The Israeli soldiers grabbed his arms on each side, Nasir Damaj recalled, marching him through the streets to the blown-out shell of a mosque.

A shaft led to an old underground cave. As they ordered him to climb down, Mr. Damaj said he realized why: He was being used as a human shield.

“They wanted me to scout what was downstairs, to protect them,” Mr. Damaj said.

He said he protested, but the three soldiers and their commander, assault rifles in hand, forced him to investigate what the Israelis later called “an underground combat facility.”

“Be careful,” Mr. Damaj recalled the commander telling him as the soldiers handed him a drone so they could survey the cave. “Don’t break it. It’s expensive.”

The episode, which was corroborated by witnesses, did not take place in Gaza, where Israeli forces have illegally forced Palestinians to carry out dangerous missions to avoid risking the lives of Israeli soldiers in the war there.

It happened in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where, residents say, Israeli forces are adopting tactics similar to the ones they are deploying in Gaza, including airstrikes and the use of Palestinians as human shields.

The 10-day Israeli raid in Mr. Damaj’s densely packed hometown, Jenin, was part of a broader military offensive into Palestinian areas that began in late August and signaled an intensification of Israeli offensives in the West Bank.

Before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli airstrikes on the West Bank were relatively rare, experts said, with only a few confirmed cases.

But during the raids in Jenin and other Palestinian areas beginning in August, the Israeli military reported carrying out about 50 airstrikes on the West Bank.

More than 180 people have been killed in airstrikes on the territory in the past year, including dozens of children, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian human rights group Al Haq. The Israeli military declined to provide a death toll, but contended that “98 percent” of the people killed in airstrikes were “involved in terrorist activities.”

The strikes have caused extensive damage to roads, electricity networks and water and sewage lines. Local, international and United Nations humanitarian workers say Israel has disrupted their relief efforts, while videos verified by The New York Times appear to show Israeli bulldozers blocking emergency vehicles from passing. (The Israeli military said it operated in accordance with international law.)

Instead of calling them raids, residents, aid workers and some experts have likened what is happening in the West Bank to a war.

“We call Jenin a small Gaza,” said Saleem Al-Sade, a member of a local neighborhood council.

As he walked through a neighborhood known as Jenin camp, which started as a refugee camp for Palestinians displaced from their homes in what is now Israel, he pointed out the constant sound overhead of Israeli drones that carry out surveillance and airstrikes.

“It’s a Gazafication of the northern part of the West Bank,” said Nadav Weiman, the director of Breaking the Silence, an advocacy group made up of former Israeli soldiers who say they are collecting testimonies from soldiers who took part in the raids in Jenin and another city, Tulkarm.

Raids into Palestinian areas of the West Bank have become common since the Oct. 7 attacks last year. Beyond the armed drones, bulldozers have ripped up the roads, which the Israeli military says is to unearth explosives buried beneath the pavement.

But the strikes in the past few months were some of the most extensive and deadly in the West Bank in two decades.

The Israeli military described the raids as a “counterterrorism operation” to crack down on Palestinian armed groups and to combat rising attacks against Israelis, including shootings and attempts to set off car bombs. The violence has accompanied a surge in attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers who often operate with impunity.

In its operations in the West Bank, the Israeli military said it had killed or detained dozens of fighters, confiscated explosives and destroyed command and control centers. It added that it carried out airstrikes “in situations where arrests cannot be made due to real risk to the forces.”

The military’s actions in the West Bank were long shrouded in secrecy, but experts said Israel had largely refrained from conducting airstrikes on the territory since the end of the second intifada, nearly 20 years ago. At times, Israel used attack helicopters in select operations, but experts said that happened in only a few cases that they knew of over the two decades.

The Israeli military’s deployment of armed drones appeared to have been exceedingly rare. Palestinian reports of it emerged in 2022, but only a few cases were confirmed before Oct. 7, 2023.

Since then, Israeli forces have carried out dozens of strikes in northern areas of the West Bank, largely concentrated in the cities and towns of Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus and Tubas.

