Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were attacked in Amsterdam after attending a Europa League match against Ajax on November 7. Before the meeting, incidents had already broken out following provocations from Israeli fans.
The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, expressed this Sunday, November 17, her regret for having used the term “pogrom” to describe the violence that occurred in her city on the sidelines of a Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv.
On Thursday, November 7, supporters of the Israeli club were the target of attacks by men on scooters in the streets of the Dutch capital after the match. Police said the perpetrators were encouraged by calls to attack Jews on social media.
Five Maccabi fans were briefly hospitalized due to the attack, which sparked outrage among Western leaders.
Earlier in the evening, incidents had broken out due to provocative acts by visiting fans. Anti-Arab slogans were chanted by the latter, who also vandalized a taxi and burned a Palestinian flag in the main square of Amsterdam, according to the authorities.
A term reused by Israeli propaganda
The day after the events, the councilor declared that he understood that “this brings back the memory of the pogroms” during a press conference, before repeating this term last Tuesday during a municipal council meeting. At that time, she reported a “toxic cocktail of anti-Semitism and hooliganism” to describe the scenes of violence.
Femke Halsema highlights this Sunday in the TV show News hour that she did not want to make a direct comparison with the pogroms, but that she wanted to express the sadness and fear of the Jewish inhabitants of Amsterdam.
“If I had known that it would be used politically in this way, including as propaganda… I want nothing to do with that,” she regrets, deploring the reuse of her words by officials of the Hebrew State.
In a message posted and edited on November 8 on his X account, Israeli President Isaac Herzog denounced a “pogrom”.
Larousse defines the word “pogrom” (“devastation” in its original meaning in Russian) as an “attack accompanied by looting and murder perpetrated against a Jewish community”.
45 people targeted by Dutch police
The mayor of Amsterdam also criticizes certain political reactions in the Netherlands, citing an “integration problem” at the origin of the violence in her city. She believes that her detractors are “misappropriating” the word “pogrom” in order to discriminate against Muslim Amsterdammers, reports the Dutch media.
According to Femke Halsema, the declarations of the national representation only accentuate the divisions in her city. “I would like to appeal to The Hague: get down to business and don’t argue. Regardless of your political affiliation,” she asks.
In recent days, the mayor has spoken a lot with the different communities in Amsterdam. She also wants independent investigations to be carried out to understand how such acts happened.
Dutch police announced on Sunday that they were investigating 45 people in connection with this violence. Nine of them have already been identified and arrested. The number of suspects is expected to increase “partly based on the analysis of a large number of images”, police added.
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