« Just eighty-six years ago, during Kristallnacht, Jews were attacked on European soil because they were Jewish. It happened again. » Friday, the day after the attacks against Maccabi Tel-Aviv supporters perpetrated in the streets of Amsterdam, Benjamin Netanyahu did not hesitate to use heavy comparisons, plunging Europe back into its dark past and that night of the Nazi pogrom in 1938.
To better show his level of concern, the head of government, who has made the fight against anti-Semitism one of the pillars of his policy, dispatched his brand new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Saar, to the Dutch capital. The latter met the Minister of Justice, David Van Weel, as well as the leader of the far right, Geert Wilders, known for his Islamophobic positions.
Football: France-Israel, a match under extreme surveillance
At the same time, the first flight carrying some of the approximately 3,000 Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters evacuated from Amsterdam landed at Ben-Gurion airport. Their testimonies corroborated the images and videos that surged all night on social networks. Interviewed upon his return by the Israeli media, Oz Maklab, 22, spoke of a planned ambush: “There were at least 100 to 150 attackers waiting for us near the Dam Square metro station,” he said.
King Hadiya, evacuated on the same flight, says he “saw people getting stabbed”, adding: “The taxi drivers, most of them Muslims, refused to take us. » An investigation is underway to clarify the circumstances of the confrontations during which around ten supporters were injured and which led to the arrest of 62 people. Certain comments, which relate the lynching by evoking the first racist provocations on the part of Maccabi fans, have flourished on the Web.
Whatever the case, these events were experienced in Israel as a real shock. “Seeing, on social networks, a chased young man begging: 'I'm not Jewish, I'm not Jewish' in the streets of Amsterdam, the city of Anne Frank, before being knocked out with a punch, this resonates loudly in the Israeli ethos,” deciphers the historian Frédérique Schillo.
The French more empathetic towards the Jews
Now a question arises: will these events in Amsterdam influence the France-Israel meeting scheduled for Thursday at the Stade de France? “It will be a match played by the national team, a meeting which will therefore be managed differently and for which Israeli security agencies will be involved, as during the Olympic Games,” specifies Nitzan Nuriel, former head of the counter-terrorism office.
The latter believes that the attacks suffered by Maccabi fans are the result of “pure failure” of the Amsterdam police, who ” underrated ” the anti-Israeli threat in the city center despite warnings issued by the Mossad. “Cooperation with the French security services is proven,” he specifies. It remains that “this meeting on Thursday, which presents a triple challenge – security, diplomacy and internal politics – occurs in a period of tensions between the two countries rarely equaled”, underlines Frédérique Schillo. In recent weeks, the areas of disagreement between Paris and Tel Aviv have indeed multiplied.
The Israeli authorities thus did not appreciate that on October 5, two days before the commemoration of the October 7 massacres, Emmanuel Macron called for a halt to arms sales to Israel. They were also furious to see Israeli companies banned from the Euronaval show, a decision invalidated on October 30. The accusatory words of Emmanuel Macron, during the recent conference on Lebanon, drove home the point of discord. The head of state declared that he was not “not sure that we defend a civilization by sowing barbarism ourselves”.
Thursday, while the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, was visiting the Jewish state, a new incident further tarnished relations between the two countries. Israeli police entered “armed” et “without permission” within the confines of the Eleona national domain, owned by France in East Jerusalem. The head of diplomacy denounced an unacceptable situation, an attack likely to “weaken the links” that he was “yet came to cultivate with Israel.”