In visits to Jenin, Tubas and Tulkarm, The Times encountered multiple accounts of Palestinians being forced to perform potentially dangerous missions for Israeli soldiers. The destruction from blasts was widespread, leaving families grappling with the losses of their loved ones in rapid succession.

Israeli forces conducted an airstrike on Aug. 26 in the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm on what it described as an “operations room,” killing five people, including a 15-year-old, Adnan Jaber, whom Israel accused of manufacturing explosives.

“Immediately, the Israeli news announced they had killed a terrorist,” said Aysar Jaber, Adnan’s father. “But he was a young kid, not a terrorist.”

His son had been taking classes to become a barber, Mr. Jaber said. “He had about two weeks left, and he was killed.”

On Aug. 28, an Israeli aircraft struck what the military said were militants in an alleyway in the Faraa refugee camp. Residents recounted how a home was hit, as well, killing two brothers, Muhammad Masoud Muhammad Naja, 17, and Murad Masoud Muhammad Naja, 13, and critically injuring a third brother and the boys’ father.

In September, the Israeli military said its aircraft had struck “terrorists who hurled explosives and shot at the security forces” and had “eliminated” a person “armed with an explosive device.”

Residents said that Israeli soldiers had shot Majed Fida Abu Zeina, 17, and had fired upon ambulances that tried to rescue him, ultimately using a bulldozer to dump his body outside the camp.

“The soldiers are doing whatever they want,” said his mother, Amal Abu Zeina.

The raids in Jenin and other cities over 10 days killed 51 people, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Seven children were among those killed, according to the United Nations.

On the morning of Aug. 28, when Israeli forces launched their raids into Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, Israel Katz, posted on social media, “We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza.”

Human rights groups and aid workers are warning about what they call the dangerous parallels.

“We all have this sense that the pattern of Gaza, the modus operandi, is being applied in the West Bank, and it’s very worrisome,” said Allegra Pacheco, who leads a consortium of Western-backed aid groups in the West Bank.

“The current Israeli government’s objectives in the West Bank aim to force Palestinians out of targeted areas using the same Gaza type of massive force, weaponry and destruction,” she added.

U.N. officials, warning of “lethal warlike tactics” in the West Bank, tried to get into Jenin to carry out an assessment but were denied access by the Israeli authorities, the U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said in September.

During the raids, Mr. Damaj’s mother, Amal Damaj, 48, said, “I was so afraid.”

She added, “These are the most intense raids I’ve ever seen, I’ve ever experienced.”

Once in the cave, Mr. Damaj recounted how the only light came from the drone in his hands.

From above, the commander watched the live feed on an iPad and yelled out instructions on where to go and what to approach, Mr. Damaj said.

Seemingly satisfied that it was safe, the three soldiers and the commander joined Mr. Damaj in the cave and interrogated him, demanding to know the location of members of armed Palestinian groups.

“I don’t know; I don’t get involved,” Mr. Damaj said he told them.

“‘You’re a liar; you’re living in the neighborhood of the terrorists,’” he said the commander yelled at him. “‘Speak the truth or I’m going to shoot you in the legs.’”

After more than two hours, he said, they let him go. The next day, the Israeli military returned and blew up the cave.

In response to questions about two cases involving the use of human shields in Jenin, including Mr. Damaj, the Israeli military said, “The incidents mentioned in the inquiry appear to contradict I.D.F. orders.” It added that it did not have enough information to confirm or deny whether the episodes took place.

It did confirm an action involving the cave, however, saying “an underground combat facility located beneath a mosque was destroyed.”

In 2005, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the military’s use of civilians as human shields violated international law and banned the practice.

“You cannot exploit the civilian population for the army’s military needs, and you cannot force them to collaborate with the army,” Ahron Barak, then chief justice, wrote in the ruling.

But Palestinians in the West Bank say the practice never stopped.

Ahmed Bilalo said Israeli forces had given him a lighter and ordered him to torch the strings holding up the curtained tarps above the narrow alleyways of Jenin camp, which fighters often use to obscure themselves from view.

“If I said, ‘No,’ I knew they would beat me up,” he said.

