How Israeli hooligans fueled fascism in the Netherlands
On the 6th and 7th of November, fascist goons from Maccabi Tel Aviv descended on the streets of Amsterdam, chanting proudly about murdered children in Gaza, while assaulting local houses, passers-by and taxi drivers that appeared pro-Palestinian or Arab. As the police failed to protect its own citizens, some took matters into their own hands and started striking back, wounding multiple Maccabi supporters.
These events in our city have become worldwide news, portrayed as a targeted ‘pogrom’ against jews, by mass-murderers such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden. Yet not a single local jew, jewish store or jewish institution was attacked. The far-right has seized on Israeli propaganda to demonize the entire migrant community in the Netherlands and the right to protest, fueling a looming descent into fascism.
It is high time to set the record straight. We, as a local party with representation in the city council of Amsterdam, have been in touch with countless local citizens and journalists, who have told us a highly different version of events from what has been reported by the Western mainstream press. Much of this was caught on camera and spread online from the start, but largely ignored by major Western media. It was independent YouTube journalists such as Left Laser, Bender, Sallaheddine that broke the first major factual reports of what happened in Amsterdam. What follows is a reconstruction.
Maccabi ultras are fascist goons
Maccabi ultras are not random hooligans. Considering the obligatory military draft in Israël, practically all of them are soldiers or ex-soldiers, many of them coming straight from duty in Gaza or Libanon, where they have been complicit in genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Hailing from an apartheid society, where pogroms against Palestinians are a daily reality, they are used to terrorizing Palestinians, Arabs and political opponents with impunity.
In 2020, for example, Maccabi ultra’s attacked anti-Netanyahu demonstrators with batons and broken glass, wounding several of them. The club gained a reputation as “Israel’s most racist soccer club,” already before the ultra’s managed to cleanse its team of all Arab players, by constantly intimidating and insulting them with racist slurs.
The Maccabi Ultras take their fascist mentality with them when visiting other cities, from Malta to Athens. In march this year in Greece, for example, the Maccabi ultras beat an Egyptian man into the hospital for holding a Palestinian flag.
The last time Maccabi goons visited Amsterdam, in 2016, they proudly sang their ‘rape song’, which speaks about drinking the blood of the ‘whores of the Arabs’, raping their women, and hanging communists on squares. In the run-up to the football match this November, the ultra’s proudly re-posted the video recording of that shameful episode in Amsterdam on their YouTube channel. An ominous warning.
The majority of the citizens in Amsterdam have a migrant background, many of them from the MENA region. The city also has a strong movement in solidarity with Palestine, with demonstrations happening literally every single day at the Central Station. Clearly, trouble was coming. That is why Amsterdam citizens had warned in advance that the football match should be canceled, a voice that we, as a local political party, amplified in the city council of Amsterdam. Indeed, just next door in Belgium, the Israeli national team was not allowed to come to Belgium last September, for fear of violence.
Yet in Amsterdam, despite our warnings in the city council about the nature of this club and its racism, nothing was done. How was that possible?
How UEFA and the Dutch state white-washed Maccabi Tel Aviv
The mayor of Amsterdam claims that Maccabi is not a high-risk club, based on assessments her administration had received from the local police in Tel Aviv, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and the Dutch security services, the NCTV. Yet her sources all have a deeply biased and racist history. Let’s look, in particular, at UEFA and the Dutch NCTV.
For over a decade, UEFA has consistently rejected demands to suspend or expel the Israel Football Association (IFA), despite numerous requests to do so by the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) and the Red Card Israeli Racism campaign. Mouin Rabbani sums up the numerous arguments to sanction Israël:
“that Israel is an institutionally racist state and should be treated no differently than apartheid South Africa (suspended by FIFA in 1961) and Rhodesia (suspended in 1970); that the IFA includes clubs based in illegal settlements in the illegally-occupied Palestinian territories; that the IFA discriminates against Palestinian clubs; that IFA teams discriminate against Palestinian players; that Israel in 2019 prevented the PFA cup final from taking place when it prohibited the Khadamaat Rafah team traveling from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank to play against Balata FC; that Israel has killed and maimed Palestinian players; that Israeli clubs systematically tolerate racist and genocidal conduct by supporters; and a variety of other grounds, most recently that Israel is perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that has resulted in the killing of numerous Palestinian players, officials, and staff.”
