The Media Can’t Figure Out Why Some Racist Israeli Soccer Hooligans Were Beaten Up

Stripped of context, visiting soccer fans getting drunk and causing havoc ahead of a big continental match in Europe would be so routine as to be almost unworthy of mention. But the hooligans in this instance were supporters of the Israeli soccer club Maccabi Tel Aviv, and the residents of Amsterdam weren't keen to their disruptive behavior, which meant that outlets like the New York Times and politicians like Joe Biden trained their focus on what happened and characterized it with their warped clarity.

After a few hours and several substantial edits, the Times' article about Thursday's events has something approaching a comprehensive picture of what went down—though to get it, you still have to patch together a timeline from the facts scattered throughout the article. It all started on Wednesday, the day before the match, when a sizable number of Maccabi fans arrived into Amsterdam to watch their team take on Ajax in the Europa League. Coinciding with the Maccabi fans' arrival, pro-Palestinian activists assembled in Dam Square in protest of Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.

Groups of Maccabi fans reportedly went through the city, confronting the pro-Palestine protesters and generally causing trouble. Videos show Maccabi fans tearing down Palestine flags from the windows of private residences. In one such video, you can hear people serenading the flag-ripper with "Fuck you, Palestine." Per the NYT, Amsterdam police say some Israeli fans burned one Palestine flag and also vandalized a taxi. One Twitter account posted a video that purportedly shows a Maccabi fan smashing a taxi with a chain.

Tensions remained high going into Thursday, the day of the match. Maccabi fans again took to the streets, at times chanting racist phrases like "Death to the Arabs." One chant heard on video goes "Let the IDF win, we will fuck the Arabs." Lyrics of that same Maccabi song include "Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there." A photographer spotted one Maccabi fan unfurling a Make America Great Again flag. These scenes led to further clashes with pro-Palestine protesters. Several videos going around social media show violence between locals and Maccabi fans. The following, widely shared video can be found in many news articles, often positioned as evidence of Dutch violence on Israelis—a CNN World video explicitly presents the video as "Israeli football fans [being] beaten and injured"—even though the photographer who took the video has clarified that it depicts Maccabi fans attacking a Dutch man:

In response to Wednesday's events, Amsterdam police were out in full force on Thursday, though their presence didn't prevent all of the violence. After the match itself, a 5-0 Ajax victory, during which Maccabi fans disrupted a moment of silence for victims of the recent floods in Valencia, Spain—the Spanish government has made efforts to distance itself from Israel in light of the attacks on Gaza—Dutch authorities escorted Maccabi fans onto a fleet of buses that took them from the stadium to their hotels. However, some Maccabi fans who lingered around the city found themselves set upon by groups of Dutchmen, who, as Amsterdam city council member Jazie Veldhuyzen put it in an interview with Al Jazeera English, "mobilized themselves" and "countered the attacks that started on Wednesday." On social media, there are videos that purportedly show these "scooter youth" fighting Maccabi fans. Soccer fan Gal Binyamin Tshuva recounted his story to the BBC:

"We faced around 20 people who ran towards us. They asked me where I was from, and I said I was from Greece. They said they didn’t believe me and they asked to see my passport.

When he told them he didn't have it, the men beat him, pushed him to the ground and kicked his face, Mr Tshuva said.

"I don’t remember anything after that, and I woke up in an ambulance with blood all over my face, and realised they had broken two of my teeth."

Amsterdam police said at least 62 people were arrested in connection with the violence, though only 10 remain in custody as of Friday night. Five Israelis were sent to the hospital with injuries, though all have since been discharged.

Although that summarizes the fuller picture, nearly every media story in the Western world frames the matter as an unprovoked and antisemitic attack on soccer fans who were just minding their business. In most of these articles, you have to scroll past multiple paragraphs of vague but forceful accusations of antisemitism and quotes from horrified elected officials—the mayor of Amsterdam, both the prime minister and the king of the Netherlands, the prime minister of Israel, the president of the United States—before you even get a sense of what happened beforehand. And that's not even including the cynics in hysterics about a "pogrom."

This is nothing new. Concepts like the directionality of time, causality, proportion, and accountability often suddenly become fuzzy when the word "Israel" is introduced. The supposed leading lights of journalism report on unattributed bombs that are passively dropped on Gaza's hospitals and apartment buildings, killing tens of thousands of innocents who are then described as "terrorists" by dint of their ethnicity. It's a bit ridiculous to see this well-established bias applied to a group of over-confident jackasses who went looking for a fight and found one, but the ridicule shouldn't obscure the darker reality here.

To that end, Palestinian reporter Younis Tirawi posted a video on Friday that appears to show IDF soldiers launching a rocket into the distance in Gaza, as spectators cheer the explosion. Overlayed on the video in Hebrew read the following message: "We dedicate this explosion to all the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv. We’ll get to all of you, you sons of bitches."