Mr. Weiman, who leads Breaking the Silence, the advocacy group of former Israeli soldiers, said the overall military approach being used in the West Bank was known as the “Dahiya doctrine,” a reference to Israel’s flattening of the Dahiya, the collection of neighborhoods in southern Beirut that is a Hezbollah stronghold, during its 34-day war in Lebanon in 2006.

The tactic creates disproportionate damage to civilian infrastructure and is aimed at trying to cause so much damage and destruction that civilians turn against armed groups in their areas, he said.

“That kind of pressure wasn’t imposed on villages and towns in the West Bank until very recently,” he said.

The Israeli military rejected his assessment, saying, “The claim that the I.D.F. deliberately causes harm to civilian infrastructure is false.” Instead, it has long accused Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups of embedding themselves in civilian areas.

The day after the Israeli military forced Mr. Damaj into the cave, it returned and ordered Khalid Salih, 59, a school attendant, and his wife to leave their home before it was blown up, the couple said.

When they returned after the explosion, Mr. Salih said, the shock at seeing their home destroyed felt as if someone had punched him in the head. The house is uninhabitable.

The mosque above the cave had already been destroyed by an airstrike, killing four people, according to residents. Israel’s military said at the time that it was targeting an underground “terror compound” beneath the mosque being used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad to organize an imminent attack.

Aseel Mustafa Salih, who is married to Mr. Salih’s nephew and lived in an adjacent apartment, was asleep at home with her husband and two young children when the mosque was struck.

“I woke up and thought our house was the one that was struck,” she said, adding that the airstrike broke some of their windows.

Downstairs, Mr. Salih and his wife were thrown from their beds and across the room from the blast, he said.

Half an hour after the Oct. 22 strike, Ms. Salih said, she received a text message from the Israeli military instructing her to leave the area: “You are in a place that is not safe.”

Hiba Yazbek and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

Authoritarian governments are not known for taking kindly to criticism. And in Egypt, official skins can be especially thin: Deepening repression has muffled most dissent and sent tens of thousands of perceived political opponents to jail, including one for posting a doctored photo of the president with Mickey Mouse ears.

But this month, Egypt found itself facing an opponent it could not silence so easily.

“Cairo Airport: Is There a Worse Major Airport?” the travel blogger Ben Schlappig pondered in a no-holds-barred post on his website, One Mile at a Time. He cited the “actively hostile and rude” staff, the “endless requests for tips,” the “disorder” in line, the “weak” dining options and the “yuck” lounges.

“My visits have varied from inconvenient and disorganized, to outright chaotic,” he wrote. “I just can’t think of a single redeeming quality about the airport.” As if salting the wound, he ended by comparing Cairo’s airport unfavorably with that of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, with which Egypt is locked in a yearslong dispute over water rights.

It was a verdict almost guaranteed to enrage Egypt’s government, which is making a concerted push to double its tourism numbers, trying to reach 30 million annual visitors by 2028. Besides employing one in 12 Egyptian workers, the tourism industry delivers desperately needed foreign currency to a country reeling from a prolonged economic crisis.

New luxury hotels are going up around Cairo and Egypt’s sunny beach destinations. The government has announced plans to refurbish historic attractions. And a long-awaited new museum of antiquities is opening in stages — and to positive reviews — next to the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Against this march of progress, Mr. Schlappig’s complaints might seem like a minor annoyance. Yet Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry reacted with fury, issuing a more than 1,100-word response this past week, upbraiding Mr. Schlappig for his “unfounded, destructive accusations” and suggesting it was prepared to take legal action.

As evidence, it laid out a step-by-step accounting of the blogger’s most recent visit to the airport, drawn from what the ministry called a thorough review of security camera footage. From his first security scan to his arrival at a gate, it said, all went smoothly, without any contentious interactions with staff.

