A supporter of the Israeli Maccabi football team walks through David Ben-Gurion airport after Israeli authorities evacuated Israelis from Amsterdam on Thursday night. Photograph: Jack Guez, AFP

With Jodi Rudoren
November 8, 2024

the next morning Amsterdam football pogrom, Abe Foxman He was faced with an impossible dilemma.

His 20-year-old grandson was in Amsterdam and had spent part of Thursday night sheltering in a restaurant to avoid anti-Semitic looters on the street. Now he was asking Foxman, who was born in Poland in 1940 and spent half a century running the company: Anti-Defamation LeagueWhether to go ahead with the plan to visit Anne Frank House.

“A Jewish boy asks his Holocaust survivor grandfather: ‘Is it safe for a Jew to go to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam today?’ “It’s a scary question, but it’s a legitimate question,” Foxman said when we spoke Friday morning. “I don’t want to scare her; I want to calm her down. But I don’t know how safe it is. I don’t know how many Arabs are waiting for Jews to come to the Anne Frank House.”

“We are struggling to find an answer to the question of what to tell him; the dilemma is terrifying.”

I spent Thursday evening at a Kristallnacht commemoration ceremony talking about whether the rise in antisemitism and authoritarianism we are experiencing is an echo of 1930s Europe that produced that terrible pogrom. As we spoke from the safety of a synagogue in Manhattan, none of us knew that today’s pogrom was taking place. Appears on the streets of Amsterdam.

videos As Foxman says, the number of gangs chasing and beating Israeli football fans who travel to the Netherlands to cheer on the Maccabi Tel Aviv team is appalling. Also creepy, terrifying, ugly and any other negative adjective you can think of. But this isn’t the 1930s.

Vechtpartij for Amsterdam Centraal Station #ajpurpose #Israel ©iAnnet pic.twitter.com/nD08QLOIRY

— iAnnet (@iAnnetnl) November 7, 2024

Without the support of the Dutch police, some Jews decided to unite and fight back by taking matters into their own hands. pic.twitter.com/5whXLnB8kX

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) November 8, 2024

There are very important differences between the events that broke out on the streets of Amsterdam last night and the Night of Broken Glass that devastated Germany and Austria 86 years ago, especially the existence and power of the Jewish state of Israel.

Israel sent two planes On Friday afternoon, he sent his foreign minister to meet his Dutch counterpart to save the football team and its fans. a sharp contrast with crystal night, It happened days after Hitler gave the order deportation of approximately 12,000 Polish Jews He lives in Germany. They were given one night to leave their homes and were put on trains to the Polish border. where most are denied entry.

Germany’s ruling Nazi Party organized Kristallnacht, in which Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were looted and burned and 100 civilians were killed while police remained indifferent or intervened. Dutch officials may Ignored warnings Israel’s security services warned of the potential for violence around the Europa League football match but arrested 62 rioters and arrested them on Friday morning made harsh statements condemning The attacks sent five Israelis to hospitals and injured another five.

I follow the news from Amsterdam and am horrified by the antisemitic attacks against Israeli citizens. This is absolutely unacceptable. I am in close contact with all parties involved and have just met. @IsraelPM Netanyahu called and said that the perpetrators…

— Dick Schoof (@MinPres) November 8, 2024

“We failed the Dutch Jewish community during World War II,” the Dutch king told the Israeli president in a phone call on Friday, “and last night we failed again.”

Amb. Deborah E. LipstadtUS special representative on anti-Semitism, he tweeted Thursday night. A post saying the attacks were “reminiscent of a classic pogrom” was viewed more than 655,000 times in 12 hours. Lipstadt is first and foremost a Holocaust historian, so I called him to ask if history repeats itself.

“It’s not the same thing, because Kristallnacht was government-sponsored; in the 1930s it was government-sponsored, not government-sponsored,” he noted. “If you fall down and get kicked, does that make you feel better? No. “But if you sit back and think about it, it’s important.”

