A 10-page report addressed to council members, including substantial input from police investigators, paints a different picture from the narrative that rapidly spread across Western media, which had ignored the facts documented by several videos after the Israeli fans’ attacks in the city.
Dutch authorities toned down some, but not all, of the characterizations of the violence as anti-Semitic.
The document exposes the distorted reality adopted earlier and finds that the first serious incident occurred around midnight on Wednesday, the night before the soccer match. It says 50 Maccabi fans pulled down a Palestinian flag from a building in the city's centre.
Some of those fans fled to Amsterdam's red-light district and attacked a taxi. Other taxis were vandalized by other Israeli fans nearby.
In response, taxi drivers communicated with each others and mobilized against a group of approximately 400 Israelis, prompting police to keep the two groups apart, the report indicates.
Tensions continued to rise as Maccabi racist fans set off fireworks in Dam Square and shared inflammatory posts online.
Videos also surfaced of fans chanting racist slurs, including "Let the IDF win" and "F--k the Arabs."
Despite these provocations, the match proceeded with minimal incidents inside the stadium. More than 2,800 Israeli fans had travelled to the city for the game.
However, after the game, Maccabi supporters armed with sticks carried out acts of vandalism in Amsterdam’s city centre, the report continues.
Initially, Amsterdam's Mayor Femke Halsema described the violence as a “pogrom” during a press conference on 8 November, accusing local rioters of targeting Israeli fans with anti-Semitic intent. She has since walked back her remarks, saying she would not use it again in relation to the incidents in Amsterdam.
A pogrom refers to an organized violent attack on a specific ethnic or religious group, typically used in the context of WWII-era violence against Jews in the Netherlands.
In an interview with the public broadcaster NPO on Sunday, the mayor said Israel and Dutch national politicians had weaponized the term for political purposes, exacerbating divisions within the society. “That is not what I meant or wanted,” she claimed.
Halsema stressed that she had not intended to compare the violence in Amsterdam with WWII pogrom directly. “If I had known that it would be used politically in this way, also as propaganda, I don’t want anything to do with that,” she said.
She further expressed frustration with Israel's reaction, saying: "We were completely overtaken by Israel. At 3 a.m., Prime Minister Netanyahu suddenly gave a lecture about what had happened in Amsterdam, while we were still gathering the facts."
The mayor criticized how national politicians had appropriated the term "pogrom" to cast blame on Moroccan and Muslim communities in Amsterdam.
The Netherlands' coalition government has been left hanging by a thread after a Moroccan-born Junior Finance Minister Nora Achahbar resigned due to the language used by coalition colleagues.
On Wednesday, Stephan van Baarle, leader of the Dutch Denk party, speaking during an emergency debate on the issue, told the Netherlands’ parliament that the rampage of Israeli football fans through the country’s capital represented Amsterdam being “terrorised by genocide glorifiers who thought they, like some sort of colonists, could make Amsterdam unsafe.”
The mayor acknowledged that the authorities failed to protect the city during the riots and promised an independent investigation to pinpoint where things went wrong.
Two political debates on the issue were held in the past few days. The first, dominated by left-wing parties, occurred on Tuesday in the Amsterdam city council. The second was the following day when the debate moved to the Dutch parliament in The Hague.
At Amsterdam’s city hall, Mayor Halsema survived a no-confidence vote requested by the right-wing opposition party.
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