In Amsterdam, anti-Israel pogrom recalls pre-Holocaust era

The Amsterdam progrom happened on Thursday night, on the eve of the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms in Europe.

By Canaan Lidor, JNS

Walking through the misty streets of Amsterdam on a cold November night, two young Jewish men feigned confidence and casual body language so as not to arouse the suspicion of dozens of antisemitic thugs looking for victims to assault.

This event only sounds like it happened in the 1930s or ’40s.

In fact, it happened on Thursday night, on the eve of the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms in Europe, to Aviv B. and a friend. The two tourists from Israel were among dozens of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans returning to their hotel from a soccer match in the Dutch capital against the local Ajax powerhouse, Aviv told JNS on Friday.

The fans came under a series of assaults that left at least five people wounded, according to police, and constitutes the largest-scale antisemitic event in the kingdom since the Holocaust. Police said they had detained 62 people. The municipality condemned the attacks as antisemitic and vowed to study how they were allowed to happen.

Coinciding with a divisive debate in the Netherlands and Europe about Muslim immigration, it underlined the return of violent antisemitism to streets where it had nearly wiped out the local Jewish population less than a century ago.

Salo Muller, a Holocaust survivor and retired physiotherapist for Ajax, was reminded by the incident of the lead-up to the Holocaust.

“Police should’ve brought the Maccabi fans safely to their hotels. Instead, they were abandoned to their fates. Just like during the war. It’s scandalous and it saddens me to my core,” he told JNS. “This terrible thing should’ve never happened. The mayor and police should’ve anticipated this. People on scooters hunting Jews.”

Locals and other witnesses described the events as an antisemitic pogrom perpetrated and organized by at least 100 men of Arab and Muslim extraction. Hundreds of Israelis and Jews hunkered down indoors on Thursday night, some of them at the homes of local Jews, as a local Jewish sports club set up a safe house for them.

Israel sent two military rescue flights to airlift its citizens out of Amsterdam as the Jewish state’s National Security Council advised them to avoid traveling anywhere in the Netherlands except for airports, and to refrain from displaying any signs that they are Israeli or Jewish.

Amid an international uproar by Jewish groups and beyond, the leader of the largest political party in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, said he’d like to see the perpetrators deported and called an emergency meeting with Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof.

“Looks like a Jew-hunt in the streets of Amsterdam. Arrest and deport the multicultural scum that attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in our streets. Ashamed that this can happen in the Netherlands. Totally unacceptable,” wrote Wilders of the Party for Freedom.

“We have become the Gaza of Europe. Muslims with Palestinian flags hunting down Jews. I will not accept that. Never. The authorities will be held accountable for their failure to protect the Israeli citizens. Never again,” he added.

Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the head of the European Jewish Association, called the events “the strongest example of the extreme antisemitism, the all-pervading Jew-hatred, that is spreading like a cancer throughout the continent.”

Aviv, a 37-year-old business owner from Petach Tikvah who asked that his last name be withheld, described to JNS what he saw at the iconic Dam Square in Amsterdam, which features a prominent monument for the victims of World War II—including the 75% of Dutch Jewry who were murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators.

“My friend and I took a metro from the Johan Cruyff Arena”—where Ajax handily won against Maccabi Tel Aviv—Aviv said. “Security was tight at the arena and we felt safe. But when we came to Dam Square, it was a battle scene. People getting knocked out. People flying up in the air. Explosions from firecrackers. Smoke grenades. The perpetrators had set up a preplanned ambush. It was insane.”

The perpetrators acted in “small groups of five-10 men, each one encircling a victim or two and then punching them and kicking them mercilessly,” he said.

On social media, one video showed a young Israeli man on his knees forced to say “Free Palestine” by men standing around him. Some accounts spoke of an attempted car ramming. At least one person is said to have jumped into a canal to escape his attackers. And another is missing his passport and other valuables after an assault that may have also been a robbery.

“We decided to walk slowly and casual-like to not get picked off. We heard the perpetrators shouting around us, looking for Jews to beat up. But they didn’t pick up on us and we made it to safety,” Aviv told JNS from Schiphol Airport, where he and dozens of other Israelis were under heavy guard, awaiting the rescue flights.

Aviv had thought of Amsterdam, which he’d visited four times in the past, as a relatively safe destination. But after Thursday night, “I don’t think I’ll be visiting Amsterdam again in the near future,” he said.

He added, “I want to stress that the Ajax fans are not the ones who turned on us. They are our friends and terrific sports enthusiasts. There’s a bond and at no point did we feel threatened by Ajax. This was an ambush that happened after the match, by Arabs, who sort of used the match as an opportunity.”

