How Israeli Hooligans Fueled Fascism in the Netherlands

On November 6 and 7, fascist goons from Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli professional football club, descended on the streets of Amsterdam, chanting proudly about murdered children in Gaza while assaulting local houses, passers-by, and taxi drivers that appeared pro-Palestinian or Arab.

As the police failed to protect its own citizens, some took matters into their own hands and started striking back, wounding multiple Maccabi supporters.

Maccabi hooligans pull down a Palestinian flag in Amsterdam.

These events in our city have become worldwide news, portrayed by mass-murderers such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden as a targeted “pogrom” against Jewish people. Yet not a single local Jewish person, store, or institution was attacked. The far right has seized onto Israeli propaganda to demonize the entire migrant community in the Netherlands and the right to protest, fueling a looming descent into fascism.

It is high time to set the record straight. We, as a local party with representation in the city council of Amsterdam, have been in touch with countless local citizens and journalists, who have told us a highly different version of events from what has been reported by the Western mainstream press. Much of this has been caught on camera and spread online from the start, but largely ignored by major Western media. It was independent YouTube journalists such as Left Laser, Bender, and Sallaheddine who broke the first major factual reports of what happened in Amsterdam. What follows is a reconstruction.

Maccabi ultras—fanatical supporters of the team—are not random hooligans. Considering the obligatory military draft in Israel, practically all of them are soldiers or ex-soldiers, many of them coming straight from duty in Gaza or Lebanon, where they have been complicit in genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Hailing from an apartheid society, where pogroms against Palestinians are a daily reality, they are used to terrorizing Palestinians, Arabs, and political opponents with impunity.

In 2020, for example, Maccabi ultras attacked anti-Netanyahu demonstrators with batons and broken glass, wounding several of them. The club gained a reputation as “Israel’s most racist soccer club,” even before the ultras managed to cleanse its team of all Arab players by constantly intimidating and insulting them with racist slurs.

The Maccabi ultras take their fascist mentality with them when visiting other cities, from Malta to Athens. In March of this year in Greece, for instance, the Maccabi ultras beat an Egyptian man into hospitalization for holding a Palestinian flag.

The last time Maccabi goons visited Amsterdam, in 2016, they proudly sang their “rape song,” which includes lyrics about drinking the blood of the “whores of the Arabs,” raping their women, and hanging communists in squares. In the run-up to the football match this November, the ultras proudly reposted the video recording of that shameful episode in Amsterdam on their YouTube channel. An ominous warning.

Most citizens in Amsterdam are of a migrant background, many of them from the Middle Eastern and North African region. The city also has a strong movement in solidarity with Palestine, with demonstrations happening literally every single day at the central station. Clearly, trouble was coming. This is why Amsterdam citizens warned that the football match should be canceled—a request that we, as a local political party, amplified in the city council. Indeed, just next door, the Israeli national team was not allowed to visit Belgium last September for fear of violence. Yet, in Amsterdam, despite our warnings in the city council about the nature of this club and its racism, nothing was done. How is that possible?

The mayor of Amsterdam claims that Maccabi is not a high-risk club, based on assessments her administration had received from the local police in Tel Aviv, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), and the Dutch security services (NCTV). However, her sources all have a deeply biased and racist history. Let us take a look, in particular, at the UEFA and Dutch NCTV.

For over a decade, the UEFA has consistently rejected demands to suspend or expel the Israel Football Association (IFA), despite numerous requests to do so by the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) and the Red Card Israeli Racism campaign. Mouin Rabbani sums up the numerous arguments to sanction Israel:

That Israel is an institutionally racist state and should be treated no differently than apartheid South Africa (suspended by FIFA in 1961) and Rhodesia (suspended in 1970); that the IFA includes clubs based in illegal settlements in the illegally-occupied Palestinian territories; that the IFA discriminates against Palestinian clubs; that IFA teams discriminate against Palestinian players; that Israel in 2019 prevented the PFA cup final from taking place when it prohibited the Khadamaat Rafah team traveling from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank to play against Balata FC; that Israel has killed and maimed Palestinian players; that Israeli clubs systematically tolerate racist and genocidal conduct by supporters; and a variety of other grounds, most recently that Israel is perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that has resulted in the killing of numerous Palestinian players, officials, and staff.