Indeed, in Gaza alone, over 300 Palestinian football players have been murdered by the Israeli army since October 7th.
UEFA has defended their stance in defense of the Israeli league by claiming that they don’t want to be involved with politics. They showed their true face when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, as they banned all Russian teams overnight. Even though Israël has been exterminating Gaza’s children at a rate nearly 450 times higher than Russia in Ukraine. Clearly, UEFA cannot be considered an impartial source.
The reality of the Dutch NCTV is perhaps even worse, with a specific history of inciting racism against muslims in Amsterdam. Most recently, in September this year, a Dutch court ruled that the NCTV had wrongly painted an Amsterdam Islamic school as extremist. The Amsterdam municipality had used the slanderous reports of the NCTV to try to get the school closed.
In that sense, it is no surprise that the local Amsterdam administration falls back once again on racist sources such as the NCTV to justify their dangerous policies that threaten their own citizens, especially those with a migrant background. Indeed, the rot runs deep within the entire municipality, where a huge scandal has recently erupted about the systemic abuse of employees, who were “large-scale victims of racism, bullying and abuse of power.”
Maccabi fascists terrorize citizens in Amsterdam, supported by police
Already the day before the football match, on November 6th, Maccabi ultra’s were roaming through the streets of Amsterdam in search of pro-Palestinian citizens to terrorize. The ultras attacked multiple houses with Palestinian flags or posters, tearing them down, smashing their windows and threatening the inhabitants.
For example, dozens of Maccabi fascists gathered in front of Villa Mokum on Wednesday night, a squat where various Palestinian flags are hanging. Videos show how they throw stones at the windows, climb the building and tear off the flags.
“They were kicking our doors and trying to get into our house,” said a 23-year-old resident of the building to the local Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool. “They were giving us the middle finger and making beheading gestures, saying ‘we’re going to kill you and we will come back’.”
At one of the home raids by the Maccabi Hooligans, a local taxi driver spoke out, and the fascist goons attempted to beat him up. He got away uninjured, though with smashed windows and dents in his car. As even the mayor confirmed in her letter to the council, the Maccabi fascists then took off their belts, and started smashing various other taxis in the vicinity.
In response to the Israeli violence, Amsterdam citizens struck back. Used to sniping Palestinian children from a distance, the Israeli fascists immediately cowered in fear. In an iconic video, one of the Maccabi hooligans jumped into a canal to flee, and agreed to shout ‘Free Palestine’ to make his pursuers leave. Most of the hooligans were driven into a local casino, where they had to hide for a collective of taxi drivers, until the police came to save them. Yet there were no reported injuries that night.
Taxi drivers in Amsterdam are notorious for being well organized and loyal, sticking up for each other. It is no surprise, then, that they immediately organized to defend themselves and sent a clear signal to the hooligans that they are not to be messed with. Nevertheless, later interviews also made clear that they wanted to protect Amsterdam citizens more generally from the fascist violence of Maccabi supporters.
On that first day, on the 6th of November, we saw a pattern that would repeat itself the next day. On video footage, we can see how a police car drives by whilst Israeli thugs attack a house, doing nothing. The first taxi driver that was assaulted, likewise, went straight to the police, where the police simply told him off, even though his windows were clearly smashed.
The impunity with which the Israeli fascists were able to assault pro-Palestinian citizens caused major worries within activist circles and migrant communities. We know from organizers of autonomous, pro-Palestinian community centers such as De Vrankrijk, that they felt compelled to organize nightly reconnaissance teams and barricade doors, in order to prepare from possible attacks by the Maccabi fascists. Chats and social media groups of human rights activists warned not to wear Kuffiyeh’s or other pro-Palestinian symbols in the city center, in fear of violence.
