Hundreds of Israeli football hooligans clashed with supporters of Palestine in Netherland’s capital Amsterdam, prior and after a football match between their team Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Dutch team Ajax that was held on Thursday, November 7 as part of the Europa League.
Videos posted on social media networks showed dozens of hooded people, chanting incendiary anti-Palestine obscenities, as well as a person climbing up the front of a building, then ripping down a Palestinian flag. Other residences flying the flags of Palestine were said to have been targeted by the saboteurs, while people of Arab ethnicity were reportedly subjected to physical abuse, including taxi drivers.
These provocative actions are believed to have triggered the clashes in different parts of Amsterdam, leaving several injuries. A member of Amsterdam city council Jazie Veldhuyzen criticized the violent acts perpetrated by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, indicating that the clashes were triggered by the Israeli fans’ assaults on residences in the Dutch capital. “They began attacking houses of people in Amsterdam with Palestinian flags, so that’s actually where the violence started,” Veldhuyzen told Al Jazeera.
The Dutch police dispersed the clashes, and arrested around 62 people, while the authorities banned demonstrations for three days as of Friday, November 8. In an attempt to manipulate the narrative, Israeli and western media outlets alleged that the clashes were driven by antisemitic sentiments labeling them as “pogroms”. Furthermore, the Israeli government ordered the deployment of rescue planes to the Netherlands to evacuate its citizens.
Dutch officials echoed the allegations which attributed the incidents to antisemitism. Netherland’s King Willem-Alexander commented on the incidents by saying: “We cannot turn a blind eye to antisemitic behavior in our streets”. Meanwhile, the European country’s Prime Minister Dick Schoof stated on his account on X that he “followed the news from Amsterdam with horror”, describing them as “completely unacceptable anti-Semitic attacks on Israelis”.
Netherland’s official stance on the incident was slammed and labeled as biased by Nicholas McGeehana, co-founder of the rights group FairSquare. “To present them as innocent victims of antisemitism is a gross misrepresentation of the facts,” McGeehana said.