Indeed, in Gaza alone, over three hundred Palestinian football players have been murdered by the Israeli army since October 7.

The UEFA has defended their stance standing up for the Israeli league by claiming that they do not want to be involved with politics. Yet, they showed their true face by banning Russian teams overnight in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, even though Israel has been exterminating Gaza’s children at a rate nearly 450 times higher than Russia in Ukraine. Clearly, the UEFA cannot be considered an impartial source.

The reality of the Dutch NCTV is perhaps even worse, with a specific history of inciting racism against Muslims in Amsterdam. Most recently, in September, a Dutch court ruled that the NCTV had wrongly painted an Amsterdam Islamic school as extremist. The Amsterdam municipality had used the slanderous reports of the NCTV to try to close the school.

In that sense, it is no surprise that the local Amsterdam administration once again falls back on racist sources such as the NCTV to justify their dangerous policies that threaten their own citizens, especially those of migrant backgrounds. Indeed, the rot runs deep within the entire municipality, where a huge scandal has recently erupted about the systemic abuse of employees, who were “large-scale victims of racism, bullying, and abuse of power.”

Already the day before the football match, on November 6, Maccabi ultras were roaming the streets of Amsterdam in search of pro-Palestinian citizens to terrorize. The ultras attacked multiple houses with Palestinian flags or posters, tearing them down, smashing their windows, and threatening the inhabitants.

For example, dozens of Maccabi fascists gathered in front of Villa Mokum on Wednesday night, a squat where various Palestinian flags are hanging. Videos show them throwing stones at the windows, climbing the building, and tearing off the flags.

“They were kicking our doors and trying to get into our house,” said a 23-year-old resident of the building to the local Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool. “They were giving us the middle finger and making beheading gestures, saying ‘we’re going to kill you and we will come back.’”

At one of the home raids by the Maccabi hooligans, a local taxi driver spoke out and the fascist goons attempted to beat him up. He got away uninjured, though with smashed windows and dents in his car. As even the mayor confirmed in her letter to the council, the Maccabi fascists then took off their belts and started smashing various other taxis in the vicinity.

In response to the Israeli violence, Amsterdam citizens struck back. Used to sniping Palestinian children from a distance, the Israeli fascists immediately cowered in fear. In an iconic video, one of the Maccabi hooligans jumped into a canal to flee, and agreed to shout “Free Palestine” to make his pursuers leave. Most of the hooligans were driven into a local casino, where they had to hide from a collective of taxi drivers, until the police came to save them. Yet there were no reported injuries that night.

Taxi drivers in Amsterdam are notorious for being well-organized and loyal, sticking up for one another. It is no surprise, then, that they immediately organized to defend themselves and sent a clear signal to the hooligans that they are not to be messed with. Later interviews also made clear that they wanted to protect Amsterdam citizens more generally from the fascist violence of Maccabi supporters.

On that first day, November 6, we saw a pattern that would repeat itself the next day. In the video footage, we can see how a police car drives by as Israeli thugs attack a house. Similarly, when the first taxi driver that was assaulted went straight to the police, the police simply told him off, even though his windows were clearly smashed.

The impunity with which the Israeli fascists were able to assault pro-Palestinian citizens was a major cause for concern within activist circles and migrant communities. We know from organizers of autonomous, pro-Palestinian community centers such as De Vrankrijk that they felt compelled to organize nightly reconnaissance teams and barricade doors to prepare for possible attacks by the Maccabi fascists. Chats and social media groups of human rights activists warned not to wear keffiyehs or other pro-Palestinian symbols in the city center, in fear of violence.

