Weaponizing Jewish fear, from Tel Aviv to Amsterdam

Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in the arrivals hall of Ben Gurion Airport, near Tel Aviv, November 8, 2024. (Jonathan Shaul/Flash90)

“Tomorrow, 86 years ago, was Kristallnacht — an attack on Jews just for being Jews, on European soil. It’s back now; we saw it yesterday on the streets of Amsterdam. There’s only one difference: in the meantime, the Jewish state has been established. We need to deal with it.”

There is a lot to unpack in this statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the unrest and violence surrounding last week’s soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax. Those events began ahead of the game with the Israeli club’s fans charging around the city tearing down Palestinian flags from apartment windows, attacking a taxi driver, and chanting “Let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs” (upon their return to Israel, they were also filmed chanting “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no children left there”). What followed for hours after the game finished on Thursday night was a series of attacks on Maccabi fans by locals, some of them wearing Palestinian flags and shouting pro-Palestine slogans, which left as many as 30 people wounded and five hospitalized.

Many prominent media outlets and world leaders readily adopted the narrative that the unrest was a straightforward case of antisemitic violence. Israeli President Isaac Herzog was quick to label it a “pogrom.” Geert Wilders, head of the far-right Party for Freedom, currently the largest party in the Netherlands’ House of Representatives, described it as a “Jew hunt.” The Dutch king told Herzog: “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again.”

Social media was awash with the crassest parallels imaginable — including memes of Anne Frank wearing a Maccabi Tel Aviv shirt — taking the debasement of the memory of Jews’ persecution at the hands of the Nazis and their allies to new levels. How darkly ironic that these events overshadowed the actual anniversary of the Kristallnacht, at a time when the consequences of racist, state-backed violence feel so relevant.

In the wake of October 7, scholars of antisemitism, genocide, and Jewish history have warned of the ways that particularly traumatic episodes in Jewish history have been evoked to justify Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and crack down on those who criticize it. As antisemitism scholar Brendan McGeever articulated clearly, despite being brutal and disturbing, the incident in Amsterdam was no pogrom — the term for an attack on an oppressed group with the backing of the authorities. The proliferation of this term and others like it in the aftermath of the violence only served to obfuscate the reality of those events through creating mass hysteria.

Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in the arrivals hall of Ben Gurion Airport, near Tel Aviv, November 8, 2024. (Jonathan Shaul/Flash90)

This is, of course, a common tactic in the far-right playbook: generating chaos and fear to reassert its worldview. The erasure of the racist violence of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans through negligent reporting by much of the mainstream media only accelerated it in this instance. At a time when genuine antisemitism is on the rise and Jewish people feel particularly under threat around the world, this instrumentalization of Jewish fear was especially galling.

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