France-Israel Soccer Match is Overshadowed by Amsterdam Attack

After the recent violence around an Israeli team’s game in Amsterdam, French leaders insisted on proceeding under security with a France-Israel match, and on showing up, themselves.

It was the type of political attention reserved for only the biggest of sporting occasions.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, the prime minister and other political grandees sat in the stands on Thursday to watch the national team play soccer.

But the French side was not chasing a big prize before a packed house. Instead, it was playing a run-of-the-mill match, without its star player Kylian Mbappé, against a mediocre opponent — the type of game that usually attracts scant attention, as demonstrated by the vast empty spaces in the stands at the national stadium just outside Paris.

The reason for the V.I.P. turnout was the opponent, Israel’s national team, and what was happening on the Stade de France field was very much overshadowed by what was happening away from it. The violence a week earlier in Amsterdam surrounding a soccer match between a Dutch team and a different Israeli squad guaranteed that Thursday’s game would be far more a political event than a sporting one.

As Dutch authorities investigate what they call antisemitic attacks on Israeli fans, as well as incendiary behavior by both sides, French authorities have vowed to prevent such scenes from being repeated here.

The result has been a massive security operation befitting a G20 summit. The security forces that blanketed the vicinity of the stadium in Saint-Denis, at key sites across Paris and throughout the transit system, resembled the operation for the spectacularly successful Olympic Games held here this summer.

The city’s police chief said there would be 4,000 officers deployed for the game, with 2,500 stationed around the stadium itself and the others spread across the city. Another 1,600 private security guards and stewards were on duty at the game, where fans as well as journalists went through several security checks even before entering the stadium.

In contrast, in Amsterdam, for the club game between the Dutch team Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv, there were 800 officers on duty, and more than 3,000 fans from Israel.

“We are a big country. We know how to put on big events like we did during the Olympics. We won’t tremble before this match,” Laurent Nuñez, Paris’s police chief, said during a radio interview Wednesday morning. He was also responsible for the security bubble that cocooned the Israeli Olympic team during the recent Games.

Stores and shops in the vicinity of the stadium were ordered shuttered by 3.45 p.m. — five hours before kickoff. The surrounding streets were largely deserted except for police officers.

No specific threat had been made to the game, and the contingent of Israeli fans was small. The Israeli security council issued an alert telling Israeli citizens to “categorically avoid attending Israeli sports/cultural events abroad,” particularly this Paris match.

But with the heavy security, and the presence of the president and other dignitaries, French authorities wanted to make clear that the event was safe and that no disturbance would be tolerated. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said, “It is out of the question that we take the risk of seeing a repeat” of what occurred in Amsterdam.

Mr. Macron is a die-hard soccer fan, known to post photos of himself congratulating the team in their locker room. But his attendance this time was also meant to send a “message of fraternity and solidarity after the intolerable antisemitic acts that followed the match in Amsterdam,” said a member of his staff in a text message.

“We will yield nothing to antisemitism anywhere,” President Macron told BFMTV on Thursday shortly before the match. “And violence, including within the French Republic, will never prevail.”

He was joined at the game by Michel Barnier, the prime minister, and both of France’s living former presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the American special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, was also planning to attend the match.

Before the game, helicopters thumped overhead and sirens blared, but there were few fans on the concourse leading to the stadium, which would normally be crowded. Police officers seemed to outnumber spectators, and two officers cautioned a fan that the Israeli flag draped across his shoulders could make him a target. Inside the stadium, a mix of jeers and cheers greeted the Israeli anthem.

Hosting Israeli soccer teams has proved problematic for countries across Europe since the Hamas-led attack on Israel of Oct. 7, 2023, and a devastating Israeli response that has fueled widespread anger.

Belgium moved its Nations League home game against the Israeli national team in September to Hungary, after cities across Belgium refused to host it. Italy switched its game against Israel from Florence to Udine, where the occasion was met with pregame pro-Palestinian protests in nearby streets. And Maccabi Tel-Aviv’s next game in Europe has been moved to a neutral venue in Hungary, without fans of either team present, because of security concerns.

French officials said they would not consider moving Thursday’s match, especially in light of the events in Amsterdam, as it would send the wrong signal.

“France does not retreat,” said Mr. Retailleau, the interior minister. “France does not submit, and the France-Israel match will take place where it’s supposed to.”

While condemnation of the incidents in Amsterdam arrived swiftly, a more complex picture of what happened in the Dutch city emerged in the following days.

Videos circulating on social media, verified by The New York Times, showed some Israeli fans chanting racist anti-Arab phrases and defiling a Palestinian flag. After the game, the authorities said that men on scooters and on foot went in search of Israeli fans, punching and kicking them, after social media messages called for targeting Jews.

A police investigation is continuing, and arrests have been made, including of visitors from Israel.

While French leaders unified behind Thursday’s game as an act of solidarity, support for it to go ahead was not universal. A couple of hours before the match, several hundred protesters gathered in a public square to chant slogans about freeing Palestine, wave Palestinian flags and denounce both the match and the French politicians attending it.

“Antisemitism must be combated. But the central question today is the massacre of a population that is being forbidden to survive,” said Jean-Marc Bourquin, 77, who stood near the edge of the peaceful crowd with his electric bicycle. Some said they considered the low turnout to the match to be a virtual boycott.

Even before the Amsterdam attack, the France-Israel match was bound to stir tension in the capital city of a country that is home to Western Europe’s largest populations of Jews and Muslims. The polarization created by events in the Middle East is visible in protests and on posters across the city.

Earlier this month, the organized fan group of France’s best team, Paris Saint Germain, unfurled an enormous and elaborate banner, covering one section of the stands behind a goal, with the words “Free Palestine.”

During the Israel-Hamas war, the number of reported antisemitic acts in France spiked to 1,676 in 2023 from 436 the previous year. So far this year, more than 1,200 such acts have been reported, according to Isabelle Rome, France’s Ambassador for Human Rights.

Other bias offenses increase at a slower pace, according to government figures: Reported anti-Muslim acts rose to 242 last year, from 188 the year before, and “racist and xenophobic” ones climbed to 1,221, from 1012.

Pro-Palestinian protests have become increasingly common in Paris, and political, with the country’s far-left party France Unbowed regularly speaking at them. Earlier this week, the party demanded that neither the soccer game nor a fund-raising gala for a far-right pro-Israel group be allowed to proceed, so as not to send a message of “total impunity” to Israel.

Tension in the city was heightened on Wednesday evening during the gala event, hosted by “Israel is Forever,” and a counterprotest that drew several thousand people, and ended in clashes and the use of tear gas by the police.

The use of force, and tear gas in particular, by French authorities in connection with sporting events has been under scrutiny since a near disaster, when the Stade de France hosted European soccer’s biggest club game, the Champions League final, in 2022. After the game’s ticketing system collapsed, thousands of Liverpool fans found themselves crushed near entrances and the police responded with tear gas. Officials were forced to apologize after initially blaming fans for the problems, leaving many to successfully claim damages.

In 2015, a series of coordinated attacks across Paris claimed by the Islamic State killed 130 people. In one of those attacks, three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the national stadium, packed with soccer fans for a friendly France-Germany match. A plaque to Manuel Dias, a bus driver who had just dropped off fans and was killed in the blast, remains affixed to the stadium’s walls near where he died.

Security concerns in the city have run high ever since, but even so, the show of force for the France-Israel game was rare for a soccer match.

“These are situations the players are not accustomed to,” France coach Didier Deschamps said on Wednesday. “But we have to adapt.”