On November 7, Maccabi ultras clearly considered themselves untouchable. They again paraded through the streets of Amsterdam, intimidating passers-by and loudly chanting genocidal songs. “Let the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] win to fuck the Arabs,” was cheered loudly in clear daylight, part of a longer song that claims “there are no children in Gaza, because there are no children left.”

Indeed, the IDF has wiped out some 500 schools and 17,000 children in Gaza in a systematic campaign of mass murder, still ignoring the much larger death toll from the Israeli manufactured famine. According to UN figures, 70 percent of the murdered victims are women and children, with those aged 5 to 9 being the single biggest victim group. Again, the police stood by and did nothing, even though incitement to genocide is a criminal offense.

Passers-by wearing a keffiyeh or Palestine button were insulted, spat on, and had bottles thrown at them. Many that were assaulted have testified that the police did nothing, told them to leave, and blamed them for being near the hooligans.

When the Maccabi ultras finally came to the match, they loudly disturbed a minute of silence that was held for flood victims in Spain due to the country’s critical stance toward Israel.

When they left the stadium, they went to the city center on a warpath, armed with chains, sticks, and stones, seemingly ready to make good on their death threats from the night before. Bizarrely, they were escorted by police while carrying these weapons, even though the entire area was designated as high-risk by the mayor.

This time, however, the tables were turned.

Maccabi fans on the escalator to Amsterdam Central Station metro chant: “Let the IDF win to destroy the Arabs”. They are protected by the police. Their genocidal song also includes lyrics such as: “Why are there no more schools in Gaza? Because there are no children left.”

After the first attacks by Maccabi hooligans, various Dutch citizens seem to have organized themselves to prepare for retaliatory hit-and-run attacks, moving quickly on scooters to avoid being caught. This resulted in dozens of mostly light injuries against Maccabi hooligans, including five that briefly visited a local hospital.

According to the mayor’s office, the perpetrators were organizing themselves in Telegram groups where the term Jew hunt was repeatedly used. Nevertheless, most of these sources, nor the size or relevance of the Telegram groups, have not been made public. Regardless, this language was seized upon by pro-genocide politicians across the world to proclaim that what transpired on November 7 was a “pogrom” against Jewish people.

Even if we accept the police’s claims, the inflated language about a “pogrom” is clearly inaccurate. First, pogroms are associated with systemic state-sanctioned violence against minorities. Yet, the Maccabi fascists were the ones who were given free reign by the police, not the other way around.

Second, as even the most right-wing major newspaper in the Netherlands was forced to admit: “There are no indications yet that Jewish Amsterdammers or synagogues, for example, were also targeted. The authorities believe that a distinction was made between Israeli fans and Jews in general.” The perpetrators were mainly “after Maccabi supporters because there were supposedly Israeli ex-soldiers and Mossad agents among them.”

If the alleged Telegram messages about a “Jew hunt” turn out to be authentic, there seems to have been a clear conflation of terms between Zionists and Jewish people, even though they were clearly targeting the former, not the latter. A conflation of terms that Zionists themselves have, of course, been trying to create for decades, including every major political party in the Netherlands. Half of the people arrested for violent offenses on November 7 were minors, making ignorance a likely cause for the conflation.

Yet another possible cause for the conflation is the old tradition of Amsterdam Ajax supporters calling themselves “super Jews,” which has led their opponents to use anti-Jewish language, even if they don’t mean actual Jewish people. There are plenty of videos of mostly white football choirs literally singing about “Jew hunts” or how “the Jews are going to die.” Interestingly, in 2017, the Dutch national broadcaster publicly apologized to FC Utrecht supporters for having painted them as antisemitic for this reason.

