Let us look at the schedule of international football. This Thursday, November 14, Israel will play France in Paris in the UEFA Nations League. It is a “high-security match,” as it is described. Israel’s government strongly urges its citizens not to travel. On November 28, within the framework of the Europa League, Maccabi Tel Aviv will face Beşiktaş Istanbul, and it will be played behind closed doors in Debrecen, Hungary. This stems from a Turkish and Hungarian initiative.
The European football association UEFA, on the other hand, is perfectly content to simply speak out against violence in general. The harassment that Israeli football fans were subjected to in Amsterdam last week is not a topic for UEFA. That is remarkable, after all, since the fight against racism is supposedly on their agenda, and indeed UEFA sanctions racist chants, homophobic banners or defamatory gestures.
But already a week ago, when during a UEFA Champions League match of Paris Saint-Germain a giant “Free Palestine” banner was unfurled that also idolized a martial fighter with a keffiyeh, UEFA did nothing. Whether this is connected to PSG belonging to the state fund Qatar Sports Investment, as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz suspects, remains to be seen.
That UEFA has now been compelled to act, at least a little, is due to the war that Israel is currently waging in Gaza and Lebanon, and in the narrower sense it is the Amsterdam riots that many eyewitnesses describe as a pogrom.
Mitigating Objections
There is currently a great deal of talk about “misinformation” regarding Amsterdam: many Israeli fans should not be regarded as victims but as perpetrators. The “backstory” is said to be “violent assaults by supporters of the football club Maccabi Tel Aviv,” writes Frankfurter Allgemeine. And the newspaper nd believes that antisemitism cannot be spoken of, because the victims were “persecuted as Israelis and not because of their faith.” A frequently circulated video shows not, as initially reported, violence against Maccabi fans, but Israeli fans who themselves attack.
Indeed, there were more ugly scenes than initially known. Maccabi fans roamed Amsterdam streets with racist chants, and a Palestinian flag was burned. The assessment, however, that marauding fan groups who seek to provoke as aggressively as possible are not uncommon in international football, is not accepted by many observers in this particular case. Their appearance is instead weighed against the following antisemitic hunting scenes. It is the narrative of “violence on both sides” that should be condemned equally.
But despite the widespread talk of “misinformation,” the fact that in the night from Thursday to Friday in Amsterdam an almost unimaginable Jew-hatred spread cannot be disputed. In a thorough reconstruction of the events, the weekly Jüdische Allgemeine reports instances of Israelis having to flee into houses, of identity and passport checks carried out by people who presented themselves as pro-Palestine activists and asked who was Jewish. The British Guardian, which also reconstructed the night, reports hours-long chases with motor scooters and e-bikes.
Let us sort out the many findings. It is not only the latest Middle East conflict that is affecting football. It is also an open Jew-hatred that is erupting in the heart of Europe, and sports federations and many media respond with a relativization that often carries the tone that it was the Jews who started it.