On November 7th, Maccabi Ultra’s clearly considered themselves untouchable. They again paraded through the streets of Amsterdam, whilst intimidating passers-by and loudly chanting genocidal songs. “Let the IDF win to fuck the Arabs,” was cheered loudly in clear daylight, part of a longer song that claims ‘there are no schools in Gaza, because there are no children left.”
Indeed, the IDF has wiped out some 500 schools and 17.000 children in Gaza in a systematic campaign of mass murder, still ignoring the much larger death toll from the Israeli manufactured famine. According to UN figures, 70 percent of the murdered victims are women and children, with those aged five to nine being the single biggest victim group. Again, the police stood by and did nothing, even though incitement to genocide is a criminal offense.
Passers-by wearing a Keffiyeh or Palestine button were insulted, spat on and had bottles thrown at them. Various of the passers-by that were assaulted have testified how the police did nothing, told them to leave and blamed them for being near the hooligans.
When the Maccabi ultra’s finally came to the match, they loudly disturbed a minute of silence that was held for flood victims in Spain, because of the countries’ critical stance against Israël.
When they left the stadium, they went to the city center on a warpath, armed with chains, sticks and stones, seemingly ready to make good on their death threats from the night before. Bizarrely, they were escorted by police whilst carrying these arms, even though the entire area was designated as a high-risk area by the mayor.
This time, however, the tables were turned.
There was no ‘pogrom’ against jews
After the first attacks by Maccabi hooligans, various Dutch citizens seem to have organized themselves to prepare for retaliatory hit and run attacks, moving around quickly on scooters to avoid being caught. This resulted in dozens of mostly light injuries against Maccabi hooligans, including five of them that briefly visited a local hospital.
According to the mayor’s office, the perpetrators were organizing themselves in Telegram groups where the word ‘jew hunt’ was repeatedly used. Nevertheless, most of the sources have not been made public, nor the context of the remarks or the size and relevance of the Telegram groups. Regardless, this language was seized upon by pro-genocide politicians across the world to proclaim that what transpired on the 7th of November was a ‘pogrom’ against jews.
Even if we accept the claims of the police, the inflated language about a ‘pogrom’ is clearly inaccurate. Firstly, pogroms are associated with systemic state-sanctioned violence against minorities. Yet the Maccabi fascists were the ones who were given free reign by the police, not the other way around.
Secondly, as even the most right-wing major newspaper in the Netherlands was forced to admit: “There are no indications yet that Jewish Amsterdammers or synagogues, for example, were also targeted. The authorities believe that a distinction was made between Israeli fans and Jews in general.” The perpetrators were mainly “after Maccabi supporters because there were supposedly Israeli ex-soldiers and Mossad agents among them.”
If the alleged Telegram messages about a ‘jew hunt’ turn out to be authentic, there seems to have been a clear conflation of terms between zionists and jews, even though they were clearly targeting the former, not the latter. A conflation of terms that zionists themselves have, of course, been trying to create for decades, including every major political party in the Netherlands. Half of the people arrested for violent offenses on November 7th were minors, making ignorance a likely cause for the conflation.
Yet another possible cause for the conflation is the old tradition of Amsterdam Ajax supporters to call themselves ‘super jews,’ which has led their opponents to use anti-jewish language, even if they don’t mean actual jews. There are plenty of video’s of mostly white football choirs literally singing about ‘jew hunts’ or how ‘the jews are going to die.’ Interestingly, in 2017 the Dutch national broadcaster publicly apologized to FC Utrecht supporters for having painted them as antisemitic for this reason.
Indeed, football is the main reason that antisemitism numbers spiked in 2023 according to figures of the Dutch public prosecutor. “The striking increase in the discrimination grounds of anti-Semitism cannot be related to facts related to the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas on October 7, 2023,” the prosecutor claims. “The strikingly high influx at this Public Prosecutor’s Office is related to various football matches that were played in Rotterdam or by Feyenoord.”
