Authorities in Amsterdam are grappling with unrest after violent assaults targeting Israeli soccer fans last week sparked outrage around the world and kicked off a charged debate over migration and integration in the Netherlands.
Amsterdam police said they had arrested five more people in connection with last week’s violence, which included targeted assaults on Israeli soccer fans by attackers who chased them through the streets on motorbikes. Four of those remained in custody as of late Monday, police said. Four others detained on Thursday and Friday also remained in custody, the Amsterdam prosecutor’s office said.
Authorities have struggled to restore calm since last week’s incidents. Police arrested three people on Monday night after they said a large group of people set off fireworks and caused a fire inside a tram in the city. Police said officers and a city bus were hit with rocks and a cyclist was assaulted.
Early Tuesday morning at another location in Amsterdam, a police bus was set on fire, police said. In the afternoon, six more people were arrested for defying a demonstration ban in the city. This followed the arrest of more than 50 demonstrators on Sunday who had defied a demonstration ban.
Last week’s attacks, which authorities have called antisemitic, shook Amsterdam residents and reverberated around the world. For some, they carried echoes of the pogroms that recurred in Europe’s history up to the Holocaust.
After inching up in recent years, antisemitic incidents shot up in Europe and the U.S. after last year’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, according to governments and nongovernmental organizations. The Hamas-led attack, in which 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 taken captive, sparked an Israeli response that has left more than 43,000 Palestinians dead.
Amsterdam officials have said they are working to understand what happened in the lead-up to last week’s violence and to examine whether authorities might have been insufficiently prepared.
Thousands of Israeli soccer fans had traveled to Amsterdam for a Thursday night match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and local Dutch team Ajax. Dutch authorities said they had prepared for the possibility of a clash between visiting Israeli fans and others, including pro-Palestinian demonstrators, because of tensions and public rhetoric over Israel’s war in Gaza.
Netherlands Prime Minister Dick Schoof on Monday said young first- and second-generation migrants appeared overrepresented among suspected perpetrators. He said the Netherlands has a broader problem with integration.
Schoof said that while there was room for dissent over the war in Gaza and that reports about the behavior of Maccabi supporters would be investigated, “nothing, absolutely nothing can serve as an excuse for the deliberate seeking out and hounding of Jews.”
Videos circulated online last week showing Israeli soccer fans pulling down a Palestinian flag and chanting anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian slogans.
Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema wrote in a letter Monday that what happened in the city was “the result of a toxic cocktail of anti-Semitism, hooliganism and anger over the war in Palestine and Israel, and other countries in the Middle East.”
She said Jews, Muslims, Palestinians and other minority groups have all been regularly targeted in the city, adding, “We abhor all of those kinds of violence and do everything to combat them.”
“Antisemitism cannot be met with other racism: The safety of one group cannot be at the expense of the safety of another,” Halsema said.
