“Globalise the intifada!”, radicals cried on the streets of Europe this past year. And last night it happened: the intifada was globalised. Jews in Europe were hunted down, humiliated and beaten.
The scenes from Amsterdam are horrendous. The echoes of past catastrophes are hard to ignore.
Israeli fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team were chased through the streets and assaulted. Some reportedly leapt into canals or took refuge in hotels to escape the blows of their persecutors.
“Free Palestine!”, the mob thundered. “Now you know how it feels”, some screamed as they put the boot into the visiting Jews. They had clearly anointed themselves as Gaza’s vengeance with a duty to visit violent “justice” on these Israeli citizens.
It started as football clashes often do – with offensive chanting and scuffles here and there.
The Maccabi Tel Aviv fans had come from Israel to watch their team play a Europa League match against the Dutch side Ajax.
Tensions ran high. Footage on social media seems to show Maccabi fans gathering in Dam Square and elsewhere in the city where they chanted “F**k Palestine” and tore down some of the Palestine flags that are now omnipresent in Europe’s capitals.
But after the game, things took a very dark turn. What had been a pretty typical skirmish between fans morphed into something more like a mini-pogrom.
There were “completely unacceptable anti-Semitic attacks on Israelis”, said the Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof. The Israeli media is referring to it as a “Jew hunt”.
The mob filmed their abuse and shared it online. They demanded to see their victims’ passports to check if they were Israelis and thus deserving of a vicious kicking. There are chilling clips of Israelis seemingly knocked unconscious. Some can be heard pleading for the mob’s mercy.
“This is nothing like Amsterdam”, said the city’s mayor Femke Halsema. “I’m very ashamed of the behaviour that was shown last night.”
We should all be. This bloody taunting of Israelis, this collective punishment of visiting Jews, shames all of Europe. It makes a mockery of our postwar promise to protect Jews from the hellish hatreds of the mob.
It is reported that some of the assailants were of Arab origin and perhaps were recent immigrants. That remains to be seen. But if it is true, then this horrific event also raises questions about Europe’s immigration policies and our crisis of integration.
Do we really want to throw open the doors to migrants who, in Kemi Badenoch’s words a few weeks ago, “hate Israel”? “That sentiment has no place here”, said Badenoch. I suspect many Dutch politicians will be thinking similarly this morning.
Some will try to write off the Amsterdam horror as a one-off. A regrettable anomaly. Nothing to do with the anti-Israel protests that have taken place across Europe every weekend since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October last year.
I’m not buying it. I think the violence in Amsterdam is grim confirmation that a continent on which it becomes fashionable to view the Jewish nation as the most evil nation is a continent on which it will become acceptable to attack Jews.
The Israelophobia we’ve seen in our cities this past year has been unhinged.
It has crossed the line, time and again, from criticism of Israel into frothing bigotry against Israelis. From peacenik opposition to Israel’s war on Hamas to an ugly, wild-eyed view of Israel as a uniquely barbarous nation, more wicked and deceitful than all the others.
Serious commentators have described Israel as a nation in the grip of “genocidal mania”.
Posters of the Israelis kidnapped on 7 October have been clawed down in virtually every city, because apparently even the innocent citizens of Israel are suspect, “problematic”, undeserving of our sympathy.
Israeli culture and wares are feverishly boycotted by the pseudo-virtuous of our chattering classes. They meticulously forcefield their entire lives from the output of this most unholy nation like medieval mystics praying to keep the devil at bay.
The impression given by this army of “pro-Palestine” influencers is that Israel is a fallen nation. And its people are under the spell of “savagery”. And everything it produces is morally compromised, if not morally poisonous, and thus you must boycott, avoid, destroy.
That some in Europe have taken this polite-society bigotry one step further and physically attacked the citizens of this supposedly diseased nation is shocking, but not surprising.
Israel-hate is a la mode in intellectual circles across Europe. That mob in Amsterdam was its armed wing.