By turns self-congratulatory, suspicious and threatening in tone, the ministry defended the airport’s quality, saying it holds “nearly” four stars from an independent evaluator. It cast doubt on Mr. Schlappig’s complaints, asserting, “the photo of the bathroom he posted does not correspond to the bathroom he used.” It questioned his choices, asking, “Is it reasonable for a passenger to visit two lounges before a single flight?” Finally, it ended by accusing him of harboring sinister motives, saying the sole purpose of his visit appeared to be “undermining Cairo Airport.”

But the blogger quickly fired back, saying he had based his assessment on many visits, not only the last. In a rebuttal, he said he had photographed the relevant bathroom on a previous visit and had spent a few hours in Cairo on his way to Ethiopia, not to expose the airport.

“This is perhaps the most bizarre response I’ve ever seen from a government to any negative story I’ve written,” wrote Mr. Schlappig. “I know Egypt isn’t necessarily the most pro-free speech place on earth, but I wasn’t expecting a Pyongyang-esque response,” he added, referring to the capital of North Korea.

Despite the many reasonably priced premium fares available from Cairo that had previously brought him there, he said he would be avoiding Egypt for the foreseeable future. (Mr. Schlappig did not respond to requests for comment.)

Online, it has never been hard to find other travelers saying they are done with Egypt. An American YouTuber who reviews food was similarly uncomplimentary after he and his equipment were detained on arrival in Egypt in 2022, posting a video titled, “NIGHTMARE Egypt Food Tour!! POLICE Shut Us Down!!” He advised his 11 million subscribers, “Don’t come here!”

The latest saga drew heavy sighs from some in Egypt’s tourism industry.

“Unfortunately, everything published on social media affects tourists,” said Mina Samir, a longtime tour guide.

But Egypt may not need to worry too much about Mr. Schlappig.

A record-breaking 7.1 million tourists visited Egypt in the first half of this year, according to official figures, apparently undeterred by the war in the next-door Gaza Strip and other regional turmoil. Attractions like the new museum, as well as growing interest in Egypt’s deserts and historical sites beyond the pharaonic ones, were likely to keep boosting the flow, Mr. Samir and other tour guides said.

But, they said, bureaucracy and unqualified guides — and, yes, a disorganized airport — still presented obstacles.

Some pro-government users on social media, as well as government-aligned media outlets, dismissed the complaints, as did travelers who said they enjoyed their Egyptian travels.

But others lamented what they said was a self-inflicted injury.

“All the Egyptian media are scrambling to defend Egypt’s sad airport,” a Facebook user named Mohamed el-Gazzar posted. “Guys, tourism is the only thing that works well these days … we don’t need this right now.”

“A mamacita since she was 14,” the song says in Spanish, with a chorus that repeats: “And even though that little baby has an owner, she goes out whenever she wants.”

These lyrics from a recent reggaeton hit have set off a firestorm after eight of Colombia’s biggest artists banded together and released the song this month. The track, which includes global superstars Karol G, J Balvin and Maluma, is called “+57,” a reference to Colombia’s country telephone code.

Commercially, the song was a hit. It has been streamed more than 35 million times worldwide, and immediately shot up to the top spot on Spotify in Colombia, where it remains.

But it has also drawn outrage over lyrics that many Colombians say sexualize children, setting off a fierce debate between those who say the song reinforces negative stereotypes about Colombia and those who say the genre is being unfairly attacked.

Many music experts say “+57” received more attention than most reggaeton songs because of the collection of prominent artists involved and because it was branded as if it represented Colombian culture.

Over the past two decades, Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, has emerged as a center of reggaeton, a genre with dance-hall and hip-hop elements that was born in Panama and popularized by Puerto Rican artists.

At the same time, Medellín has also become known as a hub for drugs, partying and sex tourism, a reputation that many Colombians say reggaeton lyrics help reinforce.

In the song, “+57,” a woman hides from her boyfriend the fact that she is partying until the early hours of the morning — not an unusual subject matter for the genre.

But it is the words that refer to the woman as attractive “since she was 14” that have provoked the most indignation. References to drugs and explicit remarks about women’s bodies in the song have also upset many Colombians.

The country’s culture minister, Juan David Correa, in an interview, called the song “banal, childish” and “inconsequential,” and said it perpetuated the idea that Colombia is “a poor, precarious country, where we can treat women as persons of lesser value and sell a city as a big open-air brothel.”

