursday’s violence against them, calling it an excuse for premeditated attacks on Jews.

“I think that those clashes are being emphasized now to say those Maccabi fans weren’t the loveliest people either. In other words, they deserved it,” she said. “I really object to that.”

And Economist correspondent Anshel Pfeffer tweeted that he abhorred Maccabi fans’ conduct but that some of the reaction online recalled earlier instances of blaming Jews for the violence visited upon them.

“I hate Maccabi Tel Aviv, after Beitar they’re the 2nd most loathsome football team in Israel with their fair share of racist arsehole fans, but so much of the comments here on the Amsterdam attack are basically ‘the Jews had it coming,’ much like after October 7,” he wrote.

Echoing the statements of world leaders, many Jewish officials and groups, like the American Jewish Committee, said the blame for the attack fell on those who assaulted Jewish fans. But the Jewish statements also placed blame on European officials.

“This modern-day pogrom reflects a broader rise in antisemitic violence across Europe since October 7 — fueled not only by an anti-Israel political ideology and extremist interpretations of Islam, but also by the rhetoric and complacency of some European leaders,” AJC wrote in a statement.

A bipartisan group of U.S. Jewish lawmakers similarly called the violence a “modern-day pogrom” and said “European nations have failed to address this problem.”

Racist chants are a longstanding problem across European soccer, though they rarely lead to the scale of physical violence seen last week. In June, three men were sentenced to eight months in prison in Spain for a high-profile instance of racist chants against Vinicius Junior, a Black athlete. Last December, police said they would investigate racist comments from fans toward an athlete in the United Kingdom. And in July, the UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, fined seven national soccer federations for racist behavior from fans.

Fans at soccer games around the world, meanwhile, have chanted anti-Israel or antisemitic slogans at games. FIFA, global soccer’s governing body, has weighed a Palestinian request to suspend Israel from international play due to its military campaign in Gaza.

Dutch Jews are still coping with the fallout of last week. Lievnath Faber, the founder of the progressive Jewish group Oy Vey and a rabbinical student, said that her community was “shaken” but added, “Once the dust has settled, we will be able to take our role as bridge builders, which is difficult at the moment.”

Voet said the small community of Jews in the Netherlands were feeling isolated and keenly aware of vulnerabilities in the systems meant to protect them. When the police left holes in their security last week, she said, “we filled them up.”

“We showed what we can do as a Jewish community,” said Voet. “Within two hours, we had a complete organization standing — people were standing up for each other, people could hide. We did great. But we’re too small.”

Amsterdam pogromantisemitic violenceThe Netherlands