I have often wondered where the first anti-Jewish riots in western Europe this century will be. And it was Amsterdam on Thursday 7 November, the same night the Dutch Jewish community commemorated the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht. That it is Amsterdam has an awful poetry to it. It’s the home of Anne Frank.
The facts: after the Ajax vs Maccabi Tel Aviv football game (5-0, if you still care), Arabic-speaking men appeared to chase and beat Israeli football fans. The Telegraph reported that they were organised in advance, and that one person involved called them a “Jew hunt”. There was provocation: some Israelis burned a Palestinian flag, chanted anti-Arab slogans, and mocked a one-minute silence for the flood victims of Valencia. They vandalised a taxi. In this case – but no other I can summon – the punishment was being run over with scooters, chased into canals, and beaten while, in some cases, the police said there was little they could do. Some say they were forced to show their passports.
The Dutch authorities – Amsterdam mayor, prime minister, prosecutor, king – were clear: this was anti-Semitism. But then, because the victims were Jews, the race to find extenuating circumstances began. This disbelief came broadly in two theories. If one doesn’t work, you can take the other. (Anti-Semites are not analytical people. If your diagnosis of global peril is “the Jew” you have already failed at everything.) The theories were: it didn’t happen, or, if it did, it was understandable.
The first didn’t hold up. How could it, when the perpetrators videoed themselves? So, it’s on to “understandable”. Who wouldn’t run someone over if they heckled a one-minute silence or sang a racist song? There was misreporting on social media and real media. Social media called it a common fight between football fans, and plenty said it was deserved. Real media preferred to diminish the anti-Jewish character of the violence. “Anti-Semitic” appeared in quotation marks, as if it were a fancy, impossible to prove. “Clashes,” said the BBC.
Jews responded with what in others would be considered hysteria. But we have been here before. If we haven’t personally had to prove lack of Jewishness to avoid a beating – and the courtesy of one rioter when he learned he had caught a Ukrainian, not a Jew, was bewitching; I wondered if he would offer him a drink, call him comrade? – we all have an ancestor who did. Are you a Jew?
In his 2023 memoir Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, Daniel Finkelstein tells the story of an Amsterdam street – Beethovenstraat – in 1940. (The Weiners, his grandparents, lived on an adjoining road near the Frank family. They were all German refugees to the Netherlands.) It is a page of a picture book gone wrong. The cigar-maker lived at number six, died in Auschwitz, 1942; the greengrocer lived at number 58, died in Auschwitz, 1942; the butcher lived at number 82, died in Auschwitz, 1944; the baker lived at number 55, died in Auschwitz, 1943. There were 150,000 Jews in the Netherlands in 1941. Now there are 30,000, and they have the common experience of European Jews. They worship behind bullet-proof glass.
Anti-Semitic incidents increased 800 per cent in the Netherlands in the months after 7 October 2023. The opening of a new Holocaust museum was picketed; families of survivors were abused. A freed Hamas hostage was reportedly harassed by Amsterdam airport staff; a statue of Anne Frank was defaced. Even before then, anti-Semitism was typical. One football chant, according to the philosopher David de Bruijn, was: “We like to burn Jews, because Jews burn the best.”
I used to think that postwar anti-Semitism is repressed guilt: if Jews are Nazis in character, we murdered ourselves, and non-Jews have nothing to fear, and nothing to reproach themselves for. I am past this now: it was a fairy tale. Rather, we have returned to the settled place: the belief that there is something peculiarly untrustworthy about Jews.
I have waited, as I said. I have waited for Jew hate to leave the parts of the “pro”-Palestine marches where people make Hamas triangles – the triangle means the Jew is a target – and bloom into physical violence. I have waited for it to leave the social media mirror world. Now it’s here, and it’s over to non-Jewish Europeans. What are you going to do about it?
[See also: Justin Welby must resign now]
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