A Context So Sorely Lacking

Jonathan Liew writes:

If social media posts are anything to go by, Tommy Robinson is planning to visit Villa Park next month as a Maccabi Tel Aviv fan. What can possibly have attracted the Luton-born political activist to the Israeli Premier League’s second-placed club? The stylish all-action midfield play of Dor Peretz? The stirring run to the group stages of the 2004-05 Champions League? Perhaps, in the fashion of the club’s former manager Robbie Keane, Robinson’s embrace is simply the fulfilment of a cherished and multifaceted boyhood dream.

But of course there is a natural synergy there too, one we should probably have identified long before the Uefa computer pitted Aston Villa against the club long known in Israel as “the country’s team”, and inadvertently threw a hand grenade into British politics. Like Robinson, Maccabi attracts a fervid following of young men from the far right, who gather at weekends to chant racist and anti-Arab slogans. Like Robinson’s disciples, Maccabi’s fans have occasionally been known to indulge in a little light violence. A decade ago Maccabi fans unveiled a banner reading “refugees (not) welcome”, a refrain with which you can imagine the artist formerly known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon nodding heartily along.

Then there was Maharan Radi, the Israeli international midfielder who after signing for the team was greeted with racist slurs and death threats by members of the Maccabi Fanatics, the club’s ultra group. Anti-Arab graffiti began to appear in the city. Later, many years after leaving the club, Radi would testify that some of his teammates had tried to mediate with some of the more hard-line supporters. A few days later, Radi said, they reported back. “There’s nothing we can do,” they told him. “They just hate Arabs.”

None of this explains on its own the decision by West Midlands police to ban travelling Maccabi fans from their Europa League game against Aston Villa. But it does offer a context so sorely lacking from the incendiary discussion and ill-informed grandstanding that have engulfed the subsequent days. Many Maccabi fans will doubtless have travelled to Birmingham with the sole intention of watching a game of football. But it takes a certain wilful blindness to ignore the likelihood that a significant number will have had other intentions in mind.

Partly this stems from the fact that elite football in England is a largely depoliticised space, that most fanbases are not overtly activist in the manner of many of their foreign counterparts. In Israel, by contrast, football and politics remain deeply intertwined. Traditionally Maccabi teams were associated with the right; Hapoel with the left. And even if this distinction is no longer strictly observed, football in Israel – as with much of civic life – is often an alternative battleground upon which to enact some very familiar feuds.

In 2020, a group of protesters demonstrating against the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was attacked by a group of Maccabi Fanatics wielding batons and broken bottles. Anti-Arab chants and songs are commonplace at home games. A banner displayed at a recent game read “fuck Hamas, fuck St Pauli, fuck Hapoel”: the last of these a reference to their city rivals, the second a small German club famous for its progressive, anti-racist values.

The point here is that to treat this as your common or garden football hooliganism threat is to miss the point. Rather, it is the prospect of targeted, politicised footballing violence that renders this particular case so potentially toxic. Violence of the sort seen in Amsterdam late last year, when travelling fans and local thugs fought in the streets, far from the Johan Cruyff Arena where Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv were playing. Israeli fans, an Arab taxi driver and pro-Palestinian protesters were all targeted and subjected to lawless violence.

Who started it? Who was more to blame? At what precise point did tension, provocation and goading cross the boundary into criminality? Nobody can really be sure, and in any case these are questions whose answers are framed by what you already choose to believe. And in recent days, as politicians from across the spectrum have stampeded to condemn West Midlands police – from the centre to the far right – it is clear what lessons our political class chose to learn from the episode.

Perhaps, given the government’s recent record on policing protest, we should assume it has some classified intelligence on the Maccabi Tel Aviv fanbase that it is regrettably unable to share with us. Perhaps they’ve done a secret straw poll of the Fanatics and concluded that they’re all great lads who just want to see Villa’s Morgan Rogers in the flesh. In which case, it certainly seems to have materialised in a hurry.