Although the hit-and-run attacks were aimed at Maccabi hooligans, not at Ajax supporters, the Amsterdam club itself has a reputation of being pro-Israël and some of its supporters had assaulted a Palestinian man just days before the match. It is entirely possible that the football lingo got mixed up in the Telegram chats. Indeed, not a single local jew, jewish store, or jewish institution was targeted. Clearly, there was not an actual jew hunt. And definitely not a state-sanctioned one.
Amsterdam police only targets ‘anti-fascists’ and racialized minorities
There has been a lot of criticism about the relatively small amount of police present around the Maccabi hooligans on November 6th and 7th. Yet this does not mean that a small police force was present in Amsterdam those days. In fact, there was a huge special mobilization from neighboring regions, including riot police, arrest units, horses, dogs, reconnaissance units, football units and the ‘peace unit’. The problem is that they were used against the wrong people.
Anti-genocide protestors were planning to hold a demonstration at the Amsterdam stadium against the presence of Maccabi Tel Aviv, in favour of a sports boycott against genocide, colonialism and apartheid, as was done in the case of Apartheid South-Africa and Rhodesia.
In violation of their constitutional rights, the demonstrators were told to go to the Anton de Kom square, which is neither visible nor hearable from the stadium. Regardless, the demonstrators complied with the orders from the mayor and the police. Despite their obedience, the anti-genocide demonstrators were confronted with a massive police force, including riot police and horses.
Although ten hooligans were briefly arrested, not a single Israeli was prosecuted. All of them were protected by the police, escorted to their hotels and allowed to return to Israël, mirroring the culture of impunity in their home country. We have spoken to a taxi driver who attempted to file charges against Maccabi hooligans, but was literally refused by the police for days. Other taxi drivers are afraid of speaking out at all, in fear of being ethnically profiled and framed.
Mossad agents accompanied the Israeli hooligans, in direct violation of Dutch sovereignty, which would have never allowed Iranian, Russian or Chinese agents to enter the Netherlands, let alone to accompany foreign fascist and openly genocidal gangs. Now, the Dutch authorities are collaborating with the Israeli government to ‘research’ the so-called ‘pogroms’, a government whose entire cabinet should be tried in the Hague for genocide.
On November 9th, the jewish anti-zionist organization Erev Rav felt compelled to cancel their anti-fascist Kristallnacht commemoration at the Jewish resistance memorial in Amsterdam. They had asked the police for special protection against the Maccabi fascists, who have a history of attacking anti-war leftists, including jews, yet the police simply responded that they were more worried about ‘pro Palestinian activists and anti-fascists.’ Astounded, the spokesperson of Erev Rav replied: “Of course there would be anti-fascists. We are anti-fascists. And we expect the police to be anti-fascist themselves.”
Yet the Amsterdam police clearly is not anti-fascist. In fact, anti-fascist stickers are even shown as examples of ‘leftist extremism’ in police training. It is no surprise then, that it was the pro-Palestinian anti-fascists that were surrounded by police.
The double-standards of the Dutch state and police are no coincidence. Institutional racism in the Dutch police and criminal justice system is deeply entrenched. Figures show that racial inequalities in police killings, arrests and imprisonment rates are significantly worse than in the United States.
The far-right zionist PVV party has massive support within the police force, in some areas as much as 60 percent who voted for the extremist party. Think of police officers who, according to several whistleblowers, call themselves ‘Moroccan exterminators’ or who talk about ‘shit Africans’ or ‘Natos’ (‘North African Cunts Wearing Sports Shoes’).
Like in so many countries, the Israeli laboratory of repression is directly imported into the Netherlands. The state has purchased two Israeli wiretapping systems to surveil its own citizens, the last one from Cyber Intelligence, a subsidiary of Elbit Systems, in 2019.