Indeed, football is the main reason that antisemitism numbers spiked in 2023 according to figures from the Dutch public prosecutor. “The striking increase in the discrimination grounds of antisemitism cannot be related to facts related to the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas on October 7, 2023,” the prosecutor claims. “The strikingly high influx at this Public Prosecutor’s Office is related to various football matches that were played in Rotterdam or by Feyenoord.”

Although the hit-and-run attacks were aimed at Maccabi hooligans, not at Ajax supporters, the Amsterdam club itself has a reputation of being pro-Israel and some of its supporters had assaulted a Palestinian man just days before the match. It is entirely possible that the football lingo got mixed up in the Telegram chats. Indeed, not a single local Jewish person, store, or institution was targeted. Clearly, there was not an actual “Jew hunt.” And definitely not a state-sanctioned one.

There has been a lot of criticism about the relatively small amount of police present around the Maccabi hooligans on November 6 and 7. However, this does not mean that a small police force was present in Amsterdam those days. In fact, there was a huge special mobilization from neighboring regions, including riot police, arrest units, horses, dogs, reconnaissance units, football units, and the “peace” unit. The problem is that they were used against the wrong people.

Anti-genocide protesters were planning to hold a demonstration at the Amsterdam stadium against the presence of Maccabi Tel Aviv, in favor of a sports boycott against genocide, colonialism, and apartheid, as was done in the case of Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia.

In violation of their constitutional rights, the demonstrators were told to go to the Anton de Kom Square, which is neither visible nor audible from the stadium. Regardless, the demonstrators complied with the orders from the mayor and the police. Despite their obedience, the anti-genocide demonstrators were confronted by a massive police force, including riot police and horses.

Although ten hooligans were briefly arrested, not a single Israeli was prosecuted. All of them were protected by the police, escorted to their hotels, and allowed to return to Israel, mirroring the culture of impunity in their home country. We have spoken to a taxi driver who attempted to file charges against Maccabi hooligans, but was literally refused by the police for days. Other taxi drivers are afraid of speaking out at all, in fear of being ethnically profiled and targeted.

Mossad agents accompanied the Israeli hooligans, in direct violation of Dutch sovereignty, which would have never allowed Iranian, Russian, or Chinese agents to enter the Netherlands, let alone to accompany foreign fascist and openly genocidal gangs. Now, the Dutch authorities are collaborating with the Israeli government to “research” the so-called “pogroms,” a government whose entire cabinet should be tried in the Hague for genocide.

On November 9, the Jewish anti-Zionist organization Erev Rav felt compelled to cancel their antifascist Kristallnacht commemoration at the Jewish resistance memorial in Amsterdam. They had asked the police for special protection against the Maccabi fascists, who have a history of attacking antiwar leftists, including Jewish ones, yet the police simply responded that they were more worried about “pro-Palestinian activists and antifascists.” Astounded, the spokesperson of Erev Rav replied: “Of course there would be antifascists. We are antifascists. And we expect the police to be antifascist themselves.”

Yet the Amsterdam police is clearly not antifascist. In fact, antifascist stickers are even shown as examples of “leftist extremism” in police training. It is no surprise then, that it was the pro-Palestinian antifascists who were surrounded by police.

The double standards of the Dutch state and police are no coincidence. Institutional racism in the Dutch police and criminal justice system is deeply entrenched. Figures show that racial inequalities in police killings, arrests, and imprisonment rates are significantly worse than in the United States.

The far-right Zionist Party for Freedom (PVV) has massive support within the police force, in some areas as much as 60 percent. Think of police officers who, according to several whistleblowers, call themselves “Moroccan exterminators” or who talk about “shit Africans” or “Natos” (“North African Cunts Wearing Sports Shoes”).

Like in so many countries, the Israeli laboratory of repression is directly imported into the Netherlands. The state has purchased two Israeli wiretapping systems to surveil its own citizens, the last one from Cyber ​​Intelligence, a subsidiary of Elbit Systems, in 2019.