Esther Voet, the veteran editor-in-chief of the Dutch Jewish weekly NIW, is already seeing attempts to frame the incidents as “a soccer riot gone out of hand,” she told JNS. “It’s not a soccer riot. It’s an attempted antisemitic mass assault.”

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, said in a statement, “Just like back then in 1938, security forces and the police have stood idly by and watched these pogrom-like conditions.”

Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs is not calling the incidents a pogrom because he expects firm action by the government, he told JNS. “The government isn’t OK with this. So I’m not calling it a pogrom. But it’s an unprecedented escalation in the level of antisemitic persecution around soccer and in general.”

Asked whether Amsterdam is safe for Jews at the moment, Jacobs said he can only speak of his risk calculations. “I am walking around with a kippah, I will not intimidated. But I am extra alert,” said Jacobs, who for years has been avoiding public transportation in the Netherlands for fear of antisemitic assaults.

Voet is one of the Dutch Jews who opened their homes to Israelis looking for places to lie low. Her deputy editor-in-chief, Bart Schut, who is not Jewish, drove up from his home in the southern Netherlands to Amsterdam, to take people in his car to Voet’s home in Amsterdam’s center. They were afraid to order a taxi because many taxi drivers are Muslim, she explained.

Voet has been covering antisemitism for many years and has studied hundreds of cases, including serious assaults of extreme violence. Nevertheless, she was taken aback by the events of Thursday night. “I never imagined something like this could happen in this scale, no,” she told JNS.

Like many other Dutch citizens, Voet has questions about how the violence was allowed to happen at a time of elevated hostility toward Israel in Europe and in a city with decades of experience in handling mass sports events.

Meital, one of the Israelis who took refuge at Voet’s home en route to a safehouse organized for Israelis by the local Maccabi sports club, said the attacks brought back memories of Oct. 7, 2023. On that day, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists murdered some 1,200 people in Israel and abducted another 251 to Gaza, plunging the region into a war that is still ongoing and which has provoked a massive wave of antisemitic incidents in Western Europe.

“I came here for a vacation to get away from the war,” she told JNS. “Instead, they tried to do another October 7 to us.”

Herman Loonstein, a Dutch-Jewish lawyer, said that police “were just looking the other way.” He told JNS that as he was driving around Amsterdam to help extract stranded Israelis, he witnessed scant police presence. “Police just drove past assaults. It’s difficult to explain.”

The Amsterdam police did not immediately reply to a request for reaction to claims of failure on the authorities’ part. In a statement, the municipality wrote: “This outburst of violence toward Israeli supporters is unacceptable and cannot be defended in any way. There is no excuse for the antisemitic behavior exhibited last night by rioters who actively sought out Israeli supporters to attack and assault them.”

Last month, the NIW exposed how some police officers in the Netherlands are opting out of protecting Jewish events because of their animosity to Israel. Loonstein said he thought about this revelation when he pulled up to a police station on Thursday night to let off some Israelis he’d picked up to bring to safety.

“There were eight police cars parked out front. Why were they not in the city center, on the streets? Is it because they don’t want to protect Jews? I don’t know but I can’t help but wonder,” he said. “What I do know is that yesterday, a pogrom occurred in Amsterdam as the police looked away.”

Some anti-Israel intellectuals defended the violence.

“Haven’t followed it closely and I condemn all violence of course, but if you understand Hebrew and hear how Maccabi fans chanted about Palestinians and Arabs, and climbed a building to steal a Palestinian flag, well that’s pure provocation,” wrote Rena Netjes, an anti-Israel activist with 40,000 followers on X. Netjes has worked for the Rights Forum, an institute many Dutch Jews have accused of spreading antisemitism, though its spokespeople have denied this.

Tamir Dotan is one of the 10,000-odd Israelis living in Amsterdam, which has one of the largest Israeli expat communities in Europe. He went to the match but returned home before it started because stadium security wouldn’t let in his friend after they found a Maccabi scarf in his bag (both men had seats in the home crowd stands).

Dotan called Mayor Femke Halsema, a left-wing politician who in April allowed anti-Israel protesters to picket the opening of the national Holocaust museum, “a doormat who represents the declining number of naïve Dutchmen who think they can get along with the antisemitic beast that reared its head on October 7. Now, after a short delay, it appeared also here in Amsterdam on Thursday.”

The events of May, when Arab men wearing keffiyehs beat up Jews at the prestigious University of Amsterdam, “were a huge wakeup for the Dutch public,” Dotan said. “What happened on Thursday will be an eye-opener for many more.”

Dotan, who has lived in the Netherlands for 35 years, said he was “filled with immense pride to see airplanes coming from Israel to airlift stranded Jews. No other country would do it.”

He paused, adding: “Of course, those planes are evacuating people to a place under constant rocket fire. Which just goes to show the insanity of the world Jews inhabit right now.”

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