November 14, 2024
Nasser Kandil
The confrontations in Amsterdam’s streets, involving hundreds of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters who travelled from the occupying entity, have highlighted the provocations they directed toward thousands of migrants, residents, and citizens of Arab and Muslim backgrounds. The response – chasing Tel Aviv fans through streets, restaurants, and nightclubs – became a global headline, forcing the occupying entity’s prime minister to dispatch two planes to extract the supporters brigade from the scene.
The Amsterdam episode mirrored similar scenes across various European capitals, each with its own characteristics but all fueled by fallout of the Al-Aqsa Flood and the brutal crimes committed by the occupying army. The settlers’ gatherings conveyed racist rhetoric justifying the killing of children, with chants glorifying horrific acts against civilians including drinking their blood, crushing Palestinian children’s bones and raping women. Simultaneously, European parliaments saw lawmakers openly discussing Palestine, holding their governments accountable for complicity in these crimes – whether by silence or support.
These waves of anger converged with the student movements filling campuses across the United States and Europe, spurred by images of catastrophic massacres against women and children. Frustrated by the world’s silence or tepid appeals for “less killing”, these movements transformed anger into escalating actions: from sit-ins, to marches, to statements calling to cut arms supplies to the occupying army, as British, Belgian, French, and German parliamentarians have done, accusing their governments of complicity. All of this was embodied in Amsterdam’s eruption.
Daily videos circulate showing seemingly isolated clashes between organised groups supporting the occupying entity and solidarity movements advocating an end to the war and halting arms supplies. Gradually, a global movement is forming, perhaps rooted in Arab and Muslim migrant communities but encompassing many Western activists, cultural icons, and thousands of students and youth.
The occupying entity’s leaders have yet to recognise this wave as significant, relying on the default claim of “antisemitism” and even calling it an “Iranian conspiracy”, as Netanyahu labelled American university students’ protests. Rather than pausing to reflect on this new global message – that the entity has become a source of shame for those tied to it commercially, academically, culturally, or artistically – the occupying entity has intensified its assaults displaying its commitment to force alone –
not only in Gaza’s and Lebanon’s battlefields where the escalation inches closer to explosion.
We are on the brink of a second phase of this flood – a global arena where occupying entity settlers face mounting outrage and tracking, whether around sports events or beyond. The entity’s leaders should not be surprised to see daily campaigns against settlers during travel, and for its soldiers and officers to face pursuits abroad, evident in Netanyahu’s decision to ban military personnel from travelling to the Netherlands for fear of confrontation. Legal pursuits will soon intensify, likely transforming this global outcry into physical confrontations.
Western governments backing the occupying entity are increasingly unable to contain this anger or protect settlers, soldiers, and officers during their travels. The scenes in Amsterdam may soon become a worldwide routine, prompting global Jewish communities to disassociate from the entity and its atrocities to ensure their own safety. This wave of outrage has nothing to do with so-called anti-Jewish hatred, but with the undeniable horror exposed by this war – horrors that cannot be met without a human reaction, comparable to the response to the Holocaust, long considered by Jews as a dark stain in human history – more precisely the history of the West . Yet now, the crimes of the settlers and their army in Gaza and Lebanon threaten to taint the holocaust as a grey dot in a sea of black created by the settlers and their army.
