The organized vicious assaults on Jews in Amsterdam Nov. 7 — in the heartland of imperialist Europe — were planned in advance and carried out by supporters of Hamas. The Dutch police knew in advance and did little to stop the right-wing thugs from rampaging for hours through the streets, beating up and harassing Jews.
Some 30 Jews were injured, including five who were hospitalized, when the thugs — some armed with clubs and knives — ambushed fans of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team after a match with Amsterdam’s Ajax team ended. They went after anyone they suspected of being Jewish.
“It was a pogrom,” one victim told Israel’s Haaretz. He noted that the attacks took place two days before the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass,” when Nazi storm troopers led a series of pogroms against Jews all across Germany Nov. 9-10, 1938.
Videos show the thugs in Amsterdam, some on motorized scooters, chasing Jews down the streets. Gangs surrounded some of their victims, demanding to see their passports to determine if they were Jews and then beating them. At least one Jewish man was thrown into a canal and only allowed out when he obeyed the attackers’ order to shout “Free Palestine.”
One video shows a man, who was knocked unconscious, being repeatedly kicked. The attackers tried to run over some Jews with cars.
Melhem Asad, an Arab Druze citizen of Israel and fan of the Maccabi team, told Israel’s Channel 12 News that “the local police just screwed up. They didn’t guard us, we felt really exposed.”
Asad encountered a group of Arabic-speaking thugs getting ready to assault some Jewish Maccabi fans. He spoke to the thugs in Arabic, saying, “No Jews are still here, that they escaped.” He said, “I directed them the other way and then ran toward groups of Israelis and warned them.”
The statements by several organizations of Hamas supporters posted on Telegram, Instagram and WhatsApp before the soccer match show that these were coordinated, planned attacks. Some boasted that they were going to carry out “Jew-Hunt II” when the soccer game ended.
“This is a direct clash with our enemy,” read one post on Instagram. “We’re not here to retreat, we’re here to ignite,” said another. “Let’s set it off. Bring the war home.”
False narrative by liberal media
Much of the liberal media — including the New York Times, BBC and others — put forward the narrative that the Maccabi fans provoked the attack. They point to videos the night before of Maccabi fans tearing down a Palestinian flag. One widely circulated video showed a large group of the team’s fans entering a subway station while singing anti-Arab songs.
“I don’t agree at all with what happened from our side,” Dan Kopla, one of the fans attacked in Amsterdam, told Israel National News. “Even so, they should not be taking it out on all Jews.”
Kopla noted that while the police and local authorities did nothing, “a lot of citizens opened their homes for scared Israelis, which was heartwarming.”
Dutch officials stated afterward that they were “ashamed” that the anti-Jewish attacks occurred. But they have no explanation for why police generally left Jews on their own and why not one attacker was arrested during the assaults.
The next day the government banned all protests for three days. But the attacks on Jews were not “protests.” They were fascist-like thuggery. The government is now using that to set a precedent for restricting democratic rights.
Jew-hatred, part of imperialist epoch
Like Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom in Israel, the mass assault in Amsterdam has provoked discussion by opponents of Jew-hatred on what it represents and the way forward. Is another Holocaust like what the Nazis carried out in World War II possible?
At a Nov. 9 program on “Israel at the Crossroads” attended by some 500 people at the 92nd Street Y in New York, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the well-known French-Jewish author of Israel Alone, said the assault in Amsterdam “should be a wake-up call for all of us in Europe and America.”
Brutal assaults like this are spawned by those who speak of “global intifada” and “present Hamas as a liberation movement,” he said. Only by standing up for themselves, he added, can Jews win broader support for the fight against Jew-hatred.
“Some media sources have attempted to frame this as a ‘clash’ and even tried to blame the Israelis in an effort to justify these disgusting acts,” noted a Nov. 9 statement by Students Supporting Israel at Columbia University in New York. “Hateful slogans should be condemned regardless of who chants them. However, a small group of reckless supporters chanting slogans in Hebrew does not justify violently hunting down every Jew and Israeli in the streets.”
“Do not expect to be saved by others,” the group said. “We have learned from history that we must rely on ourselves.”
“It would be a dangerous illusion to believe that ‘democratic’ imperialist governments, whether in Washington, Amsterdam or anywhere else, can be relied on to take on Jew-hatred,” Joanne Kuniansky, the 2024 Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey, told the Militant.
“What happened in Amsterdam shows the real dangers of Jew-hatred and pogroms. They are an integral part of the social convulsions and wars of the imperialist epoch. The fight against them is a working-class battle.
“The goal of the capitalist rulers is to defend their economic and political interests at all costs,” she said. “History teaches that when they fear the working class is on the road to taking political power, the boss class will unleash Jew-hating fascist gangs to defend their class rule.”