Emergency ordinances remain in place in Amsterdam after the violence that followed last Thursday’s Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv, which Ajax won 5-0.
Five people were hospitalised and 62 people were arrested as Maccabi fans clashed with locals.
The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the violence as “a planned antisemitic attack against Israeli citizens” and arranged for a flight to bring the Maccabi supporters home. There was widespread condemnation of what happened from world leaders, and on Monday the Dutch prime minister described the violence as ‘unadulterated anti-Semitic violence’.
Initial media reports made little comment about the behaviour of the traveling Maccabi supporters, and the role they played in stoking the tensions in the city in the build-up to the match. The coverage of what happened - especially from large UK-based media corporations - has drawn criticism from many people who lived in Amsterdam and were witness to what unfolded.
Dubliner Conor Dalton has lived in Amsterdam for nine years and attended the Ajax match on Thursday. He says he reached out to the BBC to offer an alternative perspective to their coverage, and was quoted in their liveblog of the incident on Friday. We spoke to him on Sunday evening, a few hours after dozens of people in Amsterdam had been arrested for breaking the city’s ban on protests to protest the ongoing war in Gaza, which has claimed the lives of nearly 45,000 people.
Here’s what he saw in Amsterdam that night.
Do you go to many Ajax matches?
I went to an Ajax-Alkmaar game when some friends were visiting a couple of years ago. It finished 5-0 so I didn't think I'd go to many more. Last year I was at Ajax versus Brighton in the Europa League.
Then a colleague of mine had tickets for the Maccabi match so I knew it would be an interesting one. I wanted to go and see if there was going to be a demonstration at the match, or anything like that.
What was the mood like in Amsterdam on the day of the game? Did the Maccabi fans have a big presence in the city?
I was cycling home from work on Thursday and I saw some people in the Maccabi colours, and, yeah, it was tense already.
But at that stage, on Thursday, there were already videos of Maccabi fans climbing onto people's houses and tearing down Palestinian flags.
So even at that point, it was already tense because everyone had seen what their supporters were doing and there was already anger at that.
What was it like heading into the Johan Cruyff stadium? Did you see any confrontations?
Me and my colleague took the metro to the match and we didn't see too many Maccabi fans heading in.
My colleague is an Ajax season ticket holder and when we got to the stadium, he pointed out this special tunnel and he said that's where they filter all the away fans through.
So it was very separated before the match. There were no clashes that I saw. There wasn't any contact with the Maccabi fans. I saw a couple of their supporters because of the gate that we had to go through, but it was pretty tame.
There’s been reports that the minute’s silence for the victims of the Valencia floods was jeered by Maccabi supporters - is that what you heard?
It was obvious because in the stadium you did hear noise. There was whistling, there was stuff like that, but I was right underneath the fans from Tel Aviv.
To me, it was a bit difficult to know where it came from. But when they ended the minute’s silence after about 20 seconds, I was like, OK, obviously they didn't want to create any embarrassment. They just cut it straight away. And then I saw the videos where the Maccabi fans had their drums and were whistling.
It was quite disrespectful. Like, it was for victims of a flood. If it was for Gaza, I would understand because they have loads of skin in the game. But, for a flood, they could have easily been quiet.
Were there any incidents during the match?
The Maccabi fans had drums and they actually kept that going throughout the whole game. Which I was surprised about, I expected it to peter out from them in terms of noise because of the score.
I was more surprised with the Ajax fans. I’m a supporter of Liverpool. For the Ajax fans, if the Maccabi keeper went down for something innocuous, the fans were relaxed waiting for him to get back up.
Whereas if this was Anfield, the fans would get on the keepers back and they'd be jeering them. So the atmosphere was pretty tame. It was family-friendly.
Ajax have a reputation of being like a Jewish club themselves. No one was really looking to create any bad atmosphere or anything like that during the match. It was quite a normal football match, actually.
What was the mood like after the match?
My colleague was going with his friends back to Rotterdam, so I was going home alone on the metro, back towards the city centre. I went to the metro station myself and then I got on the first metro that came and it was a bit weird because there were Maccabi fans on the metro. Some were on the platform, and at one of the next stops, a good few of their supporters came on. They were in Maccabi colors. There were about 8 to 12 of them and they were just going up and down the carriage, like over and over again, about three or four times.
I think they were looking for someone to say something to them, or maybe looking for someone wearing Palestine colors or a keffiyeh. They were looking for a fight, basically.
There was one guy opposite me and myself and him, we were both keeping an eye on them but most people were just trying to ignore them and trying not to attract any attention
Sometimes you just feel it in the air, the energy. It was tense. You could feel like something was happen.
It was mad to see in the media how they were being painted as the victims when I saw them behaving like hooligans.
Did you see any of the trouble in the city centre that night?
I could take the metro basically all the way towards Central Station before getting a ferry so I didn't have to pass through any of the trouble. A lot of the fans would have been going into the city, the Maccabi fans and all those people at the match.
In the city that night, there was a heavy police presence. By that stage, the police were, I feel, were being very, very protective of the Maccabi fans..
A friend of mine was working late at one of the department stores and it looks right onto like KFC and that's where there was loads of Maccabi fans had gathered. She had said that she saw a Maccabi fan running away from some Dutch people and he was shouting at them and they were chasing after him and then I think they knocked him down and they were kicking him and stuff like that. But then there were plenty of Maccabi fans nearby.
So then the police basically surrounded the Maccabi fans, protecting them basically. Apparently they put them all into the KFC and then escorted them out of the situation.
I feel the police were pretty protective of the fans even though they [the Maccabi fans] kind of provoked it themselves the night before.
What’s the fallout been like in Amsterdam?
There's been a huge fallout of it. Everyone was shocked when we saw the BBC, Sky News, and all these huge media outlets picking this up.
We were like, ‘what the hell?’. Like the whole city couldn't believe what was being said, that it was anti-Semitic, that it was planned, because everyone in Amsterdam had seen the videos the night before and now this video circulating of the fans going to going to the match shouting like there's ‘no more children in Gaza’, ‘kill all Arabs’ stuff like this.
So to see all those videos and then to be told that it's anti-Semitic, it was just unbelievable.
Like they're traveling to support their team, but it's not like they’re innocent in it. They provoked Amsterdam as a city.
The city is outraged. We feel like we’ve been betrayed in a way.
