I was hunted down and attacked in Amsterdam – will I ever leave Israel again?

Magnezi flew to Holland with his brother and cousin for the game against Ajax in November 2024. On match day they joined Maccabi fans in Dam Square “drinking beer, singing songs, having fun”.

That sense of fun quickly dissipated. As they walked off to find a pub, strangers hurled insults, both in Arabic – “Ibn Sharmuta” (son of a whore) and English: “F**king Zionist; Free Palestine”.

“I think they wanted us to start something, but we just kept going,” Magnezi says.

As he walked to the train station to get to the match, one hostile group made threatening gestures, passing thumbs across their throats like a blade.

After his side lost 5-0 to Ajax, the sizable police presence evident before the game vanished on the way back from the Johan Cruyff Arena.

“There were no police officers anywhere in the streets. Not even one.”

As Magnezi and his family, wearing yellow Maccabi shirts and scarves, looked for pizza they noticed “cars driving really fast and full volume Arabic music”. The abuse was still only verbal: “F**k you, you lost; free Palestine”.

Then the evening exploded into violence.

They walked through a group of four or five people: “When they passed me, I didn’t look back, but after a few seconds, I started hearing yelling behind me, and turned around and I saw my brother falling.”

His brother sustained a serious eye injury. Magnezi leapt to his side. “I just ran to him, trying to rescue him from the situation.” It was now Magnezi who was assaulted.

“When I came to help him, they started kicking me. They pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the hips. Then my cousin managed to pull us out from this mess, I don’t remember exactly how and we ran.”

The assailants stole Magnezi’s phone and his scarf, which they taunted him with as they ran away.

Bruised and badly shaken, the trio ran a gauntlet through the streets. They were targeted with fireworks and a large taxi-van attempted to run them down. Fearful of being followed, they stopped to remove their Maccabi scarves and other insignia.

Returning to their hotel at 2.30am, they quickly left for the airport. Magnezi’s mother, a travel agent, arranged a rescue flight for the brother because of his injured eye, the others following soon after.

“I thought when when we came back into Israel, that everybody understood what happened there.”

Indeed, a trial in Amsterdam heard how the “Jew hunt” was planned, yet in Birmingham politicians defending the ban claimed Maccabi fans were the threat.

Magnezi explains the outrageous misportrayal of events in Amsterdam: it is because it is “popular now to not like Israel, and be on the Palestinian side”.

He is adamant he did not join the few Maccabi fans responsible for disorder and offensive chants.

“Everywhere you have this minority; they are extreme so you can hear them more than regular people, but they don’t represent anything,” Magnezi said.

He adds emphatically: “We have nothing to do with what happened to us in Amsterdam.”

There is no doubt in his mind in what lies behind the ban: “I really think it is antisemitism.”

Regardless of the ban, he wouldn’t have travelled to Birmingham for the match against Aston Villa last month because of his “anxiety” at the thought of leaving Israel again.

“The real effect of what happened in Amsterdam to my life has been seeing a psychologist for the past year after the incident.”

Even now, he cannot watch footage of the attacks: “I can’t see videos like this, especially after October 7 when we all saw graphic footage, so I try to avoid it. I don’t like seeing it.”