Maccabi Tel Aviv Thugs Made Israeli Apartheid Relatable

Complexity is often the first port of call for liberals seeking to derail conversations on what should be straightforward questions of principle. Nowhere is this truer than of Israel and Palestine, a century-long conflict to which a seemingly infinite number of critical lenses can be applied. One might narrate Israeli apartheid in terms of the history of western imperialism or Jewish persecution, as a linchpin of the military-industrial complex or of climate breakdown. Even amid the most documented genocide in history, we have been told not to trust what our own eyes can see, with Hamas’s underground tunnel network becoming the ultimate Israeli trump card and proof that all is not what it seems in Gaza. Yet the fog of war momentarily cleared up last week when a hundred years of bitterly contested history were distilled into just a few days.

The events leading up to and following the Maccabi Tel Aviv match against AFC Ajax in Amsterdam last Thursday read like a parable of Israel and Palestine. Israelis come to a foreign place gaming for a fight (Sheher Khan, a Muslim member of the city council, had urged the mayor not to allow the Maccabi fans, notoriously thuggish even by Israeli standards, but was ignored). Israelis start said fight, beating people up and destroying their property. The street justice is swift. A diplomatic crisis ensues, centering Israeli victimhood.

Western politicians rush to condemn the attacks on Israelis, which are never described as retaliatory, but rather as the ground zero of all violence, the product of an ingrained antisemitism that transcends the specificity of the situation and yet, paradoxically, is on a continuum with all violence towards Jews, past and future (as the Jewish American philosopher Judith Butler has written, when antisemitism is understood as a “cancer” it “seems to exist outside history, recurring in all possible spaces and times”). There is no context for the attack but if there is, it is the Holocaust. If Israelis are manifesting their Jewish destiny to be persecuted, so are anti-Israel actors realising their inherent barbarity rather than responding as any normal people would to, say, having their flags torn down or being told to die. It is they who are the culprits, not Israelis rampaging around armed with metal scaffolding and splintered pieces of wooden bedframe.

Evidence begins circulating that challenges the Israeli narrative, only to be wholly ignored or misrepresented by media coverage (the video shows locals attacking Israelis, not vice versa). Those who attempt soberly to assess the evidence are quickly brought in line by nervous or vocally pro-Israel executives. Any suggestion that Israelis threw the first stone is proof of antisemitism: “The Jews had it coming.” Israel capitalises on the incident to shamelessly self-promote as a safe haven for harried semites, rushing to the rescue of its citizens while warning the rest of us Jews that nowhere in the diaspora is safe. If last week you did not understand how Israel has been able to livestream a genocide, well, now you do.

I like to think that after 13 months of genocide in Gaza, few people on this planet do not care about it – but that may be optimistic. There is plentiful evidence that Israel is losing public support across great swaths of the globe, including 42 of the 43 countries polled by Morning Consult in January. However, there is also evidence that might lead one to conclude that many people remain confused or simply apathetic about Palestine despite untold mountains of graphic evidence that might move them.

Asked in February “Which side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do you sympathise with more?”, 34% of British people said they didn’t know, up five percentage points on November (you would think three months of Israeli bombing would push people in the opposite direction, but there you go). According to Statista, just 1% of American voters cited foreign policy as their number-one issue in the recent presidential election.

What this suggests is that there are millions of people for whom daily footage of limbless children and immolated corpses has not had a life-altering or indeed any significant effect. Perhaps their algorithm hasn’t served it to them. Maybe it has, and they have swiped past it, unable to engage with such grotesque imagery without a clear interpretive framework or means to respond (an understandable response, I would suggest). Maybe they were too preoccupied by their own quotidian struggles to care about the suffering of people they don’t know living thousands of miles away. Perhaps they see capital P politics as happening above their heads, an elite pastime rather than the stuff of their own lives.

Whichever it is, Amsterdam may be something of an antidote. For what the events of the past week did was detach Israeli apartheid and genocide from highfalutin notions of international law and settler colonialism and bring it down to the level of racism, hooliganism and cry bullying. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans’ behaviour in Amsterdam was some of the most universally recognisable and instinctively unlikeable there is, proof that you don’t need any specialist knowledge to understand Israel – you can simply switch on the football.