Amsterdam and AntiSemitism: What most media don’t tell us about Maccabi Tel Aviv

Reprinted from the UK socialist website Left Horizons. 

General Archive International International Archive

What most media don’t tell us about Maccabi Tel Aviv

9 November 2024Posted by Editor

By John Pickard

We are well used to the lying machine that masquerades as the Israeli government press office. So we should not be surprised that the same kind of inaccurate and medacious propaganda should be peddled over the violence around the football match this week between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Dutch side Ajax, in Amsterdam.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the most right-wing Israeli government since the war, with open racists in his cabinet, takes self-righteousness and hypocrisy to new levels. He ritually equates any and every attack on the policies of his government as “antisemitism”.

So it is par for the course that he has seized on the violence in the Dutch capital, claiming that the clashes – what he calls “attacks” on Maccabi fans – are “evidence of surging antisemitism in Europe”. The extreme right wing Dutch Islamophobe politician, Geert Wilders, an ardent fan of Israel, has demanded the deportation of the “multicultural scum” he blames for the violence. (Financial Times, November 8).

Losing no opportunity for grandstanding about the danger of “antisemitism” and to emphasise the perils faced by Maccabi fans, the Israeli government sent two ‘rescue’ planes to the Netherlands to pick up their football fans.

What most of the media have not reported are the deliberately provocative anti-Arab and racist chants by Maccabi fans before, during and after the game in Amsterdam. According to the Scottish newspaper, The National, Sky News even “deleted a tweet about football fans from Israel chanting racist slurs before being attacked in Amsterdam following the world’s media coverage being heavily criticised”.

Israeli ‘fans’ attacked Arabs driving taxis

The Financial Times reports, like most newspapers, that there are videos on social media showing Arab-speaking men chasing Israeli football fans. But as one woman commented to the FT, “The eyes are always on the violence of one side but not the other side.”  Even the Financial Times – hardly a radical newspaper – reported that Dutch police “said that Israeli fans vandalised a taxi and that a Palestinian flag was burnt, while other videos showed Maccabi Tel Aviv fans chanting anti-Arab slogans as they entered a metro station”.

A headline in the Times of Israel, which included a post on X reporting that one of their hateful chants, applauding the slaughter in Gaza, was “Why is school out in Gaza. Because there are no children there.”

More film has now emerged on X showing hundreds of Maccabi fans in the centre of Amsterdam chanting anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian slogans. [The top picture is taken from this video]. According to the New York Times, “Police chief Peter Holla also told a news conference on Friday that Maccabi fans had attacked a taxi and set fire to a Palestinian flag”.

Amsterdam is home to thousands of immigrants from Islamic countries, and, as there has been in most European capitals in the last year, there have been many marches and demonstrations in support of Palestinian rights and against the genocide in Gaza. In these circumstances, the provocative actions of thousands of Israel’s most racist football ‘fans’ would have been like throwing petrol onto a bonfire.

Much of the fan base of Maccabi Tel Aviv, as the above video relates, is well known as being anti-Arab. Racist and Isalmophobic chants are part of the regular repertoire in its home ground, and their reputation for racist behaviour long preceded the game last week.

Arab and black Maccabi players abused by ‘their own’ fans

Wikipedia reports that by the New Israel Fund, a US-based NGO, made Maccabi Tel Aviv fans the second-most racist fans in Israel, behind another club, Beitar Jerusalem. The club’s fans are well known for yelling racist slurs and insults at Arab and black football players. Even players on their own team have often faced racist abuse from the team’s own fans. “Fans would yell anti-Arab slurs at Maharan Radi, an Arab player, and yell monkey noises at Baruch Dego, an Ethiopian-Jewish player.”

During the 2020–2021 protests against Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed changes in the judicial system, Maccabi fans attacked protestors with batons and broken bottles. After the events in Amsterdam, even the Times of Israel reported the return of hundreds of fans to Ben Gurion Airport in Israel – still chanting racist slogans.

Socialists are always in the forefront of the fight against all forms of racism, including antisemitism, but as far as we can tell, there are no reports suggesting that Jewish people going about their daily business in Dutch cities have been harassed or attacked by pro-Palestinian activists or Muslims. We should refuse, therefore, to equate those who fought back against the provocation of Maccabi football hooligans with ‘antisemitism’.

There is worldwide revulsion against the genocidal assault on the people of Gaza by the Israeli war machine. According to the United Nations, 60 per cent of the 45,000 killed have been women and children. It is in an attempt to deflect from the well-deserved pariah status of Israel that Netanyahu and the mainstream media are peddling lies about the events in Amsterdam this week.

If EUFA had an ounce of social consience – which unfortunately it hasn’t – it would ban this disgraceful club and its racist supporters from all European competitions.