Demonstrators gather during an unauthorized pro-Palestinian demonstration on Dam Square in Amsterdam on Nov. 13, 2024. (Credit: Nick Gammon/AFP)
The deadly Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and the ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza have upended the region’s geopolitics, further confirming that international law holds no sway in the Middle East.
Israel’s unprecedented brutality in the Palestinian coastal enclave, combined with continued settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — all with the overt or tacit approval of the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, most European governments (and some Arab regimes, though that’s another story) — will leave deep scars on the collective psyche, including among a liberal youth traditionally oriented toward the West.
But Europe will not emerge unscathed. It is already haunted by Gaza’s suffering, a reminder of what Europe wishes to suppress, following it like a shadow. For over a year, the Middle East has reawakened its demons and reopened old wounds. Everything seems to intertwine and blur together, creating fertile ground for confusion and oversimplifications.
A recent example comes from Amsterdam, where Israeli supporters of the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team were attacked by pro-Palestinian activists.
In the Netherlands and beyond, the incident has sparked shockwaves.
“We failed the Jewish community during World War II, and last night we failed again,” said Dutch King Willem-Alexander the next day.
Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof condemned the “completely unacceptable acts of anti-Semitism.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen decried the “heinous attacks,” while French President Emmanuel Macron referred to “the most disgraceful chapters of history.”
In this case, one crucial element is missing. Whether on news channels or in political speeches, most commentators either overlook or feign ignorance of the fact that, on the day before the incident, Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters had engaged in racist behavior.
They chanted anti-Arab slogans in a city with a significant Arab population. They cheered for Israeli bombings of schools in Gaza and mocked the suffering of children trapped in the Palestinian enclave, tore down Palestinian flags, and assaulted passersby and a taxi driver. They disrupted a moment of silence in honor of the victims of Spain’s devastating floods held before the match between their team and Ajax.
But beware of anyone who dares to point out this ‘detail.’ They are instantly accused of ‘contextualizing’ the events, which, in the eyes of the accusers, means ‘justifying’ them.
Undoubtedly, nothing justifies physical violence from any side, and some scenes are deeply unsettling — like one video footage showing a young man being violently beaten, shouting, “I’m not Jewish, I’m not Jewish!”
Yet, several things can be true at the same time without being equivalent
Perhaps Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema summarized the situation best, describing the violence as a “toxic cocktail of anti-Semitism, hooliganism, and outrage over the war in Palestine, Israel, and other parts of the Middle East.”
“Injustices have been committed against the Jewish community in our city,” she said, “as well as against members of minorities who sympathize with the Palestinians.”
The Holocaust
This sports-political episode is deeply symbolic, where the past and present uneasily converge.
First, the setting: Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, where nearly 75 percent of the Jewish population was exterminated in Nazi camps during World War II — an unparalleled proportion in Western Europe, due in part to particularly zealous Dutch collaboration.
For a long time, the Netherlands’ active participation in the Holocaust was a national taboo. The process of introspection was slow, and it wasn’t until the eve of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, in January 2020, that a Dutch head of government issued an official apology to the Jewish community.
This underscores how heavy and still searing the memory is, and how sensitive the topic of antisemitism remains.
Yet, a 2023 study published by the Claims Conference, a global organization representing Jewish victims of Nazism, revealed troubling findings: Nearly a quarter of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z believe the Holocaust is a myth or that the number of Jews killed in the genocide is exaggerated.
Only 44 percent of respondents in these age groups supported efforts by Dutch public figures to acknowledge the Netherlands’ failure to protect Jews during the Holocaust and to issue apologies.
These figures echo data collected by CNN in 2018 from several European countries (Austria, France, Germany, the UK, Hungary, Poland, and Sweden), which found that one in 20 people had never heard of the Holocaust.
This Jewish-European memory intersects with an Arab-European memory of a different nature. The latter is shaped primarily by the history of colonization, particularly under French and British rule. Central to this narrative is London’s pivotal role in the Jewish-Arab question, marked by the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which endorsed the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
Between 1948 — the official establishment of Israel — and 1967, Palestinians were effectively invisible in the eyes of Europeans. During this period, European nations provided unanimous support to the Israeli state, driven by two key considerations.
The first was the realization of the scale of the Nazi genocide and the resulting sense of guilt toward its survivors. The second was rooted in colonialism: the first generation of Israelis was predominantly of European origin, making Israel, in the eyes of the Old Continent, a projection of Western power in a strategically significant region.
This legacy, whose repercussions are bloodier than ever today, is compounded by the weight of contemporary identity-related anxieties that manifest, to varying degrees, across all Western European societies, including the Netherlands.
These societies are increasingly divided over issues of immigration, multiculturalism, and the role of Islam. Adding to this are the waves of jihadist attacks over the past two decades, which have sown hatred and fear, leading some to identify more closely with Israel, seen as a bulwark against the ‘Islamist enemy.’
Importation
The narratives and stances born from the so-called ‘conflict’ are varied, drawing equally from both the past and the present.
No other foreign policy issue stirs such strong emotions. No other war has the power to break as many friendships, and no crime committed thousands of kilometers away enters social relationships as intimately.
But perhaps this is precisely because it is not a foreign issue. Contrary to what is often claimed, there is no ‘importation’ of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into Europe.
The term, widely used in the media, is most often employed to harshly criticize solidarity movements with Palestine and only rarely to question the unconditional support offered by various groups or institutions to Israel.
It is a convenient expression, one that consciously or unconsciously conceals Europe’s role in the roots of the Nakba. Certainly, over the decades, Israeli society has undergone significant demographic changes.
Today, at least 40 percent of Israeli Jews are from the Arab world. But Zionism was born in Europe, and its rise is inextricably linked to the history of European antisemitism.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict offers Europe an unflattering reflection of its own past. It does not define Europe entirely — no nation, culture, or civilization can be reduced to its worst version of itself — but Europe cannot escape it.
Instead, it tries to lighten its burden by shifting part of the responsibility onto an Arab world where all imaginable forms of oppression have coexisted for decades.
Yet, despite its many flaws, the Arab world neither conceived the racialization of Jews, nor theorized their elimination, nor carried out the Holocaust.
Equating defenders of Palestinian rights with a 2.0 version of Hitler’s followers, while supporting the supremacist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the name of a memory that is no longer even successfully passed on to new generations, is a particularly dishonest and perverse distortion.
But this transfer of guilt is now accompanied by a new reality.
While Israel has, since its founding, been a ‘democratic’ state for Jews and a ‘Jewish’ state for Arabs, its ‘democratic’ character is increasingly under assault.
Netanyahu today embodies a blend of the worst traits seen in both Europe and the Arab world: A racist settler, corrupt, dismissive of the separation of powers, backed by supporters who treat the Bible as a land registry, and willing to do whatever it takes to remain in power — even if it means setting the region on fire.
If Israel was born from the bowels of imperialist Western ideology and drew its legitimacy from the post-war liberal order, it is, ironically, now providing a glimpse of the future for an increasingly illiberal West.
