Amsterdam Is About Jew Hatred — and Gaza
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Tel Aviv
When you read the news reports of the appalling violence against Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam, there is no doubt that powerful and ugly anti-Jewish hatreds were at work. To deny that is to stick your head in the sand. But to believe that this is all it’s about is very dangerous for Israel and the Jewish people.
One of the most striking things about being in Israel now is to realize how average Israeli Jews have seen very few of the pictures that go out every day on social media to the rest of the world showing Palestinian men, women and children who have been killed, wounded and maimed as collateral damage in Israel’s war on Hamas — which itself killed, wounded, maimed and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7 last year.
I am not a judge. I don’t know what the “just” proportion of Palestinian civilian lives and homes that the laws of war might say is OK for Israel to destroy in response to Oct. 7 for every Israeli Jew and home ravaged that day. But I am here to say that whatever the number is, Israel has now exceeded it.
And the fact that this destruction of Gaza continues every day by a far-right Israeli government that still — some 14 months after the war started — refuses to offer any plan for decent Palestinian governance in Gaza to replace Hamas, something that would say to Israel’s friends and enemies, “Yes, this war is exacting a terrible toll but it is in pursuit of a better future for Israelis and Palestinians,” is turning the Jewish state into a pariah state.
On Wednesday morning, I had breakfast in Tel Aviv with Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and our conversation drifted to this reality. Olmert then reached into his briefcase and read aloud to me his handwritten notes from an article he was preparing to submit to the Hebrew press about Amsterdam. Here are a few excerpts.
What happened in Amsterdam is primarily a reflection of hatred by many Muslims against the State of Israel and its citizens, because of what is transpiring in our region. It is not a continuation of the historic antisemitism that swept Europe in past centuries, the sources of which are Christian religious fanaticism and a lack of tolerance for the Jewish people in general.
The fact is, many people in the world are unable to acquiesce with Israel turning Gaza, or residential neighborhoods of Beirut, into the Stone Age — as some of our leaders promised to do. And that is to say nothing of what Israel is doing in the West Bank — the killings and destruction of Palestinian property. Are we really surprised that these things create a wave of hostile reactions when we continue to show a lack of sensitivity to human beings living in the center of the battlefield who are not terrorists?
The events in Amsterdam drew on deep roots in the past of the Jewish people. But they also drew on an unending stream of social media images of the devastation of Gaza without any Israeli plan offering a better way for Jews and Palestinians to live side-by-side. To focus entirely on the first and totally ignore the second is about the most dangerous thing Jews everywhere could do today.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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