Lipstadt said he hopes to visit Amsterdam as soon as next week. “We were shocked, completely stunned – I think shocked is the best word, shocked to see something like this happen in the capital of one of our close democratic allies,” he told me. “The authorities were on the run and the Dutch accepted it. “So we express our dismay, we express our shock, and we tell our allies we expect better.”

There is another very important difference between the attacks on Jews just because they are Jews in 1938 and the attacks on Israeli football fans because they are Israeli in 2024. This is no excuse for violence – there is certainly no excuse for the wanton mob violence captured in video clips in Amsterdam last night – but it is still true that last night’s rioters were motivated at least in part by geopolitics as well as by Jews. -hate.

The truth is that Israel’s continuation of the war in Gaza is a war born out of Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7. Also, it’s a very long war now. And it cost too many lives – combined with underlying anti-Semitism to make it unsafe for Israeli football fans to travel abroad and cheer for their teams.

This is terrible, terrifying and shocking.

However, the fact that these attacks stemmed from anti-Zionism does not eliminate their open anti-Semitism. While I am generally a defender of the mainstream media’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict against accusations of bias on either side, I was dismayed by many of the headlines about Amsterdam on Friday morning. Associated Press, Reuters, New York TimesCNN, NPR and others used this method passive voice – “Israelis attacked” – and quotes from officials He described the attacks as antisemitic instead of doing it themselves.

The violence in Amsterdam once again debunks the left’s reductionist view that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, and that Israel and the Jews are oppressors.

Although some Israeli football fans are cruel, they are not cruel. chanting racist slogans And Damaging Palestinian flags. Every civilian who is chased and beaten by rebel gangs because of their identity is among the oppressed.

“People were now saying the crowd was noisy, the Israelis were saying, ‘Let’s kill the Arabs,'” Lipstadt said. “I don’t care what they say, that doesn’t give you the right to kick someone when they’re down and make people say ‘I’m not a Jew’ so you can escape to safety.”

Today, on the eve of the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the day when Nazism crossed the line between “everyday” and genuine anti-Semitism, Hitler’s Germany destroyed more than 300 synagogues in 1938, arresting and torturing more than 30,000 Jews. A very similar wave… pic.twitter.com/FSsXN1YygP

— Chief Rabbi of Ukraine Moshe Azman (@RabbiUkraine) November 8, 2024

Both he and Foxman said Thursday’s violence was not an anomaly. Actually, in the report In the year or so following October 7, the ADL put the rise in global antisemitism at the top of its list of disturbing trends, noting major jumps in events in Europe, Australia and South Africa. The report stated that in the month after the Hamas attack in the Netherlands, there were eight times more anti-Semitic incidents than in the average month of the previous three years.

Foxman spent Thursday night and much of Friday watching Israeli television and was startled to hear officials advising Israelis abroad to remove any clothing or symbols that would identify them as Israelis or Jews. Your own childhood during the Holocaust. Chabad in Amsterdam organizing trips He went to the airport following rumors that local taxi drivers were linked to hooliganism.

“I think Europe judenreinFoxman told me ominously, using the German term – Nazi – from the Final Solution, meaning the cleansing of the Jews. “20,000 Israelis live in Amsterdam. There is an Israeli restaurant. Will he survive?”

Foxman was still texting with her grandson, a Northwestern University student studying abroad in Madrid this fall. He had traveled to Amsterdam for the weekend, partly to attend a Maccabi football match, but the tickets he bought online turned out to be fake.

Foxman told me that on Friday, his grandson and the friend he was visiting in Amsterdam had planned to have lunch at an Israeli restaurant but canceled it. He arranged for them to have Shabbat dinner at the home of a local Jewish family. In the end, they also botched the Anne Frank House; The young woman’s mother, Foxman’s daughter, was very afraid of what might happen.

Foxman’s daughter texted her grandson, “I promise you we will visit together in the future.”

I hope they do, and that they can do it safely and without fear.