Those who have said that last night’s pogrom in Amsterdam is yet more proof of the need for the existence of the State of Israel are correct. But it’s worth emphasizing why the state part of that is so important and what would be lost without sovereignty in the Jewish homeland.

First, a recap. Yesterday, on Nov. 7, 13 months after the Hamas massacre, Maccabi Tel Aviv played a local team, Ajax, in an evening soccer match. Israeli fans traveled in large numbers to watch the game in person. After the match, police escorted the Israeli fans out of the stadium complex and to city transit stations. Stationed just beyond those points were armed, largely Muslim gangs who commenced the pogrom: The gangs stabbed, beat unconscious, and even threw into the river anyone they suspected of being Jewish. Some posted videos of themselves running over Jews with cars.

The classic characteristic of a pogrom is police inaction or complicity, which is undeniably what took place last night. The pogrom was organized in part through the city’s taxi drivers, and Israeli fans report being warned by police as they left the stadium not to ride in taxis. (The cops did this rather than, you know, arrest the network of pogromists they knew had organized and were waiting to spill Jewish blood.) Israel began putting together what was essentially an airlift.

Leaked WhatsApp messages appeared to show some of the mob organizing for what they called “part 2” of the “Jewish hunt.” Open-source extremism trackers followed a digital paper trail to a local Palestinian group known as PGNL, which, “led by organizers including a former UNRWA affiliate, explicitly coordinated the protests online in the hours and day before via social media and messaging apps” such as WhatsApp and Telegram.

All of this took place two days before the anniversary of Kristallnacht, in the city that’s home to the Anne Frank House and the country that hosts the International Criminal Court.

What must be stressed is the fact that the Jewish people had never been safe from official complicity in pogroms until the state of Israel’s founding. This is what pogroms looked like in the Land of Israel too, until the establishment of Jewish sovereignty and a Jewish army.

Although it’s trendy to believe (or pretend to believe) that the Jews were a colonial power in Palestine, the exact opposite is true. When the British Mandate for Palestine was established, UK authorities had simply inherited the existing structure of the Ottoman police force, which was mostly Arab. In the mid-1920s, the police force was reformed and split between a British section and a much larger Palestinian section. Arabs made up 75 percent of the officer corps of the Palestinian section and 80 percent of all other ranks. This imbalance was even more pronounced in some cities.

As the 1929 Palestine pogrom spread to Hebron, the chief rabbi’s son, Eliezer Slonim was told by the town’s police chief and district governor that the Jews would be safe so long as they stayed inside. Journalist Yardena Schwartz describes the scene: “Eliezer went from house to Jewish house, joined by the city’s lone Jewish policeman, Chanoch Brozinsky, and Feivel Epstein, son of the head of the yeshiva, Rabbi Epstein. None of them were armed. Brozinsky’s rifle had been confiscated that day, presumably because [police chief] Cafferata feared he might shoot the rioters. The 32 other policemen on Cafferata’s force were Arabs. Their guns had not been taken. Slonim, the only other Jew with a gun in Hebron, had never used it before.”

Thirty-three police officers: 32 Arabs and one Jew. The Jew was disarmed because there was a pogrom about to happen. Arab policemen watched the slaughter, with some joining in. Over in Jerusalem, Jewish self-defense units were kept out or arrested by the British authorities while the rioters and police let loose.

The institutional colonial regime was Arab and British, and so—as in Amsterdam yesterday—there was no security, by design, for the Jews.

And this was only one example. A decade earlier, Jewish battalions serving as part of the Royal Fusiliers helped General Allenby liberate Palestine from the Turks. The British reneged on their promise to give these Jewish soldiers land after the war, and in fact kept them from being decommissioned because although the Jewish battalions weren’t needed once the war was over, keeping them under British control ensured that the Jews of Palestine would remain defenseless. A group of these soldiers were doing a training exercise in Jaffa when the rumblings of a riot began; the British immediately stopped the training exercise and transferred the Jewish soldiers out of the area so they couldn’t help protect civilians.

The British-Arab colonial project continued in this manner until the Jews won independence for both—though the Palestinian Arabs rejected their half of the offer.

The Amsterdam police were simply continuing a long tradition of malign neglect of duty whenever Jews are threatened. It was the norm until 1948, even in Eretz Yisrael. You can see why “anti-Zionism” remains popular in Europe; it is simply nostalgia for unfettered pogroms.

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