Rhetoric about ‘pogroms’ and ‘Jew hunts’ aims to obscure reality by generating mass hysteria — which can then be used to advance a far-right agenda.
“Tomorrow, 86 years ago, was Kristallnacht — an attack on Jews just for being Jews, on European soil. It’s back now; we saw it yesterday on the streets of Amsterdam. There’s only one difference: in the meantime, the Jewish state has been established. We need to deal with it.”
There is a lot to unpack in this statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the unrest and violence surrounding last week’s soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax. Those events began ahead of the game with the Israeli club’s fans charging around the city tearing down Palestinian flags from apartment windows, attacking a taxi driver, and chanting “Let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs” (upon their return to Israel, they were also filmed chanting “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no children left there”). What followed for hours after the game finished on Thursday night was a series of attacks on Maccabi fans by locals, some of them wearing Palestinian flags and shouting pro-Palestine slogans, which left as many as 30 people wounded and five hospitalized.
Many prominent media outlets and world leaders readily adopted the narrative that the unrest was a straightforward case of antisemitic violence. Israeli President Isaac Herzog was quick to label it a “pogrom.” Geert Wilders, head of the far-right Party for Freedom, currently the largest party in the Netherlands’ House of Representatives, described it as a “Jew hunt.” The Dutch king told Herzog: “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again.”
Social media was awash with the crassest parallels imaginable — including memes of Anne Frank wearing a Maccabi Tel Aviv shirt — taking the debasement of the memory of Jews’ persecution at the hands of the Nazis and their allies to new levels. How darkly ironic that these events overshadowed the actual anniversary of the Kristallnacht, at a time when the consequences of racist, state-backed violence feel so relevant.
In the wake of October 7, scholars of antisemitism, genocide, and Jewish history have warned of the ways that particularly traumatic episodes in Jewish history have been evoked to justify Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and crack down on those who criticize it. As antisemitism scholar Brendan McGeever articulated clearly, despite being brutal and disturbing, the incident in Amsterdam was no pogrom — the term for an attack on an oppressed group with the backing of the authorities. The proliferation of this term and others like it in the aftermath of the violence only served to obfuscate the reality of those events through creating mass hysteria.
This is, of course, a common tactic in the far-right playbook: generating chaos and fear to reassert its worldview. The erasure of the racist violence of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans through negligent reporting by much of the mainstream media only accelerated it in this instance. At a time when genuine antisemitism is on the rise and Jewish people feel particularly under threat around the world, this instrumentalization of Jewish fear was especially galling.
The question we must ask ourselves in the wake of these events and the discourse surrounding them is: what kind of politics does this serve? It is certainly in the interest of the Israeli government to frame the violence as solely motivated by anti-Jewish racism, and thus shut down any efforts to connect it to the genocidal war in Gaza. Israeli leaders are hellbent on reinforcing the core Zionist tenet that Israel is the only safe place for Jews, and that Muslims and Arabs pose an existential threat to us wherever they are. To keep us afraid is to keep us in line — how else will they continue to manufacture consent for the war?
The longer the onslaught on Gaza continues, the greater the likelihood that hostility toward Israelis abroad will continue to result in violence, and that the spillover of anti-Israel hostility into antisemitism will become harder and harder to contain. Indeed, we saw this in Amsterdam with people shouting “kanker jood” (cancer Jew) during attacks on Maccabi fans.
This is a clear and horrifying illustration of how Israel fails to be what it has always professed: the answer to the question of Jewish safety. When it continually declares that it is waging war on Palestinians in the name of Jewish safety, and receives the enthusiastic backing of prominent establishment Jewish organizations around the world, it feels inevitable that slippage between anti-Israel hostility and antisemitism will occur. Furthermore, the failure of the international community to hold Israel accountable has only exacerbated conspiracy theories about Jewish power that distract from the mechanisms of Western imperialism.
That doesn’t make violence against Jews in the name of rage against Israel acceptable — far from it. But in order to combat it, we need to recognize that Israel’s actions are making Jews around the world less safe, and seek to put distance between diaspora Jews and the machinations of a nation-state entirely disinterested in our security.
