Israeli thugs travelling to Amsterdam under the pretext of rooting for their visiting team have waged chaos and vandalism in the Dutch capital by committing acts of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab violence.
The hooligans presenting themselves as the Maccabi Tel Aviv football club’s fans, resorted to violence in the city over Wednesday and Thursday, various media outlets reported.
The black-clad and hooded individuals ripped Palestinian flags off several houses, committed assault and battery against Arab taxi drivers and other locals, including by using a crowbar, and shouted torrents of obscene anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab abuse that included encouraging gross violence by the Israeli military against Arab peoples in the West Asia region.
The slogans used by the attackers included genocidal taunts such as “there are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left,” a reference to the Palestinian coastal sliver that have been under an ongoing Israeli war of genocide since last October, which has killed at least 43,469 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
According to Amsterdam councilman Jazie Veldhuyzen, the Israelis “began attacking houses of people in Amsterdam with Palestinian flags, so that’s actually where the violence started.”
The attackers included many masked individuals suspected to be Israeli agent provocateurs seeking to provoke violence. The suspicions arose after the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf said operatives with the Israeli regime’s Mossad spy agency would be accompanying the Israelis to Amsterdam out of “safety concerns.”
The violence triggered clashes with local Dutch people. The police rounded up 62 people, but stopped short of arresting any of the Israelis, whom they even provided with close protection and escorted to their accommodations.
“As a reaction [to the violence], Amsterdammers mobilized themselves and countered the attacks that started on Wednesday by the Maccabi hooligans,” Veldhuyzen noted of the locals’ reaction to the violence.
Israeli and Western officials, however, raced one another to brand the reactions as “anti-Semitic attacks.”
These included Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, who assured his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu that “the perpetrators will be tracked down and prosecuted.”
Notorious Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is known for his drastic anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli stances, also tried to portray the reactions as a “pogrom” and a “Jewish hunt,” and called for the arrest and deportation of, what he described as, the “multicultural scum,” who had retaliated against the Israeli hooligans.
The Netherlands has, meanwhile, welcomed several Israeli aircraft flying to the country to take the Israeli attackers out.
The days running up to Maccabi Tel Aviv’s match with Ajax Amsterdam saw Dutch authorities banning pro-Palestinian protests against the city’s hosting the Israeli team. Defying the ban, the protesters gathered in the capital only to be dispersed by the Dutch riot police.
Reactions
Palestinian movements, including the Gaza-based resistance movement Hamas, the Mujahideen Movement, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), have hailed the retaliation against the Israeli violence as a natural response by those who want to end the regime’s genocide and reject Zionism.
“Amsterdam events confirm that the continuation of the holocaust in the Gaza Strip that has been taking place without any international intervention, leads to these spontaneous repercussions,” Hamas said.
Spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri asserted that “stopping the Zionist genocide in the Gaza Strip is an essential part of respecting and protecting human rights and ensuring regional and international security and peace.”
The PFLP praised “the confrontation of supporters of Palestine in the Netherlands for countering attempts by Zionists to burn the Palestinian flag, asserted that the Zionist entity has become globally isolated and reviled.”
“These events underscore the growing popular rejection of the Zionist entity, which has become a pariah on the global stage,” the group said.
It also denounced the Israeli violence as ”merely an extension of the colonial and racist genocide system the [Zionist] entity represents, exposing the false ‘victim’ narrative the Zionist entity and its supporters attempt to promote to the world, as its crimes and lies are increasingly revealed.”
London-based rights group, FairSquare, denounced the Israeli attackers’ actions as “well-documented racism and violence,” which “mirrors the thuggery of the Israeli government in Gaza and Lebanon.”
In remarks to the Middle East Eye news and analysis website, the group’s founder Nicholas McGeehan also slammed Israeli officials for “openly courting far-right football supporters in Israel and receiving their violent support in return,” and criticized the Dutch government for trying to present the attackers as “innocent victims of anti-Semitism.”
PFA condemns ‘anti-Palestinian racism’ in Amsterdam
The Palestine Football Association (PFA) has said it was “gravely concerned by the sequence of violent events in Amsterdam.”
The PFA condemned the “deplorable incitement to violence, anti-Palestinian racism, and Islamophobia expressed by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, who also attacked homes and shops displaying the Palestinian flag in solidarity with the victims of the ongoing genocide”.
“The PFA had presented FIFA with extensive evidence of such hateful expressions, yet concrete action remains lacking,” it said. “The absence of accountability for such entrenched violence and normalized racism has only led to further unfortunate incidents, such as those in Amsterdam.”