The Dutch complicity in the genocide in Gaza and climate breakdown have led to increasing protests on the streets of Netherlands. The response of the state has been staggering repression. When student encampments started in May 2024 in Utrecht and Amsterdam, for example, they were both met with speed eviction, swifter than in any country in the world.

We saw the same pattern of double standards in the first encampment in Amsterdam, which was attacked by Zionists with firebombs as the police stood idly by. The encampment was subsequently illegally evicted—as the public prosecutor admitted months later—with much violence, including a student whose skull was cracked by a police baton.

Since March 2024, the ruling coalition parties have openly proclaimed their intent to restrict the right to protest. The pretext was yet another Zionist lie, surrounding the visit of the Israeli president to Amsterdam for the opening of the National Holocaust Museum. As Isaac Herzog is guilty for inciting genocide, the Jewish anti-Zionist organization Erev Rav organized a demonstration. Major Dutch parties shamefully painted the protest as antisemitic, completely ignoring the presence of Erev Rav and blatantly lied about antisemitic statements that were never uttered. This lie became the basis for a campaign to restrict constitutional rights in the Netherlands.

The mayor of Amsterdam is a former leader of the GroenLinks (GreenLeft) party, a neoliberal imperialist party, which nevertheless considers itself constitutional, liberal, and in favor of civil liberties. In the past, the mayor has pushed back against some of the most extreme far-right threats against the right to protest. Since November 7, however, all pushback has gone out of the window.

GroenLinks leader Femke Halsema’s words about a “pogrom” were crucial in facilitating far-right propaganda, as an investigation by OneWorld revealed. It is reminiscent of how the supposedly “moderate” and respected Colin Powell facilitated the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with his speech at the United Nations, a turning point for liberal media. It is often the more “respectable” leaders who are crucial in facilitating colonial propaganda.

Granted, it is positive that Halsema—due to enormous pressure from below—walked back her statement about a “pogrom” ten days later. But it was too little, too late. That she did not see the far-right and Israeli propaganda coming, as she now claims, lacks any credibility.

More serious were the actual policies Halsema pursued in the aftermath of the Maccabi attacks. Claims of a “pogrom” were seized upon to promulgate emergency laws banning all protests in the city of Amsterdam. Anti-genocide demonstrators have peacefully gone onto the streets regardless, where they were charged with horses, and a Muslim shopper was beaten into a bloody pulp, leading to severe brain damage. Several clearly recognizable journalists were also beaten or arrested.

Before any investigation had been carried out, Halsema adamantly denied the police violence. This facilitated a feeling of impunity among the police. Three days later, protesters were dumped by police in an abandoned area on the outskirts of the city—out of sight of the media—where they were brutally chased and beaten in what some have called a “coordinated protester hunt.”

The protest ban remained in effect for nearly a week in Amsterdam. Even the neighboring city of Utrecht seized on the events to effectively ban a protest by the largest Dutch union against university budget cuts, with lies about an alleged threat of violence from pro-Palestinian groups. That was another supposedly left-wing mayor, Sharon Dijksma of the Labour Party.

The budget cuts are tied to the rapidly increasing military expenditures of the Dutch state, which has even started talking about reintroducing a military draft, like in Israel. Many of the weapons will in turn be bought from Israeli arms manufacturers, which are enabling the genocide in Gaza. A militarization that is also supported by the “leftist” opposition party GroenLinks-PvdA (an alliance between GroenLinks and the Labour Party).

The looming draft, too, is a threat to freedom in the Netherlands. During the Dutch colonial war in Indonesia from 1946 to 1949, countless draft resisters were imprisoned for years and have, to this day, never received any form of compensation or rehabilitation. The colonial soldiers, by contrast, have been honored as part of the official Second World War commemorations since 1961, even before the Dutch state did the same for actual Nazi Holocaust victims.