The director of the country’s child welfare agency, in a video on X, said “the song reveals a pattern of crime” of sex trafficking that puts children at risk. Lawmakers have proposed a bill punishing artists who promote explicit lyrics and have signed a petition asking Karol G to take down the song from digital platforms.

Even President Gustavo Petro weighed in, writing, “In every artistic genre there is art but also ignorance.”

Many criticized Karol G in particular, one of the few prominent female reggaeton artists who through her sex-positive lyrics has become a symbol of women’s empowerment and sexual liberation.

Her smash hit “Bichota” repurposed a Puerto Rican term for a drug kingpin — “bichote” — to mean, according to her reinterpretation, a “boss bitch.”

She has also founded a women’s empowerment organization that provides scholarships to “women in vulnerable situations,” including those who have served time in prison and teenage mothers.

Within days of the release of “+57,” the lyrics were changed, without any explanation given, to “since she was 18,” and Karol G had apologized on Instagram.

She wrote that the lyrics “were taken out of context,” but added: “I take responsibility and I realize that I still have a lot to learn. I feel very affected and I apologize from my heart.”

Other artists on the track, including J Balvin, Blessd and Ryan Castro, however, have stood by the song.

“If you don’t like the song,” said the singer-songwriter Blessd in one Instagram video, “don’t listen to it.”

Reggaeton has been a polarizing musical style since it first took off in Puerto Rico in the 1990s, said Christopher Tibble, a Colombian journalist who has researched the genre’s history.

The songs often describe the social conditions of the marginalized communities the genre emerged from and their political critiques and sexually explicit lyrics have often angered the authorities. The Puerto Rican National Guard even raided music stores to seize records for violating obscenity laws in the 1990s, when reggaeton was still largely underground.

The backlash served mostly to make the genre more popular, helping to spread its appeal across Latin America. As it flourished in Medellín, it became “a little whiter, a little softer, a little more pop,” Mr. Tibble said, while still paying homage to its “more street, more urban, rougher origins.”

Reggaeton songs have, perhaps not surprisingly, spurred controversy in the past.

A 2016 Maluma song about being in love with “four babies” who “always give me what I want” triggered an online petition to remove the song from digital platforms. In 2021, a J Balvin music video that featured Black actors performing as dogs on leashes prompted condemnation from Colombia’s vice president.

But reggaeton’s defenders say a double standard is being applied.

Many more traditional genres, they say, also feature misogynist lyrics but have not come under fire. Diomedes Díaz, known as “the king of vallenato,” a popular Colombian folk music genre, sings in one song about falling in love with a “young girl” and pursuing “females of 20, 15 and 14.”

“But don’t let her be jealous and don’t let her be bold,” he adds, instead favoring a woman “who knows how to iron a shirt.”

Alex Sánchez, who has worked in the reggaeton music industry for 20 years and has produced music videos for several performers on the track, said he listened to the song before it was released and did not think it would generate any controversy.

“I thought it was a normal reggaeton song,” he said. The backlash, he added, reflects a lack of “awareness of what we are giving to the people, to the youth, to the country.”

Nonetheless, he said, the reaction to the song could serve a useful purpose as a “wake-up call” when it comes to writing reggaeton lyrics.

While a healthy debate about misogynistic lyrics across all musical genres is necessary, the fury over one particular song stems from a disdain for reggaeton in general, said Pablito Wilson, the author of “Reggaeton: A Latin Revolution.”

“People who hate it with all their souls believe that this is their great moment of glory to destroy reggaeton,” Mr. Wilson said.

There is a long history, he said, of moral panic about popular music.

“Madonna was super controversial when she came out and nowadays nobody cares,” Mr. Wilson said.

Andrea Sañudo, 36, who works at a logistics company in Medellín, said she had been listening to reggaeton for years. The music, she said, “goes through you” and brings “an enjoyment and relish of my body, of my sensuality.”

“It is part of me,” she added. “All the important moments of my life are marked by a reggaeton song.”