How the Netherlands is turning into a police state
The Dutch complicity in the genocide in Gaza and climate breakdown have led to increasing protests on the streets of Netherlands. The response of the state has been staggering repression. When student encampments started in May 2024 in Utrecht and Amsterdam, for example, they were both met with speed eviction, swifter than in any country in the world.
We saw the same pattern of double standards in the first encampment in Amsterdam, which was attacked by zionists with firebombs as the police stood idly by. The encampment was subsequently illegally evicted – as the public prosecutor belatedly admitted months later – with much violence, including a student whose skull was cracked by a police baton.
Since march 2024, the ruling coalition parties have openly proclaimed their intent to restrict the right to protest. The pretext was yet another zionist lie, surrounding the visit of the Israeli president to Amsterdam for the opening of the National Holocaust Museum. As Herzog is guilty for inciting genocide, the jewish anti-zionist organization Erev Rav organized a demonstration. Major Dutch parties shamefully painted the protest as anti-semitic, completely ignoring the presence of Erev Rav and blatantly lied about anti-semitic statements that never happened. This lie became the basis for a campaign to restrict constitutional rights in the Netherlands.
The mayor of Amsterdam is a former leader of the Green-Left party, a neoliberal imperialist party, which nevertheless considers itself constitutional, liberal and in favor of civil liberties. In the past, the mayor has pushed back against some of the most extreme far-right threats against the right to protest. Since November 7th, however, all resistance has gone out of the window.
Femke Halsema’s words about a “pogrom” were crucial in facilitating far-right propaganda, as an investigation by OneWorld revealed. It is reminiscent of how the supposedly “moderate” and respected Colin Powell facilitated the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with his speech at the UN, also a turning point for liberal media. It is often the more ‘respectable’ leaders who are crucial in facilitating colonial propaganda.
Granted, it is positive that Femke Halsema – due to enormous pressure from below – walked back her statement about a ‘pogrom’ after 10 days. But it was also too little, too late. That she did not see the far-right and Israeli propaganda coming, as she now claims, lacks any credibility.
More serious were the actual policies Halsema pursued in the aftermath of the Maccabi attacks. Claims of a “pogrom” were seized upon to promulgate emergency laws banning all protests in the city of Amsterdam. Anti-genocide demonstrators have peacefully gone onto the streets regardless, where they were charged with horses, and a shopping muslim lady was beaten into a bloody pulp, leading to severe brain damage. Several journalists were also beaten or arrested while clearly recognizable.
The police violence was adamantly denied by Halsema in the city council – before any investigation had been done. This facilitated a feeling of impunity amongst the police. Three days later, protesters were dumped by police in an abandoned area on the outskirts of the city – out of sight of the media – where they were brutally chased and beaten in what some have called a “coordinated protester hunt”.
The protest ban remained in effect for nearly a week in Amsterdam. Even the neighboring city of Utrecht seized on the events to effectively ban a protest by the largest Dutch union against university budget cuts, with lies about an alleged threat of violence from pro-Palestinian groups. That was another supposedly left-wing mayor, Sharon Dijksma of the Labor Party.
The budget cuts are tied to the rapidly increasing military expenditures of the Dutch state, which has even started talking about re-introducing a military draft, like in Israël. Many of the weapons will in turn be bought from Israeli arms manufacturers, which are enabling the genocide in Gaza. A militarization that is also supported by the ‘leftist’ opposition party GroenLinks-PvdA.
The looming draft, too, is a threat to freedom in the Netherlands. During the Dutch colonial war in Indonesia from 1946-49, countless draft resisters were imprisoned for years, and have to this day never received any form of compensation or rehabilitation. The colonial soldiers, by contrast, have been honored as part of the official WW2 commemorations since 1961, even before the Dutch state did the same for actual Nazi holocaust victims.
Rising fascism and Islamophobia, a colonial boomerang
The Netherlands has a long and deep history of racism, having brought apartheid to South Africa, Indonesia, Surinam and the Dutch Antilles, among other places. Even the previous ‘liberal’ Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, is a convicted racist for ethnic profiling, and a zionist fanatic who instructed his own staff to cover up Israeli war crimes.
