The misuse of pogrom Analyzing the events in Amsterdam

The misuse of "pogrom": Analyzing the events in Amsterdam

MADRID- On November 8, Israeli football fans clashed violently with pro-Palestinian protesters in Amsterdam, both before and after the Europa League match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax.

In hundreds of videos circulating on social media, Israeli supporters can be seen tearing Palestinian flags from private buildings and chanting racist and pro-genocidal slogans such as "There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left" or "Gaza is a cemetery." Additionally, inside the stadium, before the match began, Maccabi fans interrupted the minute of silence for the victims of the recent floods in Spain, which have claimed over 200 lives so far, arguing that Spain supports Palestine.  

According to Amsterdam authorities, the Israeli fans were responsible for instigating the violence upon arriving in the city, attacking Palestinian supporters before the match. "They began attacking homes in Amsterdam with Palestinian flags, so that's actually where the violence started," said councilman Jazie Veldhuyzen in interviews with several international media outlets.  

Meanwhile, Israeli authorities chartered two “rescue flights” on Friday morning, instructing Maccabi fans to stay in their hotels and avoid wearing “Jewish symbols” until they returned home. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to the events as a "very violent incident against Israeli citizens."

Following the events, several media outlets, both Israeli and Western, referred to the incident in Amsterdam as a "pogrom," a comparison that is not only incorrect but also politically dangerous.  

The term "pogrom," derived from the Russian verb gromit— meaning to loot or destroy — entered the English language in the early 20th century after the atrocities committed against Jews in Imperial Russia. In this historical context, pogroms were acts of violence perpetrated by sectors of the majority population against a racialized minority that lacked rights and state protection. The aim was to subjugate that minority, keeping them "in their place" within society.  

To compare the Amsterdam incident to pogroms not only downplays the gravity of what occurred within the historical context of anti-Semitic persecution but also dilutes the understanding of the current political tensions between Israel and Palestine. This analogy disregards the profound differences between the status of Jews in Europe a century ago and their current position in a land with a Jewish majority population.  

That is to say, pogroms occurred against Jews in regions of Europe where they were structurally discriminated against, where laws prohibited their full participation in civic and political life, and where Jews were regarded as carriers of foreign values and ideologies.  

As the pogrom expert Brendan McGeever explains, describing the violence in Amsterdam last night as a pogrom is a mistake for several reasons. First, based on the footage seen, the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were not attacked for being Jewish, but for being Israeli. This means that the term pogrom is conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism.  

Football fans chant racist and pro-genocidal slogans such as "There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left" or "Gaza is a cemetery." Traditionally, a pogrom involves violence directed specifically at Jews due to their religious or ethnic identity, regardless of their nationality. In this case, the attacks were motivated by Israeli nationality, making the use of the term inappropriate.

It can therefore be said that describing the violence in Amsterdam as a pogrom leads to overlooking the vast difference between the situation of Jews in Europe a century ago and their position in Israel today, where they constitute the majority in a land that boasts one of the most powerful armies in the world.  

This also serves to continue obscuring the political distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. This strategy of attempting to conceal political criticism of Zionism, understood as an expression of settler colonialism, is not new.  

Since 1880, leaders of the Zionist movement in Palestine labeled Palestinians resisting the colonization of their land as antisemites. They argued that Palestinian opposition to Zionism was not based on the colonization of Palestine or the expropriation of land from Palestinian peasants, but rather on "antisemitism."

In 1920, Zionist settlers in Palestine accused Palestinians resisting colonization of carrying out an antisemitic "pogrom" against their Jewish colonizers.  

As Joseph Massad, a professor of Arab history, points out, at that time Zionists insisted that their ideology was the true and only expression of Judaism, merging both identities in such a way that, according to them, they could not be separated. This view solidified the idea that any Palestinian resistance to Zionism had to be interpreted as hostility toward Judaism as a whole.

The use of the word "pogrom" is not only inappropriate for explaining the events that took place in Amsterdam, but it also serves a clear political purpose: to present any criticism of the Zionist project of colonization and genocide as a case of "anti-Jewish racism."  

In other words, antisemitism refers to Jews anywhere in the world, while anti-Zionism refers solely to Israel. The problem lies in the fact that Zionism has hijacked Jewish identity and seeks to erase the vast political distance between the two concepts.

 

source: tehrantimes.com