As a Black woman and former social worker in poor neighborhoods, she said she takes issues of exploitation and violence seriously, but is skeptical of the criticism of this song.

“This generalized indignation on the part of certain intellectual sectors is not genuine, it is hypocritical,” she said. “I worked for 12 years in the territory, and I never saw the faces of any of these people in the street with me.”

Reggaeton, she believes, is central to Medellín’s culture.

“Reggaeton is part of our narrative, and we have to be more responsible and ask ourselves what we want reggaeton to say about us,” Ms. Sañudo said. “But that cannot go through this moralistic classist bias, of telling the other everything you listen to is bad.”

Femke Halsema, the mayor of Amsterdam, may have touched off a diplomatic incident last week when she said on a Dutch television show that she regretted having used the word “pogrom” the day after attacks on Israelis in her city surrounding a soccer match.

Since the incidents, which began late on the night before the Nov. 7 game, Ms. Halsema, a member of the Green Party, said she had seen “the word politicized to the point of propaganda.” In response, Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, called Ms. Halsema’s statement “utterly unacceptable.” Referring to the attacks, he said, “There is no other word for this than a pogrom.”

The word “pogrom” described loosely organized, often deadly riots by local Russians or Eastern Europeans against Jews from the 1880s through the end of the Bolshevik Revolution some 40 years later. Though today it is applied to many ethnically or religiously based attacks, it has never shed its original association, and to describe an attack on Jews as a pogrom will always disinter century-old collective memories.

The eagerness of Mr. Saar to reaffirm the word — echoing statements made by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, and Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism — reflected the international Jewish community’s increased sensitivity to antisemitism in the year since Hamas led an attack into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 and kidnapped about 250 others.

At the same time, Ms. Halsema’s hesitance to use “pogrom” amplified the concern that such rhetoric is being deployed to forward an agenda against Muslims. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who also used the word, leads a far-right party that won a plurality of votes last year on a platform that called for ending immigration from Muslim countries, taxing head scarves and banning the Quran. Mr. Wilders has called Moroccan immigrants “scum.”

Using “pogrom,” said Hassnae Bouazza, a Dutch-Moroccan journalist and filmmaker, “legitimizes everything” against Muslim migrants and “establishes that there is fear, there is hatred, and the division in the country grows.”

Keren Hirsch, a Jewish councilwoman in Amsterdam, backed up Ms. Halsema’s newer statement, posting on social media that the “real problem” was “Jew-hatred,” adding, “And no, you don’t fight that with Muslim-hatred.”

“Pogrom” has a historical association with European antisemitism, inflicted in czarist Russia and elsewhere on largely defenseless Jews. The antisemitic attacks in Amsterdam had a different context: international outrage over Israel’s destructive war in Gaza that followed Hamas’s attack.

Even aside from the Dutch situation, there is a concern for many in the Jewish community and beyond that using “pogrom” is inaccurate or inappropriate at a time when most Jews live either in liberal democracies that are committed to protecting their rights as minorities or, of course, in a sovereign Jewish state with a famously well-armed military.

The “pogrom” reference, after all, is self-consciously a throwback. “As a friend said, an ancestral memory was activated — ‘This is a pogrom, I’m in danger,’” said Jelle Zijlstra, a Dutch theater director who works with the liberal Dutch Jewish group Oy Vey.

The hard-wired response the word provokes, Mr. Zijlstra added, is precisely why it should be used with caution. “This fearmongering and messaging that pushes these buttons with us, it works,” he said. “It works to make people afraid, to see reality in a grim way, in which other minorities are your enemy.”

Plainly more than semantics is at stake. In 2024, to call something a pogrom — the word does not change in Dutch, Hebrew or English from the original Russian — is to say that a period of history that was believed over is not.

A History of Destruction

Jewish history rhymes, according to Jews. Participants in Passover Seders imagine that they themselves were freed from the pharaoh’s yoke. Jewish tradition teaches that the two ancient temples in Jerusalem were destroyed on the same calendar day, more than six centuries apart. A few months ago, an Israeli sketch comedy show concretized Jewish memory with a decidedly not-funny skit, “Never Again All Over Again,” that depicted seven survivors of antisemitic massacres spanning 2,000 years describing their experiences, concluding with Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack — which itself has been compared to a pogrom.

