Police stand guard after clashes between Israeli youth and soccer fans in Amsterdam
couple Bart H. Meijer and Toby Sterling
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were chased through the streets of Amsterdam on Thursday evening outside a Europa League soccer match against Ajax, in incidents described by Dutch and Israeli authorities as a shocking and intolerable outbreak of anti-Semitic violence.
Five people were briefly hospitalized and Amsterdam City Hall on Friday banned demonstrations until the weekend. The city’s mayor, Femke Halsema, said fans of the Israeli club had been attacked by “anti-Semitic squads”.
Local police, who banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration before the match, said no incidents took place during the match at the Johann Cruyff stadium, won 5-0 by Ajax, but that violence had occurred. broke out overnight in the city center. She made 62 arrests.
Videos posted on social media showed protesters beating people to the ground and chanting anti-Israeli slogans as well as Maccabi supporters chanting anti-Arab slogans before the match.
The Israeli government dispatched two planes to repatriate its nationals, some of whom had to be escorted to their hotels at night by security forces.
“There were many demonstrators, people running everywhere. It was really scary,” testified Joni Pogrebetsy, a Maccabi Tel Aviv supporter who made the trip to Amsterdam, like around 3,000 of his compatriots.
Anti-Semitic incidents have increased sharply in the Netherlands since the start of the war in Gaza launched by Israel after the attack by Hamas in the south of its territory on October 7, 2023.
More than 43,000 Palestinians died in the Israeli offensive, with more than 100,000 others injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The October 7 attack left 1,200 dead according to Israeli authorities.
“DISGUST”
The mayor of Amsterdam said the police had apparently been taken by surprise by the events. Around 200 police officers were mobilized for this match deemed to be of little “risk” between Maccabi and Ajax Amsterdam, a club known for decades as “pro-Jewish” in a city that had long hosted, before the Second World War and the Nazi occupation, one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe.
On Thursday, several hundred people gathered in Amsterdam to commemorate “Kristallnacht”, the pogroms carried out throughout Germany by the Nazis against the Jews on the night of November 9 to 10, 1938.
“We see the horror this morning, shocking images and videos that, since October 7, we hoped we would never see again. An anti-Semitic pogrom is taking place against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and citizens Israelis in the heart of Amsterdam”, Israeli President Isaac Herzog reacted Friday morning on the social network X.
Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof denounced these “totally unacceptable anti-Semitic acts against Israelis”, adding that he was in contact with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu. “I followed the news from Amsterdam with disgust,” he wrote on his X account.
Far-right leader Geert Wilders, head of the PVV (Party for Freedom), the first political force in Parliament since the legislative elections in November 2023, accused “Muslim criminals” of being at the origin of the incidents, demanding their expulsion. He called Benjamin Netanyahu to express “his anger and shame”.
Reacting to these incidents, French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau declared that the planned match between the French men’s football team and Israel in the Nations League on Thursday evening at the Stade de France would not be relocated and that the police chief would take the “necessary security arrangements”.
(With offices in Cairo and Jerusalem; French version Camille Raynaud, Zhifan Liu, Jean-Stéphane Brosse, edited by Kate Entringer and Bertrand Boucey)
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