In violent attack on Israelis in Amsterdam, an alarming cultural omen

What do sickening violence against Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam, a recent letter signed by thousands of authors pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions, and a new Israeli policy to deport some relatives of convicted terrorists — including citizens — have in common?

They all engage in collective punishment, treating individuals as interchangeable with a national, racial, or religious whole. In every instance, the action is discriminatory — and represents a fundamental misinterpretation of the concept of complicity.

To Hamas and its apologists, the Israeli civilians massacred on Oct. 7, including children and peace activists, served as a stand-in for everything Israel has ever done. Some messianic ultra-nationalists in Israel make the similarly outrageous claim that Palestinian civilians in Gaza are indistinguishable from their terrorist leaders.

In both cases, simply existing as an Israeli or Palestinian is seen, by some, as a form of complicity that then excuses terrible suffering. Israeli oppression of Palestinians and Palestinian terrorism against Israelis are both real phenomena. But we must be wary of how often real misdeeds are turned into excuses to target people who have nothing to do with them. And we should be highly skeptical when self-appointed prosecutors, taking matters into their own hands, shirk due process.

Which brings us, first, to Amsterdam.

Following a long tradition of racism in Israeli soccer, some Maccabi Tel Aviv fans sang an anti-Arab chant Thursday before the team’s match with the Dutch team AFC Ajax. They climbed walls to remove Palestinian flags, and burned one in the street. Those who participated in this shameful behavior deserve to be punished — by Dutch authorities, the Europa League, and in an ideal world, Maccabi Tel Aviv itself.

Not by vigilantes who wounded at least 10 Israelis in an ensuing antisemitic rampage.

Reporting by Israeli newspaper Haaretz suggests that “many of the attacks appeared to be planned ambushes, with attackers waiting at various points in the city as fans returned from the match by train.”

What followed was appalling. A father and his son were attacked by around 15 young Arab men, some with knives and clubs. Another man was punched in the face and kicked in the stomach. Yet another told the BBC that his assailants shouted “Jewish, Jewish, IDF, IDF,” while other attackers allegedly claimed, “this is for the children.”

In Amsterdam. In 2024.

Scenes of Jews being chased by violent mobs recall what my grandmother experienced as a child in 1930s Poland, when residents hunted Jews with sticks and knives as she ran away, closed the blinds, and hid until the danger passed. Live long enough, and the phantoms of the past become real again.

As craven as the violence were attempts to justify it. “If you turn up to a foreign city and chant ‘death to Arabs’ and then get your head kicked in, you get what you deserve,” wrote one user on X, an argument I saw many others make. Even if you buy that logic — which requires believing that racist rhetoric is appropriately punished by uncontrolled physical violence — there are so far no accounts of attackers asking: “Did you burn down a Palestinian flag? Sing a racist chant? Personally kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza or the West Bank?”

What they asked, instead, was to see people’s passports. They asked whether they were Jewish. These antisemitic vigilantes were willing to treat any Jew or Israeli — no matter who they were or what they did — as a political stand-in for a group of racist fans, and for the state itself.

Which brings us back to the recent letter, signed by more than 5,500 authors and book workers, pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions — as well as to Israel’s new policy about deporting the relatives of convicted terrorists.

Both the letter and the new law promise only to sanction those who really deserve it — without establishing guardrails around what “deserving it” means. In both cases, as in Amsterdam, those promises are empty.

The letter says that “Israeli cultural institutions, often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and artwashing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians.” Its signatories reserve the right to “interrogate” the relationship of these institutions to “apartheid and displacement,” and to refuse to work with those who are “complicit.”

Which cultural institutions? How, exactly, have they been complicit? What is the rubric these authors will use to “interrogate” that complicity? No answers — instead, just the sense that simply being Israeli is morally wrong.

Much like the attackers in Amsterdam, the authors show no real interest in due process. Instead, the agenda they outline — including a pledge to only work with Israeli institutions that publicly acknowledge “the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people” — smacks of loyalty oaths. If you think it would be horrifying to demand that any Muslim person denounce Hamas’ terrorism before entering a public space, you should find this letter horrifying too.

Past actions by some of the most notable signers, such as Sally Rooney, who famously refused to let her work be translated into Hebrew, also point to an implicit belief that every Israeli is a stand-in for a broad conflict, much as they were on the streets of Amsterdam Thursday night. Is there an action of which a language itself can be guilty?

The deportation law, for its part, says it will sanction those relatives of terrorists who knew about an attack in advance and failed to report it, or who have “expressed support or identification with an act of terrorism.” But allegations of “support” and “incitement” have been consistently abused by the Israeli government and institutions, including in its jailing of an Arab-Israeli college student over the Instagram stories she posted on Oct. 7; the indiscriminate firing or suspension of dozens of educators; and the brutal demolishing of Palestinians’ family homes in the West Bank. There is no reason to trust that the application of this law will involve any more nuance — or any more due process than the attackers in Amsterdam practiced Thursday night.

Everyone who stretches the meaning of complicity in this way damages our shared civic life. Whether it’s Palestinians being punished for the terror of Hamas, or Israelis for the crimes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no individual, ever, anywhere in the world should face violence or opprobrium simply because of a group to which they belong, a language they speak, or the actions of their leaders.

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