So when Israelis were targeted on the streets of a city whose most famous attractions include Anne Frank’s secret annex, days before the anniversary of the 1938 Nazi-instigated riots known as Kristallnacht (in Germany often referred to as “Reichspogromnacht”), there was a natural instinct to connect the present to the past.

The resonant analogue was the pogrom. The Russian term, probably derived from the word for thunder, originally described attacks on Jewish settlements in modern-day Ukraine in the early 1880s in the wake of the assassination of Czar Alexander II. A second wave of pogroms occurred around 1905. The third, and deadliest, came during the Russian civil war roughly a decade later.

The most infamous pogrom took place in 1903 in Kishinev, a landlocked city in the Russian province of Bessarabia. (Today it is known as Chisinau and is the capital of Moldova, a small former Soviet republic.) Over two days that April, amid false rumors of Jews committing ritual murder, 49 Jews were killed, dozens were raped, hundreds were injured; synagogues, shops and property were desecrated, looted, razed.

“Prior to Buchenwald and Auschwitz, no place-name evoked Jewish suffering more starkly than Kishinev,” the Stanford University historian Steven J. Zipperstein wrote in his 2018 book, “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.”

A lesson many Jews took from Kishinev — where the authorities failed to prevent the massacre — was that they could not rely on others to protect them. As various nationalisms swept the decaying empires of Central and Eastern Europe, a Jewish nationalism seemed logical.

A representative from Kishinev’s Jewish community spoke months later at the Sixth Zionist Congress. The Russia-born poet Hayim Nahman Bialik’s landmark response to Kishinev, “In the City of Slaughter,” was composed the following year not in Russian or Yiddish but Hebrew, the language of a revitalized Jewish nationalism.

“The pogroms are the modern root of political Zionism — that without a state there are no guarantees, that you can’t rely on the good will of other countries,” said Jonathan Rynhold, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

“When you read, ‘Here comes the state of Israel with airplanes to fly you home,’” he added, “it’s a vindication of the basic Zionist ideal.”

‘I Don’t See Why This Is Not a Pogrom’

When scholars debate polarizing terms like “apartheid” or “genocide,” they have recourse to international legal definitions. “Pogrom,” by contrast, is just a word. “The Oxford English Dictionary,” said Daniel B. Schwartz, a professor of history and Judaic studies at George Washington University, “doesn’t have an army.”

On the night of Wednesday, Nov. 6, some fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, a prominent club that had traveled to Amsterdam to play the Dutch squad Ajax in a league soccer match, chanted incendiary and racist slogans, pulled down a Palestinian flag and attacked a cab. Palestinian solidarity has been amply displayed in Amsterdam during the past year of a war that has killed tens of thousands of Gazans, including many women and children.

The same night, Amsterdam cabdrivers — many of whom are of Moroccan or Turkish heritage — answered a call spread over apps such as Telegram to gather outside a casino holding hundreds of Israeli fans. A security guard at the casino promised to tip others off should the fans show up again. “Tomorrow after the game in the night,” a participant replied, “part two of Jew hunt.”

After the match the next night, Israeli fans were assaulted in hit-and-run attacks. Online videos indicate that victims were targeted for being Israeli or Jewish. Five Israelis were hospitalized and discharged, and there were a few dozen injuries, said the police, who detained more than 60 people (including some from Israel).

The Dutch justice and security minister distinguished the attacks from the type of hooliganism that too often barnacles onto European soccer, saying, “There was a kind of manhunt for individual supporters moving around the city.”

“I don’t see why this is not a pogrom,” said Elissa Bemporad, a professor at Queens College who specializes in East European Jewish history. A pogrom, Ms. Bemporad said, involves several perpetrators assaulting victims chosen because they belong to a subordinate group, often ethnic. It appears that in Amsterdam, not just the most aggressive Maccabi fans but also any Israelis were targeted. And not all pogroms have fatalities.

