A video is circulating on social media in which a large crowd can be seen holding a procession on the street. In the video, they are singing a song that has abusive words against Muslims and holding Israeli flags.
The video is shared with the claim that it shows Jewish people in Amsterdam celebrating the establishment of a new Jewish state in Ukraine.
A social media user shared the video with a caption that reads, “Welcome to the Balfour Declaration 2.0. Ukraine is turning into the new Israel. Jews flooded the streets of Amsterdam, chanting, ‘We will rape white women and drink your blood’.”
SouthCheck found that the claim is false. The viral video is from 2016 and shows Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club fans celebrating before a match.
On a reverse image search, we found an similar video of the clip uploaded on YouTube on October 24, 2016. The video was shared with a caption that reads, “Maccabi Fanatics - Alkmaar Away.”
On searching with Google Lens, we found the image of the hotel (a building with flag in the background) was shared on Wikimedia, named Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky situated in Amsterdam.
We compared the viral video with the image of Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky and could ascertain the viral video of this location.
We further found that the video was also shared by a Facebook page on October 20, 2020, with a caption hinting that the video is of 2016 when Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were celebrating in Amsterdam ahead of their match against AZ in Alkmaar!
Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club is an Israeli professional football club. We found that there was a match between AZ Alkmaar and Maccabi Tel-Aviv in AFAS Stadion, Alkmaar, on October 21, 2016, in which the latter won.
We found the video of the celebrations uploaded on YouTube (links here and here) with their captions stating that it shows the public’s reactions before the match between AZ Alkmaar and Maccabi Tel Aviv.
Therefore, we conclude that the viral video is old.
We found that in 2023, Ukraine was home to 45,000 Jewish people, making it the country with the fourth-largest Jewish population in the world.
The conflict between Ukraine and Russia has significantly impacted the Jewish community. Since the outbreak of hostilities, many Ukrainian Jewish persons have emigrated to Israel seeking safety and stability. In 2022, Israel’s Ministry of Immigration and Absorption issued a call encouraging Ukrainian Jewish persons to immigrate. By August 2024, out of an estimated 30,000 Jewish persons who immigrated to Israel since October 2023, 900 were from Ukraine.
However, in 2019, after the victory of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine’s presidential elections, the country became the only one in the world besides Israel whose president and prime minister are Jewish.
