The violence against Israeli fans in Amsterdam was not a pogrom

Much of the media and politics spoke of "pogroms" and "Jew hunts" regarding the violence in Amsterdam.Things are different.

• Israeli fans away in Amsterdam attacked, tore down flags and chanted genocide chants.
• Elements of the local community responded with chases, identifications and beatings, resulting in six injuries.
• There was no evidence of the anti-Semitic nature of the beatings, despite the one-sided media and political narrative.

Thursday 8 November ad Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, there was violence at a football match Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv.After Israeli fans had torn Palestinian flags from homes in the previous days, carried out some attacks and chanted chants of incitement to genocide in the Gaza Strip, groups of local ultras and citizens carried out a series of ambushes against the Maccabi ultras, causing five injured.

Most of the Italian and international politicians and press have reported on the violence using terms such as “pogroms”, “anti-Semitic patrols” And “Jew hunt”.An exploitation of history that did not take into account the context in which the violence occurred and the political-identity connotation extremist of the Maccabi Tel Aviv ultras.

A few days later, no evidence has emerged that it was one anti-Semitic violence.

What the Israeli ultras did

The Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv Europa League football match took place on 8 November in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.Since about the previous day 3 thousand ultras of the Israeli team had arrived in the city, becoming protagonists of a series of episodes of challenge and provocation.

Videos show some Maccabi supporters climb on some house to tear flags of Palestine.Another flag was set on fire in Dam Square, while the ultras also attacked some Taxi, attacking the Muslim driver of one of these.Parading through the city and at the entrance to the stadium, the Israeli fans then chanted anti-Palestine chants like “Israel will destroy the Arabs” And “There are no more schools in Gaza because there are no more children left”, replicated even on the weekend once landed at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv.The Israeli ultras then booed during the minute of silence dedicated to the victims of the flood Valencia, for Spanish support for the Palestinian cause.

The Maccabi Tel Aviv ultras are no stranger to violent episodes of this type.Last March, during the match against Olympiakos, it went viral the video shot ad Athens of a brutal attack by Israeli fans against a person wearing the keffiyeh, Palestinian symbol.As underlines Valerio Moggia, journalist expert in football culture, the ultras group of Maccabi Tel Aviv is called Maccabi Fanatics and is placed in the spectrum ofright-wing extremism.In recent years in their homeland they have become protagonists of attacks on demonstrations against the Netanyahu government,  racist insults against their own players of Arab origin and against the Arab refugees, to the point of hindering UEFA's donation campaign.

The attack on the Israeli ultras

After the vandalism and violence by the Maccabi Tel Aviv ultras in the hours preceding the match in Amsterdam, part of the local community she mobilized.A group of taxi drivers of Arab origin they met outside a bar where there were a few hundred Israeli fans, while the pro-Palestine associations called a meeting demonstration outside the stadium, after days of calls for the match to be canceled to send a strong message against the genocide underway in the Gaza Strip.

The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, had the demonstration moved to a place far from the stadium, to avoid any clashes and even in the context of the match no clashes were recorded between the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and the Ajax fans, who moreover it has a component Of Jewish religion.

However, the situation worsened during the night.Groups of young people, often minors, attacked Maccabi ultras who were wandering around Amsterdam.Between chases and requests to show i documents to verify the identity and therefore the possible affiliation to Maccabi Tel Aviv, these groups of people have done brutal beatings which ended with a balance of five injured hospitalized among the Israelis, other more minor injuries and dozens of arrests among the alleged attackers for vandalism and disturbance of public order, many of which were released.From some videos the attackers can be heard screaming “This is for Palestine” or order the Israeli ultras to shout things like “Free Palestine”.

How the story was told

On Friday 9 November, in the hours following the violence in Amsterdam, most of the newspapers and politicians Italian and international they told about one “Jew hunt” around Amsterdam to the point of bothering to speak "pogrom" and the Kristallnacht.

Pogroms are the anti-Semitic violence that occurred in Russia in the 19th century, and then extended to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.Kristallnacht is perhaps the most brutal episode in this regard, a popular assault on shops, synagogues, schools and Jewish homes which took place in 1938 in Germany and which ended with the killing of hundreds if not thousands of people.

The language the very strong influence of the media was accompanied by the very strong influence of the institutions, which also contributed to painting a much more serious picture than it turned out to be.While the media evoked the beginning of a new season of “pogrom”, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu he sent two special rescue planes to recover and save the Israeli fans in Amsterdam, the Dutch authorities spread later denied news of “fans taken hostage” or missing and a real bloodbath, later reduced to five total injuries.

The Maccabi Tel Aviv club he asked to his fans not to display symbols that would make them recognisable like Jews while the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Dick Schoof, he said of being “horrified by anti-Semitic attacks to Israeli citizens", as reiterated by the mayor of Amsterdam, who banned demonstrations in the city for the entire weekend to security reasons.In Italy the prime minister Giorgia Meloni he threw the alarm for a “rampant anti-Semitism”, a line and terminology shared in a bipartisan way by our local politics.The president of the United States, Joe Biden, he spoke of a return to the dark times of “persecution of the Jews”.

No pogroms

In Amsterdam there was no pogrom.What we have witnessed, once again, is one one-sided narrative by much of the media and political institutions, who spoke about the violence against Israeli fans without describing the context in which it occurred.

The attacks occurred in a fiery context, which had become such due to the acts of which the Maccabi Tel Aviv ultras had become protagonists in the hours preceding the match.Although it cannot be ruled out that there may have been on isolated occasions anti-Semitic insults (for which there is no evidence at the moment, unlike the anti-Arab insults by the Israeli ultras, of which there are videos), what happened must be placed within the framework of political-identity conflict, and not that of “Jew hunt” which recalls dark times in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In Amsterdam the conflict between those who support what Israel is doing took place in a small way Gaza Strip and those who in more or less violent ways oppose all this.To the action of the Israeli ultras made of torn flags, attacks and Islamophobic chants This was followed by the reaction of a part of the local community, probably outside the world of cheering, who wanted to punish those ultras as symbol of the ongoing genocide.An attack on the ultras as Israeli supporters of the offensive on Gaza and not as Jews, as also shown by the videos in which the attackers force the attacked to say things like "Free Palestine".

If this is how things have gone for the elements that have emerged so far, we need to return once again to the language used by most of the media and politics to describe them.The abuse of terms such as "anti-Semitism", "pogrom" up to the front page headlines on the new Kristallnacht not only am I an insult to those who are or have truly been victims of events of that type, but they also risk empty of value those words so important from a historical point of view.As the historian points out Enzo Traverso in Gaza before history (Editori Laterza, 2024), “fighting anti-Semitism will become increasingly difficult after having disfigured and distorted its nature so blatantly.The risk of trivialisation it's very concrete."