Rutte’s government notoriously destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Dutch people of color in what became known as the ‘benefits scandal,’ which plunged innocent civilians into huge debts, leading to divorces, suicides and the loss of child custody.
Many far-right leaders in the Netherlands, including PVV-leader Geert Wilders, have a background as colonizers in Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority country in the world. The Dutch East Indies were ruled as an apartheid state, and leaders like Wilders aim to ‘avenge their ancestors’ that were defeated. They see in the Palestinian resistance the same faces of the Indonesian freedom fighters. Wilders himself had his coming of age in a Kibbutz in the West Bank, where he recognized his political soulmates in the most fanatic settlers of Israël.
After the genocide in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, the Israeli mass murders was supported by a major propaganda offensive by the Dutch government and almost all Dutch political parties, with strong racist undertones. Think, for example, of the ‘leftist’ opposition leader Frans Timmermans, who spoke about our ‘culture of life’ and their ‘culture of death.’
In this context, the national elections in November 2023 further worsened the situation.The far-right PVV party became the largest party, led by Geert Wilders, an ardent zionist and racist, who believes in a ‘jewish state’ from the river to the sea and wishes to apply the same apartheid model to the Netherlands.
Wilders was convicted by a Dutch court in 2016 for “incitement to discrimination,” after he told a rally that he ‘would arrange’ that the country would have ‘less, less Moroccans’, essentially calling for their deportation. His lawyer for the court-case was bankrolled by American zionists, to the tune of two hundred thousand euros.
The PVV is the largest of the parties in the governing coalition and served as the king-maker in coalition talks, with the prime-minister being the former head of the Dutch secret services, under whose watch Dutch Muslims were specifically targeted and spied on.
The coalition seriously considered PVV parliamentarian Gidi Markuszower as a Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Asylum and Migration. A fanatic zionist who was born and raised in Israël, Markuszower brought his fascist views with him to the Netherlands. He talks of migrants as ‘African beasts’ and advocated in a leaked email to murder anti-zionist “despicable jews”.
Those views were well-known by 2024 and not a problem for the ruling coalition. The reason Markuszower was not able to become the vice prime-minister was because he did not pass the security clearance by the Dutch secret service, most likely because of his continued ties to the Mossad. Nevertheless, he remains on the bench in parliament for the PVV.
Since the far-right election victory of the PVV, Islamofobia has sharply risen in the Netherlands. According to the latest figures of Meld Islamofobie 83 percent of Dutch muslims have been personally targeted by an Islamofobic incident last year. We have seen hate-crimes against Muslims on two separate occasions just in the last two weeks, where two muslims were nearly beaten to death by racists in their own neighborhood. This summer, another muslim was murdered by a racist neighbor.
The racists and antisemites are in the Hague
The events of November 7th last week have escalated things further. Outraged by the complete betrayal of almost the entire spectrum of Dutch politics and media, which protected foreign fascist hooligans rather than its own citizens, youths rioted in the streets of Amsterdam West on November 11th. The specific trigger was the beating up of a Muslim woman by police force during a peaceful protest the day before, which the mayor proceeded to lie about in the face of extensive video evidence.
Leaders of the governing coalition parties immediately seized upon the events to demonize the muslim community. Think for example of BBB-leader van der Plas, who claims that ‘the thirst to beat up Jews and even worse: to want to kill them’ is deeply ingrained in ‘a section of the population’. Wilders called for ‘deporting and denaturalizing’ the ‘scum’. The prime-minister, Dick Schoof, claimed the ‘jew hunt’ exposed the ‘integration-problem’ in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed a motion to place human rights organizations – literally at the urging of the Israeli state – on terrorist lists. And BBB leader van der Plas openly called for a ban against the Instagram account Cestmocro, in direct violation of freedom of speech.
