Guest article from When Saturday Comes, The Half Decent Football Magazine
On November 8, the United Nations’ Human Rights Office published an analysis of the 8,119 Palestinians killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza between November 2023 and April 2024. It found around 44 per cent of verified victims were children and 26 per cent women. The most represented age group among the dead were children between five and nine years old.
And yet, on the same day, the focus of so many news bulletins in Britain and elsewhere was the violence surrounding the Ajax v Maccabi Tel Aviv Europa League match the night before – violence which left five people hospitalised.
The initial narrative, carried by news outlets here and across the West, was of a wave of antisemitic violence against Maccabi fans. Both the Dutch prime minister, Dick Schoof, and Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema spoke of “antisemitic hit-and-run squads”. Even King Willem-Alexander claimed his country had failed their Jewish community “again” – a reference to the Second World War when 75 per cent of Dutch Jews, tl1e majority residents of Amsterdam, were killed in the Holocaust. Meanwhile, in Israel, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu likened the violence to Kristallnacht – the Nazi pogrom of November 1938 – and promised to send military aircraft to bring home the Maccabi supporters.
Beyond those headlines, though, was a different version of events. As Amsterdam’s police chief, Peter Holla, acknowledged, there had been “incidents on both sides”. Maccabi fans – who had been involved in trouble before a Conference League game in Athens in March – tore down a Palestinian flag from a building and burned it.
They chanted “Fuck the Arabs” and “Why is there no school in Gaza? Because there are no children.”
They also attacked a taxi in a city with a strong cohort of Moroccan cabbies, sparking an angry response as drivers converged on a casino where several hundred fans had gathered and duly required a police escort to get out. Later, inside the stadium, the Maccabi fans jeered during the pre-match silence for the victims of the floods in Valencia – evidently their response to Spain’s recognition of a Palestinian state and opposition to the conflict in Gaza.
Context is crucial yet that initial framing of events in Amsterdam recalls how, after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, everybody from British newspapers to US president Joe Biden parroted the never-substantiated claim of 40 beheaded babies.
Indeed, according to an investigation by Double Down News, a widely used video clip purportedly showing a mob attacking an Israeli was actually the opposite: hooded Maccabi fans chasing and beating up a local man.
With Israel’s campaign in Gaza having now killed more than 44,000 people, mostly civilians it is little wonder that the ongoing participation of Israeli clubs and national teams in international football should prompt debate. On November 16, a feature about the West Bank in the i newspaper told of a domestic league paralysed since October 7, 2023 and the destruction by the IDF of the main stadium in Jenin. A week later, the Guardian’s Jonathan Liew continued the debate, citing the “344 Palestinian footballers killed by Israel since last October” in an article that Gary Lineker posted on Twitter.
Another talking point last month was the Nations League fixture between Israel and France which took place in front of 16,611 spectators at the Stade de France. Among the stadium’s lowest-ever crowd was French president Emmanuel Macron, present to “send a message of fraternity and solidarity after the intolerable acts of antisemitism that followed the match in Amsterdam”.
A survey by a supporters’ group for the French national team found that 30 per cent of fans had stayed away because of tensions surrounding the game and another 15 per cent as a boycott. And while there were two protests beforehand, those tensions were not helped by the staging in Paris two nights before of a fundraising gala for the Israeli military which Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far right finance minister who has called for the ethnic cleansing (“voluntary migration”) of Gaza and annexation of parts of the West Bank had initially been due to attend.
At the time of writing Maccabi will shortly play their next Europa League fixture, “away” against Turkish club Besiktas, in the Hungarian city of Debrecen. And the ripples seem likely to carry on. It is worth heeding the words of Gideon Levy, a left-leaning columnist for Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper which has just been sanctioned by the Netanyahu government. After the Amsterdam violence, Levy lamented that “every Israeli abroad will be a target for hatred and violence” but with a moral clarity absent from much of our own media’s reporting, added:
“That’s what happens when you kill almost 20,000 children, carry out ethnic cleansing and destroy the Gaza Strip.”
By Thomas Hunt
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