2 weeks Ago By Nathaniel Flakin
On Thursday, there were scuffles on the streets of Amsterdam after a soccer match between the Dutch team AFC Ajax and the Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv. The New York Times claimed in a headline (which they subsequently changed) that these were “attacks linked to antisemitism.” Bret Stephens , a right-wing columnist for the paper, referred to the fighting referred to it as a “pogrom,” comparing it to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.
Israeli president Isaac Herzog used the same term in a tweet . Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was more like Kristallnacht , the Nazis’ antisemitic pogroms of November 9, 1938. These analogies raise questions.
During the Kishinev pogrom , 49 Jews were killed and 1,500 homes were damaged. The violence was provoked by newspaper reports about Jews murdering two children to drink their blood. Priests and government officials led the mobs.
In the November pogroms , also known as the Night of Broken Glass, Nazis destroyed 7,000 Jewish businesses, while 30,000 men were thrown into concentration camps. The Nazis instigated the violence after the 17-year-old Jewish refugee Herschel Grynszpan shot a German diplomat in Paris. A pogrom is a massacre of an oppressed minority, usually with the encouragement of the state.
What happened in Amsterdam? Several hundred far-right Israeli hooligans marched through the city provoking Arab and pro-Palestine residents, some of whom defended themselves. According to police, 20 to 30 Israelis sustained minor injuries. A couple of them were sent to a hospital and soon discharged, with none suffering more than scratches and bruises.
Maccabi Tel Aviv is a notoriously racist and violent soccer club. The day before the match, their supporters had been marching through Amsterdam chanting genocidal slogans , such as “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left.” They tore down at least one Palestinian flag from a private home and assaulted people they perceived to be Muslim, beating up a taxi driver.
During the game, they had disrupted a minute of silence for the floods in Spain (because the Spanish government has been criticizing weapons shipments to Israel). Countless videos on social media show the hooligans marauding through the streets with wooden boards and metal poles. Yet reports in the Western media, and especially their headlines, deliberately avoid the context.
Instead, credulous readers would get the impression that Israeli soccer fans were attacked simply because they were Jewish. Outrageously, numerous outlets published footage that purportedly showed Jews being chased through the streets. The photographer had to explain that that the video showed the exact opposite: Israeli fans hunting down Amsterdam residents — the attackers are actually easy to recognize from their team’s colors.
German public TV, for example, has issued a perfunctory correction — without elaborating on how this admission discredits their entire story. The claim that the Maccabi fans were attacked because they are Jewish is ridiculous. Anti-Zionist Jewish residents of Amsterdam condemned the hooligans’ violence and announced they had been forced to cancel a planned commemoration of Kristallnacht.
The team AFC Ajax has a long connection to the Jewish community , with fans even referring to themselves as “Superjoden” (Super Jews). As DiEM25 comments : What is curious is that actual right-wing extremist behavior from football fans in Europe, like that of Italian club Lazio, who are renowned for blatant anti-Semitic actions , have never garnered comparable scrutiny from politicians or media outlets. Western politicians have expressed more outrage at this made up “pogrom” than they have at Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and Lebanon, which has killed tens of thousands of children.
Over the last year, we’ve seen how unflinching support for Zionist war crimes is undermining democracy, with attacks on basic democratic rights and a drop in the already low journalistic standards of the bourgeois media. In the United States, Germany, and just about every country that is bankrolling Israel, large majorities of the population oppose weapons shipments. In the United States, exit polls showed 62 percent of Jewish voters opposed the Biden administration’s support for Israel.
Unable to come up with a moral defense of their support for genocide, Western politicians and media are resorting to increasingly inane propaganda campaigns, claiming that the Palestine solidarity movement is antisemitic. Anyone can see, however, that anti-Zionist Jews are playing prominent roles in all the protests against the genocide. Zionism was never about protecting Jewish life.
It was always a colonial project — which is why Jewish leftists have always rejected it . In Amsterdam, we saw another example of Zionists doing their best to create new waves of antisemitism, with celebrations of genocide in the name of Jewish people. Israel, which allies itself with the worst antisemites in the world , only tries to instrumentalize Jewish suffering in the interests of a colonial project.
As part of this ridiculous campaign to ban Palestine solidarity, the Dutch king apologized to Herzog, admitting: “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II.” Who does he mean by “we”? If he means his House of Orange-Nassau, then yes, they certainly did — the king’s grandfather was a card-carrying member of Hitler’s Nazi Party, the NSDAP . Yet Dutch working people organized heroic resistance to the Nazis.
With the February Strikes , organized by communists, hundreds of thousands of workers risked their lives to protect Jewish coworkers. The Dutch government has banned further protests, but people are taking to the streets anyway . It’s this kind of working-class solidarity that will stop antisemitism and all forms of racism.
Israel Palestine soccer.
