Amsterdamned

Since Israel began its genocide against the Palestinians, Western politicians and their slavish media have gone out of the way to prettify the crimes of their client. This has meant bucke tloads of hypocrisy, outright lying, and tanking their election hopes in defence of state interests. But amid the butchery and the cowardly defences of war crimes, there has never been a more distorted, openly propagandistic piece of reporting about and reaction to what happened in Amsterdam last night.

In case you haven't been on social media today, for the last three days footy hooligans attached to Maccabi Tel Aviv have rampaged through the Dutch capital. They have attacked Arab and Arab-looking passers-bys, caved in the windows of buildings flying Palestinian flags, and sought at every turn to provoke fights with locals. At the match they disrupted the minute's silence for victims of the flooding in Valencia, and before and after tore through Amsterdam shouting "death to Arabs!" and mocked the bombing of children in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And so fists and boots of the away fans were met by the boots and fists of the home end. A common or garden tale of football-related violence from a team that has a far right firm, and no more newsworthy than that. Until it became something else.

On Friday morning, the Israeli press reported the IDF were sending a team to Amsterdam to rescue citizens from a "pogrom". Taking the cue, virtually the entire West European media followed suit, describing shocking levels of "antisemitism" and the "hunting down" of Israelis. This BBC report is typical, describing how "youths" used scooters in hit-and-run attacks on innocent footy fans. The Dutch king typified the one-sided denunciation of the violence, siding with foreign thugs over his subject's right to self-defence. The rest of establishment politics have weighed in, with David Lammy denouncing "last night’s antisemitic attacks on Israeli citizens in Amsterdam." The Holocaust Education Trust invoked the memory of Kristallnacht, a phrase Benjamin Netanyahu also used in an address this evening. To put things into context, the complete twisting of what's happened was so bad that even the Daily Mail couldn't go along with it.

Israel is a dependent of the West, and knows how to play its patrons to keep the flow of weapons and money coming. In the UK's case, while the government has acknowledged that a catastrophe has unfolded they've framed it in such as if they were talking about a natural disaster. They have not attached any blame to Netanyahu's actions, nor the mass enthusiasm there is in Israel for the Palestinian genocide. Having been partners in supporting Israeli operations since it launched its first air strikes, they can't go back on the crimes they are now associated with. Admitting hesitancy in backing Israel on anything threatens to open the damming operation official politics has erected around the aftermath of the 7th October attacks. So far the political damage of supporting Israel resulted in the loss of one Tory home secretary and Labour's underperformance at the general election, including losses to the Greens and the left. The last thing the government and the official opposition want are the full facts splayed across broadcast news programmes, opening up a new avenue of political pressure. The consequences could be strengthening Palestinian solidarity mobilisations and the moving of their complicity in murder up the range of salient issues. Not a place they want to be in because they know it's completely indefensible, which is why they don't bother to try.

Hence they'll be glad Israel has led the way in portraying the aggressors as the victims. It's not as though it hasn't had plenty of practice. And, handily, this exercise in crude propaganda occasioned Israel's announcement that the residents of northern Gaza will not be allowed to return to their homes. What a coincidence. By entirely distorting what has happened in Amsterdam and confecting a pogrom where none existed, Israel benefits from its continuing efforts at equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and Western foreign policy establishments and their political masters gain from having their support for Israel put beyond reproach. Though, as they know, the desperation of running this sort of interference cannot stand indefinitely in the age of social media. They are putting off today what they will have to answer for tomorrow.

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