Handmaidens for the far right
Yet the crux of the issue is still being missed. This isn’t 1938; it’s 2024. What happened in Amsterdam is not, for the most part, a story about antisemitism, but rather of Europe’s rapidly escalating Islamophobia and racism. The ugly truth is that less than a century after being hunted down and exterminated by the Nazis and their allies across Europe, alleged care for Jews now acts as the handmaiden for the ambitions of the far right, who wield our fears as a cudgel against Muslims, Arabs, and migrants from the Global South.
These regressive political battles have been on full display since October 7, justified by the narrative — which Israeli leaders and right-wing Jewish organizations around the world have spurred on — that support for Palestine represents a direct threat to the safety and wellbeing of Jews. The response from the Dutch authorities to the events last week was alarming in this regard: Wilders referred to Amsterdam as having become “the Gaza of Europe,” and vowed to deport “Moroccans who want to destroy Jews.” And he’s not alone in this ambition: the Dutch government as a whole is weighing the possibility of stripping citizenship from dual nationals convicted of “antisemitism.”
Such moves are the inevitable result of the extreme rhetoric against critics of Israel that has been building up over the past year. From smearing pro-Palestine protests as “hate marches” and creating moral panics about “no-go zones” for Jews, to the violent policing and arrest of peaceful protestors, we are witnessing the collapsing of anti-Zionism into a form of terrorism and anti-Europeanness. “Combating antisemitism” has become increasingly synonymous with upholding the power of the state — not least its power to punish and surveil other minorities.
There are myriad cases from the past year in which European nationalism has been invoked to align the fight against antisemitism with a xenophobic, anti-immigrant agenda. In France, for example, the inaugural “March Against Antisemitism and for the Republic” was spearheaded by National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who was subsequently successful in pushing the current French government to pass draconian anti-immigration legislation that specifically targets people of color. Once persecuted as enemies of the state, Jews have now been transformed into a model minority in whose name France is excluding and attacking Muslim communities.
Similar political shifts took place in Britain, where events of the last year have birthed a new conversation in which support for the Jewish community has come to represent a British value among the political elite, while support for Palestine is deemed a foreign import. Immigration and anti-terrorism laws have been used to target supporters of Palestine; in one case, a former Conservative Party minister personally intervened in the process to revoke the visa of an international student who spoke at a pro-Palestine protest. And in August, far-right leaders like Tommy Robinson galvanized race riots across the UK, citing the need to take back the streets from “Hamas.”
In Germany, police have banned and repressed pro-Palestine demonstrations with extreme violence — including against German Jews and Israelis protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza. Only two weeks ago, the Bundestag passed a controversial resolution on antisemitism first proposed in the wake of October 7, cutting state funding from any organization that calls for boycotts against Israel. Another law passed earlier this year requires new German citizens to acknowledge Israel’s “right to exist.”
From Netanyahu and Wilders to Robinson and Le Pen, it is in the interest of far-right leaders everywhere to enlist Jews as foot soldiers in their war on those they most despise. As they increasingly work to blur the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, we must resist this conflation while also standing with Jewish communities against the very real threat that unchecked antisemitism poses.
But Jews, too, should remember that the far right are not our allies. Even if we are not the current targets of their ire, antisemitism has always stoked white nationalism and white supremacy. Allowing Jewish fears to be used as a battering ram against other minorities only increases our insecurity; we must urgently seek new avenues for Jewish safety in solidarity with other marginalized communities rather than in opposition to them.
Left-wing Jewish groups like Oy Vey Amsterdam, the Jewish Bloc in London, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York, and many others are spearheading this kind of organizing, building solidaristic coalitions that can act as an inspiration to others. It is disturbing to see these efforts be roundly chastised by the Jewish communal establishment.
Moreover, we need to confront the fact that in the face of over 400 days of genocide, destruction, and death at the hands of the Israeli military in Gaza, support for Israel in Europe is ultimately about shoring up a far-right political project at home. We must not let the story of the unrest in Amsterdam be retold so as to reinforce the far-right’s long-standing Islamophobia and escalating anti-migrant project.
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Weaponizing Jewish fear, from Tel Aviv to Amsterdam
Read also: Dutch Jews grapple with ‘weaponization’ of their fear following attack on Israelis: https://forward.com/news/673303/dutch-jews-israeli-attack-politics-antisemitism
and: https://paju.org/far-right-parties-in-europe-have-become-zionisms-greatest-backers/
