Hamasterdam and the “Antisemitic Pogrom” That Never Was

Ejecting Nazi-Zionism from the streets of Amsterdam

Palestine solidarity protest in The Netherlands, December 2023

You can also read this piece translated into Dutch.

I'm Jewish and have resided in The Netherlands for the better part of a decade, including several years living in the heart of Amsterdam (Ik spreek maar een beetje Nederlands, maar dat is niet zo goed). 

I currently live in a historically Jewish neighborhood that was emptied of Jewish residents during the Holocaust and occupied by Nazis from 1940-1945. A few minutes away by bike is a former SS Nazi prison camp. On my walks, I often pass by a house where Nazis interrogated and experimented with torture techniques on Jewish people in the basement.

There is a holocaust taking place now, too. People rounded up in torture camps. Mass graves and executions. Hundreds of thousands wiped out and counting. That holocaust is in Palestine, and this time Jewish people are not in the camps, we are pulling the trigger and mockingly laughing as families are lined up against the wall. 

Over the last week, many people have stepped up to correct the record after an egregious Zionist disinformation campaign spread the patently false narrative of “antisemitic pogroms” in Amsterdam when the Israeli Maccabi football club came to town. The propaganda campaign conveniently omitted the fact that Israel’s “fans” terrorized Muslims, targeted those showing solidarity with Palestine, chanted genocidal slogans like “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!” and wreaked violent havoc across the city the day prior to the match.

“Israelis” armed with metal pipes roamed the streets in mobs, harassing and spitting on locals, assaulting cab drivers, pulling down Palestinian flags, and attacking Muslims and Arabs in particular. When community members fought back against this racial violence, an orchestrated media and political campaign across Euro-America falsely reported this community defense as ”Jew-hunting riots” and a “modern day Kristallnacht” attack on Jews. 

The media and political class, including crusading settler-colonial presidents and prime ministers Biden and Trudeau, united to blatantly lie to the public about the events in Amsterdam. They issued coordinated statements depicting “Israeli” instigators as innocent victims, condemning “antisemitic attacks” which according to Biden “echoed dark moments in history when Jews were persecuted.” Was the mob violence perpetrated against Arabs and Muslims in Amsterdam referred to as “pogroms” or condemned? Of course not, the victims were Muslims. Imaginary “Jewish victimhood” is more important than real attacks on Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians. Such is the nature of Zionism.

The Dutch government - a direct partner in the ongoing Palestinian genocide - subsequently implemented a draconian ban on protests, mass arresting and beating those who defied the order. Now the state is debating a totalitarian law that would define “antisemitism” as terrorism and strip Dutch citizenship from those found guilty of this ‘crime’ - a blatant attempt to criminalize Arabs and Muslims who resist Nazi Zionism. 

This coordinated weaponization of fabricated “antisemitism” claims is nothing new - it’s the tried and true media playbook that Zionists trot out to deflect from ongoing colonial genocide, shield themselves from accountability, and play the incessant, exclusive victim card while mass murdering families in occupied Palestine. To be deemed "antisemitic" or a “terrorist” for one’s anti-zionism is a tool of violence where one may be subject to violent raids, deportation, beating, firing, doxxing, arrest, and death.

To be clear as a bell: It’s 2024 and there is no “crisis of antisemitism” in The Netherlands, just as there is no “crisis of antisemitism” sweeping across college campuses: There is a (Dutch-backed) Israeli holocaust on Palestine, widespread institutionalized Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism in Euro-America, and the Zionist propaganda that sustains this colonial violence globally. 

The Shoah was a European crime against Jewish people. As Abdaljawad Omar discusses in his crucial lecture, “Germany, Zionism, and the Politics of Debt,” Zionists project the image of the Nazi onto Palestinians and Arabs, and then proceed to tell the world they’re under “antisemitic attack” from the people they’re occupying and torturing to death in prison camps.

It isn't Palestinians' fault that the people who came to steal their land and kill their families identify as Jewish. It isn’t Dutch Muslims’ fault that the mobs racially terrorizing their families in Amsterdam identify as Jewish. That’s not why they are targeted. A Jewish fascist is still a fascist, a Jewish racist is still a racist, and a Zionist of any background is a Nazi. 

In Amsterdam, when “Israelis” came to town to spread their racial and religious terrorism, the community fought back and I applaud that. Why shouldn’t they or I? That is an act of community safety and protection. It is anti-fascism in action. It is doing what the colonial state cannot and will not do. It honors the Jewish martyrs rounded up for annihilation by fascists on the streets of Amsterdam in the 1940s. It is an unapologetic rejection of both the relentless Zionist holocaust in Palestine, and the terrorizing of Muslims and Arabs in our community. I have nothing but respect and appreciation for this act of solidarity. More of us globally should step up and intervene against Nazi Zionism in this way, particularly those of us who risk much less to do so. This is what “we keep us safe” means.

I wish my Jewish brethren would also confront Nazi Zionism with this level of urgency and force.  So I not only rebuke the perverse inverted “pogrom” narrative, I honor and respect the community members who forcefully ejected Nazi Zionism from the streets of Amsterdam.

The Dutch state is inherently colonial, racist, Islamophobic, and actively aiding and abetting the Zionist genocide of Palestine. The “Israeli” military attack dogs that maim and kill Palestinians like Muhammed Bhar are trained and supplied by Four Winds K9 in The Netherlands. The Dutch state has an ironclad commitment to staunch Zionism, with millions of euros invested in weapons contracts with “Israel.”