The inciting and violent behavior of the Maccabi fans does not mean that what happened next cannot be considered a pogrom, scholars said. Russian pogroms often flared during moments of political crisis amid rumors that Jews had committed provocations, Ms. Bemporad said. During the deadliest stretch of pogroms in the years of the Russian Civil War, pogromists affiliated with the White Army sometimes had good reason to believe that the Jewish communities they attacked had Red sympathies.

“It was not uncommon — even typical — for pogroms in Russia and elsewhere to be blamed on Jews,” Mr. Zipperstein said. “But nothing justified then — and nothing can be said to minimize today — the haunting significance of the attacks on the streets of Amsterdam on any passer-by who might be Israeli or Jewish.”

One paradox of contemporary uses of the word is that the target is often not Jews. In recent years, local officials and rights activists have described as pogroms attacks of ethnic minorities in Kosovo (against Serbs); in Myanmar (against Rohingya Muslims); in Chemnitz, Germany (against Muslim migrants); and in Ukraine (against Roma).

In fact, most scholars agree that a pogrom could be perpetrated by Jews. Observers sympathetic to Palestinians, including some Israelis, have called an attack last year by Israelis on the town of Huwara, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a pogrom. In 1983, an official Israeli commission said attacks committed by Christian militias the previous year at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon were “massacres and pogroms” for which Israeli leaders deserved “indirect blame.”

‘Caught in the Middle’

Jonathan Dekel-Chen has a cruelly unique vantage on the wisdom of comparing older Jewish tragedies to modern ones. A professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he is an authority on East European Jewry. He is also a member of a kibbutz that Hamas attacked a year ago and the father of a hostage, Sagui, 36, taken that day and believed to be alive in Gaza.

Comparing Oct. 7 to the Holocaust and other antisemitic attacks that predated Israel’s founding in 1948, Mr. Dekel-Chen argued earlier this year in a Times opinion essay, obscured the existence of a sovereign state that ensures Jews are no longer undefended, deflecting responsibility from Israel’s government for failing to prevent the attacks and retrieve the hostages.

He feels similarly about the use of “pogrom” to describe the attacks in Amsterdam, he said in an interview.

“Using the term liberally allows Jews in general and Israelis in particular to turn off their brains in terms of understanding what has happened here,” he said.

“Not to excuse what happened — it seemed not just anti-Zionist but anti-Jewish, probably antisemitic, which should be condemned and dealt with,” he added. “Labeling it a ‘pogrom’ enables us not to think about root causes.”

A modern strain of conservative Jewish thought finds one all-consuming root cause for anti-Jewish incidents: ineradicable antisemitism. The most prominent exponent of this perspective is Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, who in his declaration of war on Oct. 7, 2023, quoted the famous Bialik poem about Kishinev.

In his worldview, there is no negotiating with modern-day antisemites, much as there was no negotiating with the Amalekites, the biblical antagonists to whom Mr. Netanyahu has more than once compared contemporary enemies of Israel and Jews.

But for Israeli critics of the current government like Mr. Dekel-Chen, deploying “pogrom” short-circuits the contemplation of other, more contingent developments that may have empowered Israel’s enemies.

And for liberal Jews in the diaspora, dependent on their societies’ commitments to pluralism, vigilance against antisemitism must be paired with a concern for minority groups even when the minority group is not the Jews.

“Dutch Jews feel caught in the middle,” said Jonathan Eaton, who runs an E.U.-funded group that seeks to fight European antisemitism by promoting Jewish-Muslim dialogue, and belongs to the Amsterdam synagogue that Otto Frank, Anne’s father, helped establish after World War II. “On the left, people victim-blame. On the right, they blame every Moroccan — saying, ‘There are some good ones.’”

He added: “When you have one section of society intentionally hunt out another section, that is a pogrom. When one section feels so emboldened that they’re going to get away with it, that’s a pogrom. That’s dangerous for Jews, for Muslims, for everybody.”

Claire Moses contributed reporting.