Bullying, ignoring, silencing, humiliating – who has no experience with it, as a perpetrator, victim, but especially as a spectator? I recently had to think about the death of Rinus Israel, renowned football player. The necrologies reported that it was a sober social man outside the field.
It will, but in my memory the memory of the wider experiences of Ruud Geels (1948-2023), another football player from that time. When he was awarded, Geels told Frits Barend and Henk van Dorp in Free Netherlands Down in detail what he had experienced with some players at Feyenoord and the Dutch national team. Young players were constantly killed, Geels said. “And it didn’t stop, never. Rinus Israel could drift it that way, you could scold it terribly. And I couldn’t stand that at all.” Once Geels scolded back: “Well you have to keep your sarcastic head, big bastard.”
Geels, a modest man, came across Israel again as a reserve with the Dutch national team during the 1974 football World Cup in West Germany. He had to sit at the dining table of Van Hanegem, Keizer, Rep, Krol, Suurbier and Israel every day. The worst teasing spirits were Krol and Suurbier and “to a little lesser extent” Israel.
Geels: “There was an atmosphere of: what should that pimp at our table at the table? (…) You were terribly humiliated at the table. Look, once, okay, but four weeks, three times a day, really, without stopping, that could not be sustained.
In the days after the death of Rinus Israel, when I put that article out Free Netherlands herlas, appeared in Het Parool A revealing story by Hanneloes Pen about the situation at two Amsterdam universities, the UvA and VU. Het Parool spoke with ten Jewish students, teachers and employees of these universities.
Het Parool: “They tell about verbal aggression of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, hiding their identity, skipping lectures, a sense of exclusion and loneliness. They do not feel welcome at their university and experience the demonstrations and numerous incidents as a tough period.”
“They completely ignore me,” says Jewish-Israeli Sara (22), Student Social and Behavioral Sciences at the UvA. “A group of five fellow students looks at me for a long time when I walk for. (…) We are the oppressor.”
They are two completely different worlds, those of the funny top football players and those of the activist students, but the agreement could not escape me: the inexorable attempt to thank the other. The fact that one of the protagonists in the football world was called Israel at the time is a coincidence that the devil must have made up himself; Without coincidence it is already painful enough.
Ruud Geels also noticed at the time that, although other players did not participate in the harassment, nothing said. Apparently they don’t make that mistake at the VU and UvA. For example, Peter-Paul Verbeek, rector Magnificus of the UvA, told Het Parool: “I clearly want to pronounce that we have known and acknowledge these stories for some time. They hurt-and they matter.”