Femke Halsema, the mayor of Amsterdam, may have touched off a diplomatic incident last week when she said on a Dutch television show that she regretted having used the word “pogrom” the day after attacks on Israelis in her city surrounding a soccer match.
Since the incidents, which began late on the night before the Nov. 7 game, Ms. Halsema, a member of the Green Party, said she had seen “the word politicized to the point of propaganda.” In response, Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, called Ms. Halsema’s statement “utterly unacceptable.” Referring to the attacks, he said, “There is no other word for this than a pogrom.”
The word “pogrom” described loosely organized, often deadly riots by local Russians or Eastern Europeans against Jews from the 1880s through the end of the Bolshevik Revolution some 40 years later. Though today it is applied to many ethnically or religiously based attacks, it has never shed its original association, and to describe an attack on Jews as a pogrom will always disinter century-old collective memories.
The eagerness of Mr. Saar to reaffirm the word — echoing statements made by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, and Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism — reflected the international Jewish community’s increased sensitivity to antisemitism in the year since Hamas led an attack into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 and kidnapped about 250 others.
At the same time, Ms. Halsema’s hesitance to use “pogrom” amplified the concern that such rhetoric is being deployed to forward an agenda against Muslims. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who also used the word, leads a far-right party that won a plurality of votes last year on a platform that called for ending immigration from Muslim countries, taxing head scarves and banning the Quran. Mr. Wilders has called Moroccan immigrants “scum
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