The match was a Europa League league phase fixture between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv, scheduled for the Johan Cruyff Arena on 7 November. Ajax has long carried a symbolic association with Jewish Amsterdam, and the game was not initially flagged as high-risk. That changed quickly. On the evening of 6 November, video circulated of Maccabi supporters pulling Palestinian flags from Amsterdam apartment windows, vandalising property, and assaulting people on the street. Some chants celebrated the deaths of children in Gaza. A group of Maccabi ultras chased two men through the city, beating one with a belt as he tried to escape into a taxi. Plans for retaliation began circulating on WhatsApp and Telegram. Mayor Femke Halsema had already banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations near the stadium. The city was tense in a way the police were not fully ready for.

Kickoff was 9 p.m. Inside the stadium, a moment of silence for the victims of the 2024 Spanish floods was interrupted by Maccabi fans whistling and chanting anti-Palestinian slogans. Outside, by 11:30 p.m., the first attacks on Maccabi supporters were under way around the Dam. Walking between Station Square and Spui, some Maccabi rioters armed themselves with wooden boards and pipes from a nearby construction site, chasing and beating men they found. Then the violence reversed direction. Taxi drivers and youths on scooters - many believing rumours that Mossad agents were among the visiting fans - tracked Maccabi supporters through the streets. The man on the ground shouting "I'm not Jewish" was caught in that wave. The police shifted strategy at 12:25 a.m., moving from arresting attackers to protecting Maccabi fans, busing them in groups to their hotels. By 3 a.m. most were inside. The hunting had largely stopped, but the city had not.

Within hours, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof called the attacks antisemitic and said the country had failed its Jewish community. King Willem-Alexander invoked the Second World War: "We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again." Mayor Halsema initially used the word "pogrom." Within days she walked it back, saying she regretted the word as it was being used to attack Dutch Moroccans and Muslims, and that the first reports had not revealed how the Maccabi supporters had behaved before the match. Israeli officials denounced "barbaric and antisemitic" assaults; Netanyahu sent eight El Al rescue flights, ferrying 2,000 Israelis home. Dutch photographer Annet de Graaf's footage of Israeli supporters attacking Amsterdammers was first widely captioned as the opposite. The Guardian, The New York Times, DW, and Tagesschau later issued corrections. Both things had happened, often to different people on different streets. Both kept being denied or used.

Amsterdam banned demonstrations for three days, then extended the ban four more. A bomb threat at a synagogue turned out to be false. Calls to attack mosques circulated online. A local Kristallnacht commemoration was cancelled by anti-Zionist organisers who said they no longer trusted the authorities to keep them safe - a heavy thing to say in this city, on this date, about this event. On 13 November, police were filmed attacking pro-Palestinian protesters in Dam Square; Halsema launched an inquiry into whether the violence followed official orders, then lifted the protest ban the next day, calling it "untenable." Far-right politician Geert Wilders used the riots to push for the closure of Salafist mosques. State Secretary Nora Achahbar resigned, citing cabinet polarisation, and nearly took the four-party coalition with her. Police counted 122 suspects, around ten of them Maccabi fans. Sixteen people have been convicted of offences including public violence and downplaying the Holocaust.

When the Maccabi supporters landed at Ben Gurion, video showed some still chanting the racist slogans they had brought to Amsterdam. A rabbinical student in the city tried to thread a hard needle: "We don't know that the people who got attacked last night were those same people who chanted racist chants. There is real evidence that people went 'Jew hunting.'" Both sentences were true. A Jewish community organiser, Jelle Zijlstra, condemned the antisemitic attacks and the Maccabi hooligans in the same Instagram post. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry condemned the violence and the desecration of its flag. France 24 noted that no European leader had publicly condemned the anti-Arab chants. A month later, when the dust had settled on the diplomacy, Amsterdam still carried what had happened there - not a single story, but two, on streets that pass through each other.