Pogroms Mean Rape, Murder And Targeting Minority Neighbours, Not A Night Of Argy-Bargy In Amsterdam
The abuse of language might give good propaganda for the awful Israel government but the misuse of the word after the Ajax-Maccabi post-match clashes is misleading and dangerous
FOOTBALL TAKES YOU to strange places. And sometimes produces unexpected situations.
In 2011, as part of a Uefa factfinding tour a year before the Euros, I found myself in Lviv. A very nice young woman was allotted to a group of journalists to give us a tour of the city.
It was very interesting. Lviv was one of the jewels of the Austro-Hungarian empire – and one of its fracture points. The city’s multiethnic nature and the dangerous undercurrents that came with this is summed up by its changing name in the first half of the 20th century. It was Lemberg (German) in 1900, then Lwow (Polish), Lemberg again after Operation Barbarossa before regaining its Ukrainian identity after the second world war.
Everything was going fine until the tour guide made an assertion that could not go unchallenged. “In world war two, Lviv was the only place on the eastern front where Jews were safe.”
This was an outrageous statement. To the disapproval of some of our party, I had to correct the lie that had been fed to this young person.
There are disturbing photographs of the Lviv pogrom easily available online. They show people brutalising their neighbours with malicious glee. German soldiers are visible in the background while locals stripped and beat any Jews they could find. An invading unit filmed the awful scenes.
The sexualised nature of the Holocaust is illustrated by pictures of bleeding partly-dressed women. A particularly ugly image shows a terrified middle-aged lady with blood on her face, her clothes torn off down to her underwear, trying to run away from the mob. An excited pre-teenage boy is chasing her, wielding a stick. Men, women and children participated in tormenting and murdering people they knew (I have chosen not to use the pictures from Lviv; Google them if you must and compare them to the footage and stills from Amsterdam).
To hear the word “pogrom” attached to the events in Amsterdam after the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv game was jarring. Pogroms are spasms of brutality against minority communities by majority populations where the authorities are complicit. They either stand by or join in.
Wideranging and significant studies have been conducted into the nature of these frenzied assaults on Jewish people. No historian – unless their view is defined by political dogma – would class the trouble in the Netherlands as a pogrom.
What occurred last week was football-related political violence. The Maccabi ultras made their way to a foreign city and chanted words that many of the locals – particularly those from Arab and Muslim communities – found offensive. They vandalised the property of Amsterdammers who were displaying Palestinian flags and disrupted a minute’s silence for those killed in the Spanish floods.
Maccabi’s hardcore have a reputation for holding right-wing views. Their songs reflect this. “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left,” is a chant that echoed across the Dutch city. A day later, the United Nations Human Rights Office said that almost 70 per cent of those killed in Gaza in the past 13 months have been women and children. The Israeli team’s away following overstepped any notion of “banter” by a long, long way.
Amsterdam is an unlikely place to host a pogrom. It provided a refuge for Portuguese and Spanish Jews escaping the inquisition and those refugees played a big part in defining the identity of the port for more than four centuries. ‘Mokumers’ is an alternative nickname for Amsterdammers. Its root is a Yiddish word meaning “safe haven.”
The Germans made the Netherlands a very unsafe place during the second world war. About three-quarters of the nation’s Jewish community were murdered during the Holocaust. Workers in Amsterdam responded to the initial roundup of Jews with a show of solidarity with their Jewish compatriots. They called a general strike against the Nazi action which was put down brutally by the occupiers.
Ajax supporters have traditionally been the object of antisemitic abuse from rival fans. Although the vast majority of their fanbase are gentiles, Ajax fans subverted the perceived insults and coopted them as symbols of pride. They adopted Israeli and Jewish iconography and some even refer to themselves as “Superjews.”
Amsterdam is a tough city, though. Like most seafaring towns, it has a rough edge. It is a hub for drugs, both legal and illegal. This is a place where it pays to be careful.
Maccabi’s mob were far from careful. They alienated large sections of the local population before finding they were out of their depth.
To suggest Jews were being hunted on the streets is dangerously misleading. The attacks were focused on nationality and football allegiance, not religion. Stretching the definition of pogrom to accommodate the events of last week demeans the memory of those who experienced the real thing – and this fuels Holocaust denial. Imagine a generation growing up believing this was a pogrom? No deaths, no rapes… no comparison.
Genocide always sows the seeds of the next outrage. Only those with disturbed, closed minds can watch what’s going on in Gaza without being sick to the stomach. Hamas’s attack on Israel 13 months ago was truly horrifying but it takes a particularly evil mindset to use it to justify the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians. The word civilian has ceased to have any meaning in Gaza.
The state of Israel and its backers deserve to be abhorred – and, no, that should not be taken as an indication of support for Hamas or a minimisation of the October 7 atrocities. Unfortunately, the anger towards Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, its supporters and the Israel Defense Force is spilling into ugly areas.
Social media is full of anti-Jewish – not just anti-Israel – comments. The old antisemitic tropes that we hoped were confined to the past are being recycled. Jews who are disgusted by Israel’s actions are suffering the spillover from the nightmare of Gaza.
Watching the scenes from Gaza, it’s hard to be sympathetic towards anyone but the people living in hellish circumstances where the threat of death is all-encompassing. Yet more than one thing can be true at the same time.
Holocaust denial is growing at a disturbing rate. The Auschwitz Museum social media page (@AuschwitzMuseum on twitter/X; give them a follow) reported over the weekend that, “In the last few days, our account has lost over 20,000 followers.” The righteous fury against Israel can not be allowed to fester into a dismissal or trivialisation of the industrialised slaughter of more than six million people, the vast majority of whom were Jews. The lessons of the Holocaust are too important to dismiss or lose.
And it’s not just Israel’s opponents who are contributing to this – and this takes us back to Amsterdam. To characterise the attacks on Maccabi fans as a pogrom removes the importance from the word and gives it a different, less significant meaning. Now a pogrom becomes just a bit of mid-level rucking in the aftermath of a football match rather than a targeted attempt to murder and destroy a minority.
Israel and its supporters want to amplify its use in regard to last week because they know how deep the fear of pogroms runs in the folk memory of Jewish people. It’s dogwhistling of the ugliest kind.
Netanyahu’s anti-Islamic allies, like Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician, are using it for their own purposes. How Israelis can accept at face value the kinship of men like Wilders is mindboggling. One suspects that had the leader of the ridiculously named Party of Freedom lived in the 1940s, he would have been at the front of the queue to join the Vrijwilligerslegioen Nederland, the Dutch Waffen SS volunteers.
The Netanyahu government has told its citizens not to attend sporting and cultural events in Europe. It claims it has intelligence that pro-Palestinian groups intend to attack Israelis.
Perhaps it would be better to suggest that right-wing ultra groups keep their extremist views to themselves when in other countries. And not act like provocative pricks.
Back to Lviv. A lawyer who attended university in the city, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term ‘genocide.’ His near contemporary as a student and a native of the town, Hersch Lauterpacht, was probably the world’s first human rights legal advocate. Lauterpacht helped compose Article 6 of the Nuremburg charter that placed crimes against humanity and war crimes into international law.
Both were Jews – Lauterpacht even wrote part of Israel’s declaration of independence. Some of the arguments over whether Israel is committing genocide turn on the work of these two men. Pogroms were very close to home – literally – for Lemkin and Lauterpacht in the first third of the 20th century.
Neither would have recognised what happened in Amsterdam as a pogrom. Don’t be fooled by the abuse of the dreadful term.