The Netherlands has a long and deep history of racism, having brought apartheid to South Africa, Indonesia, Suriname, and the Dutch Antilles, among other places. Even the previous “liberal” Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, is a convicted racist for ethnic profiling and a Zionist fanatic who instructed his own staff to cover up Israeli war crimes.

Rutte’s government notoriously destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Dutch people of color in what became known as the “benefits scandal,” which plunged innocent civilians into huge debts, leading to divorces, suicides, and the loss of child custody.

Many far-right leaders in the Netherlands, including PVV leader Geert Wilders, have backgrounds as colonizers in Indonesia, the largest majority-Muslim country in the world. The Dutch East Indies were ruled as an apartheid state and leaders like Wilders aim to “avenge their ancestors” who were defeated. They see in the Palestinian resistance the same faces of the Indonesian freedom fighters. Wilders himself had his coming of age in a Kibbutz in the West Bank, where he recognized his political soulmates in the most fanatic settlers of Israel.

After the genocide in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, the Israeli mass murder was supported by a major propaganda offensive by the Dutch government and almost all Dutch political parties, with strong racist undertones. Think, for example, of the “leftist” opposition leader Frans Timmermans, who spoke about our “culture of life” and “their” “culture of death.”

In this context, the national elections in November 2023 further worsened the situation. The far-right PVV became the largest party, led by Wilders, an ardent Zionist and racist who believes in a “Jewish state” from the river to the sea and wishes to apply the same apartheid model to the Netherlands.

Wilders was convicted by a Dutch court in 2016 for “incitement to discrimination” after he told a rally that he “would arrange” for the country to have “less, less Moroccans,” essentially calling for their deportation. His lawyer for the court case was bankrolled by US Zionists to the tune of €200,000.

The PVV is the largest of the parties in the governing coalition and served as the king-maker in coalition talks, with the prime minister having been the former head of the Dutch secret services, under whose watch Dutch Muslims were specifically targeted and spied on.

The coalition seriously considered PVV parliamentarian Gidi Markuszower as a deputy prime minister and minister of asylum and migration. A fanatic Zionist who was born and raised in Israel, Markuszower brought his fascist views with him to the Netherlands. He talks of migrants as “African beasts” and advocated in a leaked email to murder anti-Zionist “despicable Jews.”

Those views were well-known by 2024 and not a problem for the ruling coalition. The reason Markuszower was not able to become the vice prime minister was because he did not pass the security clearance by the Dutch secret service, most likely because of his continued ties to the Mossad. Nevertheless, he remains on the bench in parliament for the PVV.

Since the far-right election victory of the PVV, Islamophobia has sharply risen in the Netherlands. According to the latest figures of Meld Islamofobie, 83 percent of Dutch Muslims have been personally experienced an Islamophobic incident last year. We have seen hatecrimes against Muslims on two separate occasions just in the last two weeks, where two Muslims were nearly beaten to death by racists in their own neighborhood. This summer, another Muslim was murdered by a racist neighbor.

The events of November 7 have escalated things further. Outraged by the complete betrayal of almost the entire spectrum of Dutch politics and media, which protected foreign fascist hooligans rather than its own citizens, youths rioted in the streets of Amsterdam West on November 11. The specific trigger was the beating up of a Muslim woman by police force during a peaceful protest the day before, which the mayor proceeded to lie about despite extensive video evidence.

Leaders of the governing coalition parties immediately seized upon the events to demonize the Muslim community. Think for example of Farmer–Citizen Movement leader Caroline van der Plas, who claims that “the thirst to beat up Jews and even worse: to want to kill them” is deeply ingrained in “a section of the population.” She also openly called for a ban against the Instagram account Cestmocro, in direct violation of freedom of speech. Wilders called for “deporting and denaturalizing” the “scum.” The prime minister, Dick Schoof, claimed the “Jew hunt” exposed the “integration problem” in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, at the urging of the Israeli state, the House of Representatives passed a motion to place human rights organizations on terrorist lists.

