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The coordinated attacks on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam this past week prove, once again, that anti-Semitism is the “oldest hatred.”
Science fiction writer Dan Simmons once asked himself: “[W]hat common element will bind 2001 and 3001? What eternal human verity . . . will survive the erosive winds of a full millennium?”
His response? “The one constant thread between today and a thousand years from now will be that someone, somewhere, will be planning to kill the Jews.”
Since the time when Simmons answered that question more than 20 years ago, anti-Semites have acted to prove him right, time and time again.
The most recent example was a “Jew hunt” unleashed on Israeli soccer fans this past Thursday in Amsterdam that resulted in five victims being hospitalized and up to 30 suffering injuries.
The attacks in the Dutch capital followed a soccer game between the Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Dutch team Ajax Amsterdam. As later described by Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema, the Israeli soccer fans were “attacked, abused and pelted with fireworks” by “antisemitic hit-and-run squads” throughout the city. It appears that these hit squads were primarily made up of pro-Palestinian Arabs, according to some of the witnesses to the chaos, even though many media sources are not mentioning this.
The assaults appeared to have been premeditated, as the anti-Semites responsible sent messages to each other before the match to orchestrate what has been called a modern-day pogrom.
But the despicable Thursday attacks were not the end of the story, because last night more rioters blocked streets and torched an empty tram in the Dutch capital while yelling “Cancer Jews.”
It’s a tragic irony that the anti-Jewish violence began one day before the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Nazi-organized riot in which thugs massacred almost 100 Jews and destroyed and desecrated their homes, businesses, and houses of worship.
A skeptic might say that the attacks were not motivated by anti-Semitism, only anti-Israel sentiment. But the Amsterdam “Jew hunt” fits into a pattern of attacks against Jews that has already been getting worse in the last several years, especially after the October 7 massacre.
As the Institute for Jewish Policy Research found, a toxic “ambient antisemitism” has infected Europe in the year after Hamas’s terrorist massacre.
Some Jewish groups in Europe reported “an increase of more than 400%” in “antisemitic incidents” in the months following the attack on Israel.
It’s no coincidence that attacks on Jews have risen in Europe precisely at the time when the European Union has decided to bring in millions of Arab Muslim immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. Tragically, many of these immigrants have refused to assimilate to European culture, forming their own enclaves within Europe’s cities and creating areas where Jews have found themselves harassed, attacked, and even murdered.
It is not surprising to hear of anti-Jewish attacks in places like Paris or London, but it is especially painful that the Thursday attack took place in Amsterdam, a place historically known to Jews as a “Mokum” (Yiddish for “safe place”).
Throughout the centuries, Jews who were persecuted throughout Europe found themselves welcomed in the Dutch capital, creating a thriving community.
One of the criticisms sometimes leveled at Israel is that there is no need for a Jewish state because the world has simply become too enlightened and civilized for anti-Semitism. But there is a reason why anti-Semitism has been called the “oldest hatred” — it arises again and again, whether from Russian tsars, Spanish monarchs, the Nazi regime, or radical Muslim extremists.
As long as “someone, somewhere, will be planning to kill the Jews,” as Dan Simmons warned, the only truly permanent “Mokum” for the Jews will be the State of Israel.
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