The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) condemns the vile, violent, and blatantly racist anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab rampage and incitement to genocide by fans of Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv before, during and after the Europa League match against Ajax in Amsterdam.
We join the many organizations and human rights activists in the Netherlands and worldwide that are calling for a transparent and professional investigation and full accountability. The Dutch government, the Amsterdam City Council, and other entities must be held to account.
Marauding gangs of Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans, which included Israeli soldiers who served in Israel’s Gaza genocide, sang genocidal chants, including “Let the IDF win and f*ck the Arabs” and “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there.” Israel’s Gaza genocide has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 14,000 children, and destroyed hundreds of schools, including UN schools sheltering the nearly 2 million Palestinians forced from their homes.
Not only does incitement to racial violence constitute criminal behavior, but also incitement to genocide is a violation of the Genocide Convention, no less, as the racist and anti-democratic Dutch authorities are expected to know, particularly given that the two world courts are based in the Hague.
The Maccabi Tel Aviv football team has repeatedly and proudly sent “care packages” to Israeli soldiers committing genocide in Gaza and organized videos of its many club employees serving as soldiers in Gaza as motivation ahead of matches.
The gangs of Israeli thugs threw rocks at and scaled homes and businesses in Amsterdam displaying Palestinian flags, ripping them down and burning them, attacked a taxi cab driven by an Arab man, armed themselves with pipes, chains and construction material, and beat people presumed to be Arab on the streets. They behaved in Amsterdam as they regularly do in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, giving the Dutch public a mere glimpse of the level of depravity and criminality that Palestinians must resist every day.
Inside the match, Israeli fans obscenely interrupted a minute of silence for flood victims in Valencia over the Spanish state’s recent actions to block arms sales and shipments to Israel.
The malevolent erasure of this context by racist Western media and colonial leaders presenting the genocide inciting violent Israeli thugs as victims not only turns the truth on its head. It also mirrors the deliberate amnesia of Israel’s 76-year apartheid regime in Western media propaganda that has allowed Israel to continue its genocide in Gaza for over a year, expand its massacres to Lebanon, and escalate violent ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The ultimate responsibility here lies with corrupt world football bodies UEFA and FIFA, which have for years actively shielded Israel from accountability for its illegal military occupation and settlement teams, its apartheid regime and, more recently, its genocide.
We applaud BDS Netherlands and other groups in Amsterdam that organized peaceful protests against the match, refusing to allow football-as-usual to whitewash genocide and apartheid.
We further applaud the peaceful protests organized following the match to reclaim streets and squares for dissent and continue to call for an end to Israel’s Gaza atrocities.
We reiterate our call for peaceful disruption of UEFA and FIFA matches until they meet their obligations established by International Court of Justice rulings to end all complicity in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by banning apartheid Israel from world football just as apartheid South Africa was banned.
All Israeli soldiers traveling outside of Israel should face legal questioning over their role in Israel’s genocide and other atrocity crimes committed against Palestinians and subsequent prosecution, not be allowed to travel freely, let alone wreak havoc in cities around the world.