The trouble in Amsterdam began the day before the match, police said, when some of the 3,000 visiting Maccabi supporters were involved in minor altercations in the city centre. Some Maccabi fans burned a Palestinian flag and pulled another down from a nearby building. A Muslim taxi driver’s car was attacked, and there were chants of “let the IDF win, we will fuck the Arabs”. Amid growing anger in Amsterdam’s large Muslim community, taxi drivers arrived outside a casino where about 400 Maccabi fans were gathered, and police had to intervene to break up fights.
On the day of the game, Maccabi fans chanted “Fuck you Palestine” and “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there”. Meanwhile, a pro-Palestinian demonstration calling for the match to be abandoned was moved away from the stadium, with the support of the “F-side”, Ajax’s hardcore fan contingent.
The match passed without major incident. But in the city centre around midnight, groups of attackers on scooters went looking for Maccabi fans returning to their hotels in what the mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, described as “antisemitic hit-and-run assaults”, which appear to have drawn no distinction between hooligans and ordinary fans. Dozens were chased or assaulted, and five were hospitalised; in a chat group co-ordinating the attack, one participant referred to a “Jew hunt”. Meanwhile, footage showed some Maccabi fans taking iron pipes and planks from a building site and running through the streets swinging belts.
Halsema said the events “brings back memories of pogroms” and were “an outburst of antisemitism that I hope to never see again”. The Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders blamed “multicultural scum” and “criminal Muslims” for the unrest. Another local politician, Sheher Khan, said that some Maccabi fans’ inflammatory behaviour was “not an excuse for violence, but it is an explanation for it”.
Was this football violence?
Clearly, a football match was the event around which the violence unfolded – and a group within Maccabi’s contingent of ultras, the “Fanatics”, were involved.
But, James Montague said, “I don’t see this as football violence at all. There is no sense that what happened here was the ‘Fanatics’ and the ‘F-side’ deciding to meet up and have a fight: what you have instead is some of the Maccabi fans behaving in a provocative way, and then people in the city responding to that.”
Some of that response “clearly had an antisemitic element”, he added. “I don’t see how passport checks on people could be viewed in any other way. But it is also true that it’s often the case that travelling hooligans will go to a city and say or do provocative things, and then you will see things escalate. I’ve seen that in the Balkans and all over Europe. That is distinct from straightforward violence between hooligans.”
Who are the Maccabi ‘Fanatics’?
The taxonomy of hooliganism is complicated, and distinctions between those who are primarily motivated by violence and those who are hardcore supporters of their clubs are often amorphous. But Montague draws a broad distinction between “ultras” and the subset who are hooligans.
“Ultras are the organised support,” he said. “They arrange the show: the pyrotechnics, the tifos [giant signs and banners displayed in a stadium], the corteo [procession of fans], the choreography.” That group includes many who are peaceful. “The hooligans are different. They are all about the violence: the hooligans are the muscle of the ultras.” In other words: almost all hooligans are ultras; but many ultras are not hooligans.
Within Israeli club fanbases, Montague said, “there are a wide range of political affiliations. You have a very highly developed, very political culture. There are traditionally leftwing teams, like Hapoel Tel Aviv, which have their roots in the union movement and fly a Che Guevara flag. And then you have Beitar Jerusalem, who arguably have the most racist fan group in the world.” (Montague wrote about all this for the Jewish Chronicle in 2008.)
Traditionally, he added, Maccabi fall somewhere in the middle. “But you have to understand that as the politics of Israel changes, so do the politics of the ultras. They are organised young men, many of whom have been in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] because of conscription, and what they say and chant tracks where the country is.”
As a result, he said, there is a much stronger ultra-nationalist element within the Maccabi fanbase today. “That isn’t something about the club, per se. It’s something about how Israel is changing.”
What about Ajax and hooliganism in the Netherlands?
There is no evidence as yet that Ajax fans were involved in the violence in a coordinated way – and that makes sense, Montague said. “Ajax has long had a connection to the Jewish community. You can go outside the Cruyff arena [Ajax’s home stadium] and buy stickers with the Star of David on them.”
That is not to say that there is no hooliganism among Ajax fans – and more generally, the Netherlands has seen “a kind of moral panic about ultras recently”, Montague said. Last year, a match between Ajax and Feyenoord was called off because Ajax fans threw flares and fireworks; a repeat encounter in August was called off because of a police strike. A number of other matches have also been called off. “There have been questions about whether they need to look to a British policing model, and the Dutch authorities are very much on alert.”
Ultras in the Netherlands are subject to wider political forces that can be compared to those in play in Israel, with a concerted shift to the right in recent years and growing anti-immigrant sentiment. “What you see, when you look at social media or Telegram, is that Ajax’s ‘enemies’ like Feyenoord are attacking them by saying, you’ve let this happen in your city,” Montague said. “They use racist and anti-Islamic language about ethnic minority groups in the Netherlands, and they blame the ‘F-side’ for allowing it.”
What does this story reveal about how football fits into wider political tensions?
There are still some progressive ultra groups, Montague said, particularly in Germany, “but the whole scene is moving. Across Europe, and the further east you go, the range is from right to extreme right.”
One of the curious accompaniments to that phenomenon is that the violence is becoming decoupled from the football – in a very different way from what unfolded in Amsterdam. “Football itself is becoming much less violent,” Montague said. “These groups are being hived off and turning into fighting groups, who show up for carefully organised, almost MMA-style, fights, in secret, far away from the football, and not on the same day.”
But even if that is a broader trend, there is clearly a risk of similar violence at other matches involving Israeli teams in the future – a cocktail of extremist provocation and antisemitic response. “Anyone who is paying attention should have known that a game like this would be a risk,” Montague said. “But there are questions over how Uefa handles it. I live in Istanbul, and Maccabi were due to play [local side] Besiktas here later this month. That was obviously a problem, but Uefa seemed to be OK with it until the Turkish government said that they couldn’t guarantee the visiting fans’ safety.” Now the game has been moved to Hungary, where it will be played behind closed doors.
Tomorrow night, the Israeli national team will play France in Paris. “That could be a flashpoint, but the policing has been hugely increased – so I suspect it will pass without incident,” Montague said. “But it doesn’t seem likely that this is over. It is going to be something that follows Israeli teams when they play in Europe for a long time.”
