Opinion | The Amsterdam attack on Jews wasn't an anomaly

The first recorded pogrom in history occurred in first-century Egypt, when lethal mobs in Alexandria, encouraged by the Roman prefect Aulus Avilius Flaccus, savagely attacked the city’s Jews. In the words of an eyewitness, the renowned philosopher Philo, the mobs were merciless, “sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants.”

In Amsterdam Thursday, hundreds of attackers, carrying out a “Jew hunt” planned hours earlier on social media, targeted Israeli tourists who had traveled to the Netherlands for a soccer match. In violence that was “terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom,” according to Deborah Lipstadt, the historian, diplomat, and current US envoy on antisemitism, the assailants shouted pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogans while they ambushed, beat, and chased the visiting Israelis. Much of the violence was recorded on video and posted online. One witness told Israel’s Channel 12 TV that the attackers were organized “like a terror group” and waited for the Jewish tourists “with clubs and knives. … They didn’t distinguish between women, children, men, or the elderly.”

In the 20 centuries between Alexandria and Amsterdam, Jews have faced bloody assaults almost everywhere they have settled. There were pogroms in Spain and in Syria, in the Rhineland and in Russia, in Turkey and in Tunisia. The antisemitic violence in Amsterdam occurred one day before the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-organized pogrom against the Jews of Germany and Austria that foreshadowed the coming Holocaust. It was also the anniversary of the United Nations’ poisonous 1975 resolution falsely labeling Zionism — the movement for Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland — “a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

Unlike most of history’s antisemitic rampages, no one was killed by Amsterdam’s Jew-hunting mobs, and government officials expressed revulsion and shame. “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II,” said King Willem-Alexander, “and last night we failed again.” The king was referring to the hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens who collaborated with Nazi Germany, when more than 75 percent of the country’s Jews — by far the highest percentage in Western Europe — were murdered in the Holocaust. Today, unlike then, there is a state of Israel with the ability to assist endangered Jews. Within a day of Thursday’s brutality, six El Al planes were being dispatched to evacuate the Israeli tourists. Observed The Wall Street Journal: “Jews are again fleeing the city where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis.”

The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, acknowledged that the anti-Jewish riot brought back “memories of pogroms” and called it “an outburst of antisemitism that I hope to never see again.” She will not be so fortunate. Since Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed in the Netherlands. Thousands of chanting protesters disrupted the opening of a Holocaust museum in March, throwing eggs, igniting fireworks, and waving Palestinian flags. The Anne Frank monument in Amsterdam has repeatedly been defaced. “It is now normal for Jews to be screamed at on the street,” the country’s chief rabbi told a reporter in April. “It’s more and more antisemitic.”

Everywhere is more and more antisemitic.

What happened in Amsterdam is just the latest reminder that for Jews, safety and tolerance are never permanent. Sooner or later the antisemitic derangement revives, usually with fearful results: That is as close to an immutable law of history as anything can be. For some decades after the Holocaust, when the open expression of Jew-hatred became taboo in the civilized world, it was possible to imagine that that “law” had been repealed. But the idyll is over. Hostility toward Jews and the Jewish state has become fashionable — especially among the young. On the far left and the far right, on university campuses and the internet, in Europe and the Middle East and North America, antisemitism has again become mainstream.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw it coming. Addressing the UN General Assembly after its notorious Zionism-is-racism vote 49 years ago this week, the US ambassador declared that the United States “does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.” The UN, he said, had done something shameful and obscene. It had given “the appearance of international sanction” to the “abomination of antisemitism.” Moynihan foresaw that “the terrible lie that has been told here today will have terrible consequences.”

It was with prophetic accuracy that he warned: “A great evil has been loosed upon the world.” Nearly half a century later, the effects of that evil are ubiquitous. Around the world Jews are again the object of savagery and hate, threatened and demonized and attacked as they haven’t been since the 1930s, hunted in the streets of cities that take pride in being enlightened. What happened in Amsterdam was no anomaly. Pogroms are coming back.

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Jeff Jacoby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby.