On a Sunday in March this year, Amsterdam’s Jews went to the opening of Holland’s first National Holocaust Museum. It was near a four-storey house on the Prinsengracht Canal where a young Anne Frank hid from the Nazis for two years before being sent to her death in an extermination camp.
The ceremony, attended by the Netherlands’ King Willem-Alexander and Israel‘s President Isaac Herzog, commemorated 100,000 Jews who like Anne, were transported by train from the Dutch capital to the camps during the Second World War.
Disgracefully, however, the museum’s opening was marred by pro-Palestinian protesters screaming abuse on the pavement outside. Women in hijabs shouted anti-Semitic slogans as Left-wing agitators waved posters supporting the terror group Hamas‘s invasion of Israel six months earlier, on October 7, 2023.
A heartbreaking picture and video on line shows Rudie Cortissos, one of the few Amsterdam Jews to survive the Holocaust, at the museum for the ceremony as his family and great granddaughter face the full wrath of the mob baying for their blood.
‘Jews were deeply hurt that the demonstration was allowed by the Amsterdam authorities that day,’ Robert Oudkerk, a leading light in the city’s Jewish community and a former social democrat MP, said this week.
‘There were 400 people at the museum opening and we were all shocked by the protest in front of the little girl. Some of the guests inside began crying. The Jews are now frightened in Amsterdam.
‘They are asking themselves: ‘Where can we go now? We are not safe here or anywhere in western Europe.’,’ he added.
‘There are some Dutch Muslims, a group of maybe 10,000 in this country, who are a danger to us. They want Sharia law not Western law.’
A demonstrator climbs on to a police van during a protest on the day of the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam
A young girl is escorted away from the raucous crowd, kept at bay behind barriers draped in Palestinian flags
We met Mr Oudkerk at his house on conditions of strict secrecy about where he lived. He said Jews have been in Holland for three centuries but now they face virulent anti-Semitism on European soil.
‘In the next few weeks – and I hope I am wrong – I believe a Jew or Jews will be killed,’ he said. ‘I am afraid to walk in Amsterdam showing any sign that I am Jewish. I don’t know if I will get a knife in my chest. In the last week we reached a tipping point.’
He was referring to the terrible sectarian violence on the streets of Amsterdam just over a week ago which shocked the world. It was sparked by a clash between pro-Palestinian agitators (some Muslim, some Left-wing) and Israeli football fans visiting Amsterdam for a Europa League match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax, the local team, ten days ago.
In an echo of Jew hunts in Amsterdam by the Nazis, social media messages showed that before the match a deliberate plan was orchestrated to ambush and attack the visiting football fans.
One message from a chat group called Buurthuis, a Dutch word for community centre, said 24 hours before the match on Thursday November 7: ‘Tomorrow, after the game, at night . . . part two of the Jew hunt. We will work on them.’
On the match day itself, mayhem broke out. Youths said to be of Moroccan and North African heritage criss-crossed the Dutch capital on scooters to launch ‘hit and run’ attacks on the Tel Aviv fans.
One piece of footage posted online shows a Maccabi fan jumping into a canal and floundering there to escape his attackers. As he thrashed about in the water, a pursuer shouts: ‘Say Free Palestine and we’ll let you go.’ It is not known how the victim escaped.
The person who posted the video on X commented: ‘This coward jumped into the canal, afraid of being beaten.’ It is accompanied by ‘crying with laughter’ emojis.
Protesters flee during a pro-Palestinian demonstration after the Ajax vs Maccabi Tel Aviv game
Police officers drive people away from Dam Square during a pro-Palestinian protest after mayhem broke out following the match on November 10
A pro-Palestine protester is hauled off by police in Amsterdam in chaotic scenes
A second film shows a young Israeli football fan cornered in a narrow alleyway where he ends up crouching on the floor. He begs for mercy, but his assailants knock him out with a punch on the head.
Some of the Israelis escaped only when local Jews were alerted on social media and quickly moved across the city to rescue them from being trapped in hotels, restaurants, and in one case a casino, as the mobs waited for them outside.
An Israeli diplomat upped the temperature this week by describing the attacks on the football fans as a ‘pogrom’, the Russian term meaning ‘demolish violently’ that was coined in the 19th century to describe attacks on Jews in non-Jewish nations.
None of this is to say that the visiting Maccabi fans, who have a reputation for hooliganism, were entirely innocent. After the violence, they were whisked back to Tel Aviv on rescue flights sent to Holland by the Israeli government.
Worrying footage shows them on their arrival at the airport chanting abuse about Palestinians as they mill around waiting to be taken home.
They stand accused by pro-Palestinian activists and the Dutch Muslim community of being hardened by military service in the Israeli-Hamas conflict and deliberately stirring up trouble in Amsterdam.
Some of the fans refused to join a period of silence at the match itself to mark the tragedy of the Spanish flood disaster (in the belief that Spain is anti-Israel and supports Arab nations).
Another accusation is that fans pulled down a Palestinian flag from the façade of a building, burned it, and shouted ‘F*** you Palestine’ during the 24-hour build up to the match.
‘Jews were deeply hurt that the demonstration was allowed by the Amsterdam authorities that day,’ said Robert Oudkerk, a leading light in the city’s Jewish community
Social media clips reveal the visiting Israelis setting off flares and fireworks on the streets. They are said to have chanted in Hebrew that there are no children left in Gaza – the distressing implication being that the Israel Defence Force has bombed them all to death following the October 7 Hamas raid.
The full truth of this ghastly episode, played out in a European city renowned in the modern day for its diversity and for welcoming migrants, may never be known.
An official report rushed out by shocked Amsterdam officials this week is careful not to lay the blame decisively on either side. It said that bad behaviour by Maccabi fans and Pro-Palestinian activists ‘seeking confrontation’ had both played a part. During the Amsterdam horrors, a synagogue had received a bomb threat, said the report, and a ceremony in the city marking 1938’s Kristallnacht (a significant date in the Jewish calendar, when the Nazis first moved against Germany’s Jews by systematically destroying their homes and businesses) had to be moved to a different date.
Historically, the Netherlands played a shocking role in the mass slaughter of Jews in Europe by Hitler during the war.
During the Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1944, Dutch Jews were forced onto trains from Amsterdam to the death camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland with the co-operation of local police, who were under German control.
Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi architect of the deportations, applauded their success. He remarked at the time: ‘From the beginning . . . the trains from the Netherlands were really rolling. It was wonderful.’
The few Jews in the country to survive were children, like Rudie Cortissos, who were sent into hiding by their families. Others were rescued from an Amsterdam nursery where they awaited deportation. They were miraculously whisked to safety (even smuggled out in laundry baskets) by the Dutch resistance movement with the help of staff.
No wonder that Holland’s King Willem-Alexander this week decried the recent horrific events in his country. Alluding to his country’s role in the Holocaust, he said: ‘Jews must feel safe in the Netherlands. Everywhere and at all times. We put our arms around them, we will not let them go. History has taught us how intimidation goes from bad to worse.’
Nevertheless, Amsterdam – like many other cities in western Europe – is now facing a deep sectarian rift between Jews and the Muslim community that will be hard to mend. It has grown since the October 7 attack on Israel as pro-Palestinian protestors march the streets waving Hamas flags and other paraphernalia demanding the end of the Jewish state.
Dutch conservative MP Kevin Kruger has watched the violence with a heavy heart. ‘There should be more law and order in Amsterdam from now on,’ he told the Mail. ‘The same rules should apply to everyone who lives in the city, whatever their group, and that is not happening.’
He cites the example of a pro-Palestine protest on Wednesday night which was, apparently, sanctioned by Amsterdam’s Left-wing mayor despite a city-wide emergency ban on all demonstrations following the Maccabi team’s visit. It resulted in the Dutch national newspaper De Telegraaf saying anarchy was alive and well in Holland. ‘We have been tolerant for too long,’ agreed Mr Kruger.
Annabel Nanninga, a liberal conservative Dutch politician, went further. She said on Dutch TV: ‘I am appalled by what has happened. It is not right to go on a Jew hunt.
‘The young men who were involved are third, fourth generation Islamic, Moroccan mostly, immigrants. They have still not integrated and accepted our way of life. They have no tolerance for Jews, women, gays, anyone but themselves.’
She also warned that anti-Semitic hostility towards Jews had worsened since October 7. ‘The Muslim attackers want to have dominance on the streets here. They want us to be terrified. Many Jews are now afraid.’
On Thursday night this week, Israel soccer fans returned to Europe, this time for a football match in Paris, as the city braced itself to see if a replay of Amsterdam would happen.
Thousands of extra security staff and anti-terror officers were deployed in the French capital for the Nations League game between France and Israel, as a ring of steel was thrown around the Stade de France.
Annabel Nanninga, a liberal conservative Dutch politician, warned that anti-Semitic hostility towards Jews had worsened since October 7
Outside the stadium, police surrounded pro-Palestinian protestors to keep them apart from Israel fans. Inside, during the match, fans wearing Israeli flags had a brief skirmish with supporters of the French side.
French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau had refused to cancel the match, proclaiming that France would ‘not give in’ to those groups who ‘sowed hate’.
It was a brave stance and trouble was held at bay on this occasion. But how long can this situation go on before Europe is changed irretrievably by the conflict between Israel and Hamas-controlled Palestinians in Gaza?
In London this week, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism cancelled a demonstration outside London university amid fears of ‘Amsterdam-style violence’.
The Metropolitan Police said it was actively investigating threats posted online in relation to the planned protest at Queen Mary college in Mile End, East London, where UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese was speaking to students.
The UN official has said provocatively that supporters of the terror group Hamas have a ‘right to resist’ and that Israel is akin to Nazi Germany.
Police advised the protest’s cancellation after a post on a residents’ forum in Tower Hamlets’ borough, where there is a large Muslim population, warned that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were going to get the ‘welcome they deserved’. One user of the forum suggested that it should be in ‘Amsterdam-style’.
Back in the Netherlands, Jewish community leader Robert Oudkerk, 69, told us how a string of events have also been cancelled in Holland since the October 7 invasion in what he fears is ‘an appeasement’ of Jew-haters by the Dutch authorities.
A performer at a planned Yiddish jazz event received a call from a theatre director saying: ‘it was not possible right now.’ A famous Jewish cookbook writer from Amsterdam planning to give lessons at a festival found his appearance was no longer required.
Mr Oudkerk’s late mother Betty was a 17-year-old worker at the Amsterdam nursery that saved Jewish children from the death camps. She died in 2020, the last survivor of the brave staff who had to choose which child to give the Dutch Resistance to rescue – and which to leave for the Nazis to deport and snuff out.
He says with certainty: ‘People of various orientations and backgrounds all live together in our Netherlands. I don’t hold all Muslims [there are an estimated 75,000 in Holland] responsible for what is happening here.
‘But the limit of our endurance is reached. Hunters chasing down the Maccabi fans shouted ‘Cancer Jews’ and demanded the complete destruction of the Jewish state.
‘These people do not respect my identity. They would rather have me dead.’
