Em Hilton - Weaponizing Jewish fear, from Tel Aviv to Amsterdam
https://www.972mag.com/amsterdam-maccabi-tel-aviv-antisemitism/The longer the onslaught on Gaza continues, the greater the likelihood that hostility toward Israelis abroad will continue to result in violence, and that the spillover of anti-Israel hostility into antisemitism will become harder and harder to contain. Indeed, we saw this in Amsterdam with people shouting “kanker jood” (cancer Jew) during attacks on Maccabi fans.
This is a clear and horrifying illustration of how Israel fails to be what it has always professed: the answer to the question of Jewish safety. When it continually declares that it is waging war on Palestinians in the name of Jewish safety, and receives the enthusiastic backing of prominent establishment Jewish organizations around the world, it feels inevitable that slippage between anti-Israel hostility and antisemitism will occur. Furthermore, the failure of the international community to hold Israel accountable has only exacerbated conspiracy theories about Jewish power that distract from the mechanisms of western imperialism.
That doesn’t make violence against Jews in the name of rage against Israel acceptable — far from it. But in order to combat it, we need to recognize that Israel’s actions are making Jews around the world less safe, and seek to put distance between diaspora Jews and the machinations of a nation-state entirely disinterested in our security.
Yet the crux of the issue is still being missed. This isn’t 1938; it’s 2024. What happened in Amsterdam is not, for the most part, a story about antisemitism, but rather of Europe’s rapidly escalating Islamophobia and racism. The ugly truth is that less than a century after being hunted down and exterminated by the Nazis and their allies across Europe, alleged care for Jews now now acts as the handmaiden for the ambitions of the far right, who wield our fears as a cudgel against Muslims, Arabs, and migrants from the Global South.
These regressive political battles have been on full display since October 7, justified by the narrative — which Israeli leaders and right-wing Jewish organizations around the world have spurred on — that support for Palestine represents a direct threat to the safety and wellbeing of Jews. The response from the Dutch authorities to the events last week was alarming in this regard: Wilders referred to Amsterdam as having become “the Gaza of Europe,” and vowed to deport “Moroccans who want to destroy Jews.” And he’s not alone with this ambition: the Dutch government as a whole is weighing the possibility of stripping citizenship from dual nationals convicted of “antisemitism.”
Topic: Dutch elections