The systematized racial violence of the Shoah, the enabling of the Palestinian holocaust, and the pervasive systemic discrimination against Arabs and Muslims are not aberrations for countries like Germany and The Netherlands. Rather they are natural extensions of The Netherlands’ long violent colonial legacy, as articulated by Dr. Joseph Massad. 

The Dutch state - built on slavery and colonialism - is white supremacist and sadistically brutal to the core: Just ask the people of Suriname, Indonesia, South Africa, and Curaçao. Ask the descendants of scores of enslaved Africans who were kidnapped and forced onto Dutch slave ships during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

White supremacy, colonialism, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and genocide are seared into the DNA of The Netherlands, such that a fascist party leader like Geert Wilders is indeed the most honest face of this country. Same goes for Netanyahu and Trump: Not aberrations, but mirror reflections of the inherent unreformable soul of these rotten nations. And naturally each of these fascists is a fervent Zionist. In this chapter of history, Zionism is an ideal ideological vehicle for colonial domination, perfectly suiting the confluence of ongoing white supremacist political pursuits that date back to 1492, as articulated by scholar-activists Dr. Mohamed Abdou and Dr. Linda Quiquivix. 

It is also notable that many of the folks who fought back against racist Zionism in our streets are Dutch Moroccans. There is a specific, vehement, racist and Islamophobic prejudice against  Moroccans that runs rampant throughout this country. Mainstream Dutch culture is deeply anti-Black, Islamophobic, xenophobic, and anti-Arab. Liberal and conservative white Dutch people alike are all too primed and ready to believe media reports vilifying Arabs and Muslims in general, and Moroccans in particular. This is, after all, a country where seeing white people unabashedly donning full “Zwarte Piet” Blackface on the streets every December is still commonplace.

So it’s not surprising that this week the conversation amongst Dutch politicians moved to how Moroccans aren’t “integrating well into Dutch society” - fascist racist rhetoric that should sound familiar to European Jews who were once also considered an internal racial underclass. In reality, Jews and Muslims have a common enemy: White supremacist Christian empire. But most Jewish people have abandoned that struggle and instead chose to align with “the world of the above” - whiteness and the colonial power structures in the form of Zionism. 

For all intents and purposes, the state of “Israel” is a Euro-American military base wearing a kippah. Modeled after the genocidal US settler-colony (occupied Turtle Island), “Israel” is a terrorist state populated with Jewish human shields, draped in the liberal false trappings of “modernity” “democracy” “human rights” and of course “Jewish refuge.” We as Jewish people act as footsoldiers for white supremacist empire in occupied Palestine: “Israelis” kill, rape, torture, occupy, and squat on stolen land, their very presence functioning as cudgels for the expansion of Euro-American empire on the backs of Palestinians and others across the Levant.

Zionists audaciously twist, desecrate, and weaponize historical Jewish suffering for their own fascist gain. They spit in the face of our ancestors who faced actual pogroms and death squads. Their dangerous and pervasive instrumentalization of false “antisemitism” claims is not mere rhetoric, it has a death count. This propaganda manufactures consent and cognitive dissonance for the Zionist genocide of Palestine, acting not only as distraction but pretense to criminalize, punish, and murder Muslims and Arabs globally. “Israel’s” complete reversal of victim and offender is nothing new for Palestinians, who have articulated the ins-and-outs of this playbook throughout more than a century of Zionist settler-colonial slaughter in the name of “Jewish safety.” 

Most Jewish people in The Netherlands, like me, are white Ashkenazi Jews. It’s 2024, our whiteness means we move through the world with a racial ease that is simply not afforded to Black, Arab, Muslim, and other people of color in The Netherlands who often face institutionalized profiling, discrimination, criminalization, and violence. 

Zionists intentionally manufacture and stoke “antisemitic panic” amongst Jews in order to justify their terrorist state, maintain Jewish loyalty to “Israel,” and keep the tap of new settlers flowing. “Israel” employed this tactic in the early 1950s when Mossad agents bombed Jewish sites in Iraq to instill fear in Iraqi Jews so they would leave their communities to settle in “Israel.” As an ethno-supremacist colony, “Israel” is always fighting to win what it calls a “population war” against Palestinians – they are a nascent settler-colony and need numbers of Jewish people to occupy the land, lest Palestinians will come back to reclaim their stolen homes. 

“Israel” has been hemorrhaging settlers for the past year and naturally, amidst its “antisemitism crisis in Amsterdam” spin campaign, Zionist leaders put out calls for Jews to “leave everything and move home to Israel” claiming it was too violent for Jews to live in Europe anymore. The “safety” that Zionists offer Jewish settlers will always be a false safety because it is built on colonial dispossession in the dust of an airstrike on the mass graves of Palestinians. But even if the Zionist project could offer us “safety” through slaughter (not possible), the settler-colony of “Israel,” like all settler-colonies, is morally unjustifiable on principle. Thanks to the Palestinian people and their continued armed resistance, “Israel’s” days are numbered. There is no formation of Zionism or “Israel” that exists in a just future.

The “Israelis” came to Amsterdam and experienced something that they are not accustomed to: Consequences for their actions. Their violent colony is committing an unspeakably heinous century-long genocide, they racially terrorize our neighborhoods, and many of these “innocent football fans” serve as active terrorist soldiers in the IOF. They murder children then hop on a plane to enjoy a football match. Zionists are Nazis and should have no peace as Palestine perishes. “This is for the children, motherfucker.”