The period 2000-2010 is marred by a number of headline-grabbing incidents involving mainly male youngsters, such as disrupting the 4 May Remembrance of the Dead, shouting ‘Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas’ during demonstrations, and harassing Jews on the street. From the first news items in October 2000, ‘the street’ has played a role in the interpretation of these joint pro-Palestinian protests and anti-Jewish provocations. The commotion about the riotous atmosphere surrounding the demonstrations of the Second Intifada followed upon the growing attention, throughout the 1990s, for adolescents’ ‘deviant behaviour’: annoying groups of young people gathering in the street, harassing people, causing disturbances in public transport and committing criminal offences. Over time, a number of larger urban ‘violence spectacles’ had occurred in Amsterdam. Referring to the Moroccan background of the youngsters, one of these, which took place in 1999 in the Amsterdam borough Nieuw-West (‘New West’), has been listed as the only real race riot in the Netherlands.

The incidents cannot be written off as typical youthful inappropriate behaviour, although this certainly explains part of the badgering. Here we consider the post-2000 incidents particularly as part of the troublesome identity politics of second-generation migrants. In France, the well-known publicist and historian George Bensoussan (b. 1952) has used harsh words in describing how society literally and metaphorically was losing ground to youths of North-African descent. Bensoussan considered verbal and physical public racism and antisemitism in schools and in the street the result of failed government policy in the postcolonial decades. The banlieues had become no-go areas where resistance to France's secular culture had become the standard, where antisemitism was part of children's upbringing and where the word ‘Jew’ was an insult. This and the following chapters are concerned with the Dutch urban culture of provocation and protest, and with people without routine access to broadcast and print media but with slogans and banners, songs, pamphlets, videos and internet postings at their disposal to bring their message across. More specifically we shall explore the face-to-face interactions in ‘neighbourhoods of relegation’, as the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls the deprived neighbourhoods in the Western world where ‘a blemish of place is … superimposed on the already existing stigmata traditionally associated with poverty and ethnic origin or postcolonial immigrant status’.