Throughout the decades since WW II, Amsterdam managed to rebrand its Holocaust image in the image of an exceptional young girl, Anne Frank.
In the general perception of Holocaust cruelty, Amsterdam is not one of those places that stops us in our tracks, such as Germany, Poland, Hungary, etc.
Holland. Its whimsical windmills, charming canals, little bridges for cycling.
Yet, most of Holland’s Jewish community was killed in WW II. In fact, the largest percentage of any country’s Holocaust death toll was Holland’s.
Last week, on the eve of the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Jews were attacked — hunted — on the streets of Amsterdam.
I keep hearing about the few Israeli jerks out of the hundreds if not thousands, and their bad behavior the previous night, as if that justifies a premeditated, planned and coordinated assault on a group of Jews coming home from a ball game.
I don’t justify the bad behavior. In fact, it makes me sick. How foolish to goad on local pro-Hamas individuals. But Israeli chanting versus Dutch beating, the removal of a flag versus the unleashing of violence — these are two radically different things. The bad behavior of a few jerks, while wrong and upsetting, is something we all come across from time to time. It’s certainly no reason for violence.
But predictably, the standard for Jews seems to be different. Blame the Jews, the victim. It seems that no matter what violence is directed toward us, the script is always flipped.
There is no way to justify the menacing swarm of Dutch hooligans, wielding knives and bats, terrifying Jews walking down the street, to the point of causing some to jump into nearby canals in order to save themselves from a savage, premeditated attack, as if they “asked for it.”
Yes, premeditated, down to the details of ascertaining which hotels the Israeli guests were staying at.
While the few Israeli jerks who acted up the previous night is a small part of the picture, their bad behavior is being used to divert from the central story. Which is unrelated to any Israeli behavior. The central story is a carefully planned attack on Jews, a “hunt” for Jews, as some of the perpetrators put it; a hunt that stunned and nearly overpowered hundreds of local Dutch police, a hunt that lasted close to seven hours!
After such a horrific and sustained attack, a part of me questions the narrative about the previous day’s bad behavior, because clearly the atmosphere must have been quite hostile and poisonous. Since it took hours to tame the perpetrators of this attack, including taxi drivers who ambushed Israeli Jews, this was no spontaneous response to a one-off idiot or two.
With the eerie timing of the attack — on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht — a refrain I keep hearing is, “Nothing has changed.”
However, something huge and consequential has changed since 1938.
Israel.
Then, we were an exiled people with no sovereign home to call our own and no army to protect ourselves.
Today, as painful as the seismic shift of this past year has been, as shaky as the fault lines at times feel, we are blessed to have a country of our own.
The disparity between 1938 and today is infinite.
The consistently incremental changes that keep redefining our reality and the threshold of anti-Semitism, and the new situations we keep confronting since Oct. 7, are quite real, yet the backdrop of having an Israel transforms our situation from the wreckage of then to what it is today.
Yet, we saw how things can change on a dime. We wonder, what’s next? What safe baseline might explode in our faces?
Now, attendance at European sports events needs to be reconsidered.
This incident demands a reckoning, not only for Jews, but for the world. After all these years since the Holocaust, and after Holland’s dark Holocaust history, how does Amsterdam — symbolic of Western civilization in general — want to be remembered for how it navigated an attack on the Jewish people in its streets and canals?
Why did Dutch people feel comfortable planning and executing such an attack?
Finally, what will Amsterdam do to change course?
What would Anne Frank have said?
© IJN 2024
