Michal Cotler-Wunsh sees the brutal attack in Amsterdam as an outgrowth of the obvious rise in antisemitism that’s gripped the West in the last year.
When Michal Cotler-Wunsh heard that Israeli soccer fans had been viciously attacked by an antisemitic mob at a match in Amsterdam last week, she wasn’t surprised.
As Israel’s special envoy for antisemitism, Cotler-Wunsh has come to expect explosions of mass violence from anti-Jewish bigots ever since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023.
Israeli soccer fans who traveled to the Netherlands to watch Ajax compete against Maccabi Tel Aviv in a Europa league match were left hiding in their hotel rooms Thursday night at the urging of Dutch officials. Two dozen of their countrymen had been injured and five hospitalized in the attack— which, as Cotler-Wunsh emphasizes — did not spring up spontaneously.
“We have to be very clear on that, with knives and baseball bats, this was not something that happened spontaneously,” Cotler-Wunsh said in an interview conducted the day after the Amsterdam attack.
“And, above everything else, this was mortifying but should not be surprising,” she continued, citing the “tsunami” of antisemitism in the West following the October 7 attack and Israel’s multi-front war against Iran’s terror proxies hellbent on obliterating the Jewish state.
By remaining surprised, people are enabling the “mainstreaming” of antisemitism and support for the war against Israel unfolding in the Middle East. Israel is simultaneously fighting Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, while defending itself from direct Iranian missile strikes.
Cotler-Wunsh pointed to the attack as a startling example of normalized antisemitism in the West by a combination of progressive activists, radical Islamists, and right-wing extremists. In the U.S., antisemitic incidents have surged over the past year and hate crimes against Jewish Americans have skyrocketed.
“Anti-Zionism, the modern, mutated, mainstreamed strain of antisemitism has been sort of justified, or legitimized, is precisely what enabled the attack in Amsterdam last night,” she said.
In 2023, the Netherlands saw a 245 percent increase in antisemitic incidents, a familiar pattern across European nations, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a left-wing antisemitism watchdog. The ADL cited data from a leading Dutch antisemitism monitor showing 60 percent of Holland’s antisemitic incidents last year happened after October 7.
Thursday night, videos of attackers chasing down and assaulting Jews spread like wildfire on social media, in scenes reminiscent of earlier pogroms. Over 60 people have been arrested and Israel sent rescue flights to ensure civilians were returned home safely.
Amsterdam banned protests for three days and equipped police with emergency powers to stop the “antisemitic hit-and-run squads” and quell the violence. Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar quickly flew to Holland to meeting with senior Dutch officials and the Jewish community after the attack.
President Joe Biden and other world leaders forcefully condemned the antisemitic riot and praised Dutch authorities for taking immediate action.
Elite American college campuses have been hotbeds of antisemitism for years, but the activists began making themselves more visible after the October 7 attack. Things escalated further in the spring, when activists at Columbia University set up an anti-Israel tent encampment that drew national attention and spawned imitators nationwide. The campus radicals demanded universities divest from corporations doing business in Israel and urged the Biden administration to stop sending military assistance to Israel for its war.
For Cotler-Wunsh, the campus activism is a dark harbinger of things to come.
“Over thousands of years of history, antisemitism is just a litmus test. It’s a predictor of the spaces and the places that allow it to permeate, to spread, to infect,” Cotler-Wunsh said.
“It just enables us to predict the collapse of our society, the collapse of morality, and in this case, including in Europe, 86 years after Kristallnacht, it’s devastating.”
Israel has largely decimated Hezbollah during its multi-front war by taking out the terrorist group’s leadership and using its vaunted intelligence apparatus to keep tabs on its every move. Israel has also taken out several top Hamas commanders, including October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar, as it continues fighting Hamas in Gaza and rooting out the organization.
With the return of former president Donald Trump to the White House, Israel will likely continue receiving the U.S. assistance needed to fully prosecute its war against the Iran regime and its terror proxies.