During the Council of Ministers in the week after the Maccabi riots, there was allegedly talk of “cunt Moroccans,” “halal eaters,” “pus” that “can’t just be squeezed out” and “anti-Semitism that is in the genes of muslims or Moroccans.” What was actually said remains fodder for speculation, since the Council of Ministers’ discussions are secret and the cabinet refuses to disclose them. In any case, it was reason enough for the only Moroccan-dutch minister, Nora Achahbar, to resign her job and leave the cabinet. If the cabinet admits to having made racist statements, it would legally speaking be a “criminal organization.” That, according to criminal lawyer Gerard Spong, is probably the reason Achahbar also cautiously speaks of “polarizing” language. She would not want to take credit for the fall of the cabinet.
The demonization of Dutch muslims as anti-Semites has little to do with reality or with concerns for Dutch jews. The party ideologue of the PVV, currently the chair of Dutch parliament, is notorious for spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories, and for having worn an NSB flag to Dutch parliament. The latter is the Dutch National Socialist party that collaborated with the Nazis during World War Two. The Netherlands seems to have willfully forgotten that it was not muslims but christians who systematically murdered European jews during World War II.
The claim that anti-Semitism is an Islamic problem has been a long-time talking point of the Israël lobby, including the main lobby group in the Netherlands, the CIDI. Esther Voet, then director of CIDI, claimed in 2014 that two-thirds of anti-Semitism came from Muslims, while the figures from the Public Prosecution Service showed that two-thirds of the perpetrators were ‘native’ Dutch. The second largest group of perpetrators were Dutch people with a ‘Western European’ migrant background.
An extensive government study found that twelve percent of Dutch Muslim youth were ‘not so positive’ about Jews. This is comparable to their attitude towards Kurds (twelve percent), Dutch (ten percent) and even Moroccans (eight percent). Conversely, compared to the Dutch muslim youth, Islamophobia has been rampant, as Christian and non-religious youth were extremely negative about Muslims (around thirty percent) and Moroccans (around forty percent).
We should see the demonization of Muslims by Dutch and Israeli politicians and government officials as an expression of increasing fascism. While Gaza has been transformed into an extermination camp and pogroms are a daily reality in the West Bank, right-wing politicians and government officials hope to bring this reality of apartheid and ethnic cleansing to the Netherlands. It is not without reason that they place themselves squarely behind Maccabi gangs who sang in the Dutch streets about hanging communists, raping their opponents and murdering Palestinian babies.
The rhetoric of the right about ‘Islamo-left’ should be seen as the modern-day version of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, with which the Nazis justified their murderous actions against Jews. Let us also not forget that Jewish refugees were banned and expelled from the Netherlands in the 1930s with many of the same arguments that we hear about Muslims today, by literally the same newspapers such as the Telegraaf, the largest newspaper of the Netherlands. It was not without reason that the newspaper was banned after the Second World War, as it became known as an ‘SS hate campaign paper’.
The threat of fascism is real and wide. The genocidal apartheid state of Israël is simply the tip of the spear in a much broader and dangerous process, fueling fascist imaginaries that threaten to plunge the Western world into darkness. The liberal center, from Kamala Harris in the United States to Femke Halsema in Amsterdam, seem powerless and unwilling to truly confront them.
At the same time, we see more and more people piercing through the lies, organizing and taking to the streets. There is tremendous anger about the genocide in Gaza, about the demonization of our Dutch Muslims, and about the breakdown of the welfare state in favour of a war and police state. We will have to turn that anger into a powerful, broad and well-organized mass movement for peace and solidarity. A movement that does not allow itself to be misled or divided by a government that doesn’t care in the least about Dutch workers. As we say at De Vonk: may we be the spark that fires the flame of revolution. For little else will suffice.
Chris de Ploeg and Jazie Veldhuyzen
Jazie Veldhuizen is group chair of De Vonk in the Amsterdam city council. Chris de Ploeg is a policy officer/organiser at De Vonk, as well as an investigative journalist and co-founder of Arts of Resistance and Aralez, a decolonial collective in Amsterdam.