During the Council of Ministers in the week after the Maccabi riots, there was allegedly talk of “cunt Moroccans,” “halal eaters,” “pus” that “can’t just be squeezed out,” and “antisemitism that is in the genes of Muslims or Moroccans.” What was actually said remains fodder for speculation, since the Council of Ministers’ discussions are secret and the cabinet refuses to disclose them. In any case, it was reason enough for the only Moroccan-Dutch minister, Nora Achahbar, to resign and leave the cabinet. If the cabinet admits to having made racist statements, it would legally make it a “criminal organization.” That, according to criminal lawyer Gerard Spong, is probably the reason Achahbar also cautiously speaks of “polarizing” language, since she would not want to take credit for the fall of the cabinet.

The demonization of Dutch Muslims as antisemites has little to do with reality or with concerns for Dutch Jewish people. The party ideologue of the PVV, currently the chair of Dutch parliament, is notorious for spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and for having worn an National Socialist Movement (the party that collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War) flag to Dutch parliament. The Netherlands seems to have willfully forgotten that it was not Muslims but Christians who systematically murdered European Jews during the Second World War.

The claim that antisemitism is an Islamic problem has been a long-time talking point of the Israeli lobby, including the main lobby group in the Netherlands, the Center for Information and Documentation Israel. Esther Voet, then director of the center, claimed in 2014 that two-thirds of antisemitism came from Muslims, while the figures from the Public Prosecution Service showed that two-thirds of the perpetrators were “native” Dutch. The second-largest group of perpetrators were Dutch people with a “Western European” migrant background.

An extensive government study found that 12 percent of Dutch Muslim youth are “not so positive” about Jewish people. This is comparable to their attitude toward Kurds (12 percent), Dutch (10 percent), and even Moroccans (8 percent). Conversely, Islamophobia has been rampant, as Christian and non-religious youth are extremely negative about Muslims (around 30 percent) and Moroccans (around 40 percent).

We should see the demonization of Muslims by Dutch and Israeli politicians and government officials as an expression of increasing fascism. While Gaza has been transformed into an extermination camp and pogroms are a daily reality in the West Bank, right-wing politicians and government officials hope to bring this reality of apartheid and ethnic cleansing to the Netherlands. It is not without reason that they place themselves squarely behind Maccabi gangs who sang in the Dutch streets about hanging communists, raping their opponents, and murdering Palestinian babies.

The rhetoric of the right about the “Islamo-left” should be seen as the modern-day version of the “Judeo-Bolshevism” with which the Nazis justified their murderous actions against Jewish people. Let us also not forget that Jewish refugees were banned and expelled from the Netherlands in the 1930s with many of the same arguments that we hear about Muslims today, by literally the same newspapers such as the Telegraaf, the largest newspaper of the Netherlands. It was not without reason that the newspaper was banned after the Second World War, as it became known as an “SS hate campaign paper.”

The threat of fascism is real and wide. The genocidal apartheid state of Israel is simply the tip of the spear in a much broader and dangerous process, fueling fascist imaginaries that threaten to plunge the Western world into darkness. The liberal center, from Kamala Harris in the United States to Femke Halsema in Amsterdam, seems powerless and unwilling to truly confront them.

At the same time, we see more and more people piercing through the lies, organizing, and taking to the streets. There is tremendous anger about the genocide in Gaza, about the demonization of Dutch Muslims, and about the breakdown of the welfare state in favor of a war and police state. We will have to turn that anger into a powerful, broad, and well-organized mass movement for peace and solidarity. A movement that does not allow itself to be misled or divided by a government that does not care in the least about Dutch workers. As we say at De Vonk: may we be the spark that fires the flame of revolution. For little else will suffice.

This piece was originally published in Dutch in Doorbraak.

By Chris de Ploeg and Jazie Veldhuyzen

(English version originally posted: Dec 06, 2024 on mronline.org)