Amsterdam street slang for police that signals local knowledge—informal vocabulary born from centuries of Hebrew influence on Dutch urban language.
Ibahesh is what you call the police when you're standing on an Amsterdam street corner and want everyone nearby to know exactly what you mean without saying the formal word. It's street vocabulary that marks you as someone who knows the city's linguistic codes—not tourist Dutch, but the language that evolved in neighborhoods where Hebrew words got absorbed into slang centuries ago and never left.
The word traveled a strange path to get here. It started as Hebrew 'chaverim'—meaning friends or comrades—which transformed into Dutch street slang 'gabbers' with the same meaning, then twisted again into 'ibahesh' specifically for police. The irony runs deep: a word for friendship becoming the term for authority figures. That linguistic flip isn't accidental—it's street culture's way of maintaining distance from power by mockingly renaming it.
What makes ibahesh stick around isn't just its Hebrew roots but what it signals about who's speaking. Amsterdam absorbed words from its Jewish community and wove them so deeply into street language that they outlasted the demographic shifts that brought them there. Using ibahesh isn't hostile necessarily—it's just the word you reach for when you're talking about cops in contexts where formal language would sound wrong. It's linguistic territory-marking, showing you know which Amsterdam you're in.