The Amsterdam violence shows why Israel is needed

The shameful violence against Israeli football supporters in Amsterdam last week was, we now know, planned and coordinated. But for antisemites, Jews must never be seen as victims and always deserve what is coming to them. So when a gang launched a vicious assault on Jews because they were Jews, we witnessed widespread mental contortions to assert that it was, rather, an understandable response to the behaviour of the Israeli fans.

The victims were, in fact, the real guilty parties.

It was a chilling echo of Kristallnacht, 86 years ago almost to the day. The two events were of course very different, occurring in different eras; but the Nazis also denied that there had been any organised violence, describing it instead as a spontaneous and understandable response by ordinary Germans to the assassination in Paris of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, by a young Jewish man in Paris.

October 7 last year echoed this when the Hamas massacre was celebrated by some as a legitimate form of “resistance”. No matter that the victims were simply living their lives before being butchered, raped and kidnapped. They got what they deserved.

There is, of course, a deep irony to all this. During the Second World War, Jews were regularly told to “go back to Palestine”. Now that they have done so, they are regularly told to “go back to Europe”. Amsterdam was proof of what might happen if they were to obey that new imperative.

More ironically still, the antisemites fail to appreciate that their actions on the streets of Amsterdam and elsewhere underline one of the main reasons why the State of Israel was born in the first place.

Between 2010 and 2019, more than 50,000 French Jews alone made aliyah. As other European countries continue to be gripped by violent antisemitism, the safe haven of Israel has never been needed more.