Court hands prison terms for Amsterdam ‘pogrom’

An Amsterdam court has handed down sentences to five people in connection to last month’s clashes between Dutch and Israeli football fans, which the Israeli officials described as a pogrom.

The clashes occurred on November 7 following a game between the local team Ajax and the Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv. The violence erupted during a spike in anti-Israeli sentiment stemming from the war in Gaza. Some attackers carried Palestinian flags and chanted antisemitic slogans.

On Tuesday, the court found five Dutch nationals guilty of violence against Israelis, sentencing four of them to between one and six months in prison. The fifth convict was sentenced to 100 hours of community service.

While the court found video evidence of attacks against Maccabi fans, it also noted that footage showed Israeli fans pulling down Palestinian flags, shouting anti-Arab slogans, and vandalizing cabs.

Although there were conflicting reports on what specific incident led to the unrest, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attacks on Israeli fans as a “horrific antisemitic incident,” while President Isaac Herzog labelled them “an antisemitic pogrom.”

Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema said the unrest was caused by “a toxic cocktail of antisemitism, football hooliganism and anger over the war in Palestine and Israel and other parts of the Middle East.”

Halsema later told the media that she regretted describing the clashes as a pogrom. “I saw how the word pogrom became very political and actually became propaganda,” she said, arguing that the word was “mainly used” to discriminate against Muslims living in the Netherlands.