Aston Villa put out their statement confirming the police decision at 5.17pm on Thursday. Kemi Badenoch put out her reaction at 8.02pm. Nigel Farage’s statement dropped at 8.58pm. Keir Starmer’s at 9pm. Ed Davey, 9.45pm (must do better). Presumably they all took the time to consult stakeholders, take security briefings and make the required calls to foreign officials before doing so. But the speed of the bandwagon-jumping should at least give us pause.

There is, ironically, a broader cross-border debate to be had about the increasingly sinister securitisation of football fans at matches. After all, Maccabi are by no means the only club to see their supporters banned from European away games. Eintracht Frankfurt fans will not be welcome in Naples this week. Ajax fans were banned from Marseille last month. Even the cancellation of the Tel Aviv derby at the weekend was as much a case of police brutality as fan behaviour, part of a pattern by which Israeli security forces have increasingly been engaged in stoking violence rather than trying to suppress it.

But of course none of this fits neatly into a clicky, media-friendly race-war narrative, fed by social media algorithms and all the usual provocateurs. We are spun the line that a few hundred far-right ultras with a history of violence are somehow representative of all Jews everywhere, in much the same way that the Netanyahu government appoints itself the mouthpiece for an entire religion of 16 million people based around the world, many of whom despise him and actively mobilise against him every day. We are expected to believe in the existence of a hostile antisemitic conspiracy co-hatched by the police and the residents of Birmingham.

And yes, on the face of it this is all fairly small-scale stuff: a decision affecting the fans of one football club in a second-tier game that would scarcely attract the slightest attention otherwise. But at the same time it is a fascinating case study into the instincts of our political and media class. You want concerted international action against Israel for its crimes in Gaza and elsewhere? Good luck with that when you can’t even get a few violent far-right football fans turned away at Birmingham Airport.

The quiet part, of course, is that when Maccabi fans speak out against refugees, chant “death to Arabs”, associate their enemies with Hamas and commit violence in our city centres, there is a small but significant part of our country that tacitly agrees with them, and a much larger part of our country willing to humour them out of expediency.

And really Robinson is just the thin end of the wedge here, the racist canary in the mine, the reductio ad absurdum of an impulse that has long been embedded in our politics. Choosing to stand with the far-right foreign football hooligan against the local police force: this, apparently, is what British patriotism looks like in 2025. Truly, we are through the looking-glass here.

Peter Oborne writes:

Nothing illustrates the cynicism of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s shameless journey from human rights lawyer to war crimes apologist with greater clarity than his decision to take up the cause of the violent racists who support Israeli Maccabi football club.

Scroll back ten years.

The future prime minister is speaking at a meeting of the Camden Palestinian Solidarity Campaign during the 2015 general election campaign. Behind him a banner declares: "Kick Israeli racism out of Fifa".

Last weekend, in a screeching reversal, Starmer launched a campaign to bring Israeli racism to Britain.

His intervention came after West Midlands Police blocked Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending next month’s Europa league match at Aston Villa. The police classified the match as "high risk" following what they called a "thorough assessment".

They stated that the decision was reached on "current intelligence". But they also highlighted the "violent clashes and hate crime offences" which took place during last November’s match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam.

Starmer, a keen football fan, thinks that he knows better than West Midlands Police. 

He doesn’t.

A brutal truth

In a highly unusual Downing Street intervention he announced: "This is the wrong decision", and ordered his ministers to do everything they can to ensure that Maccabi fans can come to Britain.

On Monday, his culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, told MPs that the Starmer government would provide the resources to enable Maccabi fans to attend the match, saying that the original ban on Maccabi supporters "chooses the exclusion" of Jewish people.

It should be understood that Maccabi Tel Aviv is Israel’s oldest and most famous club, dating back to 1909 and Israel’s answer to Manchester United or Liverpool.

There is unfortunately no getting away from the fact that a section of the Maccabi supporter base have an unforgivable record for racism and violence. They’ve been filmed attacking anti-Netanyahu supporters.

Back in 2014, when the club signed an Arab player he was booed and abused by his own fans. In March 2024 they were filmed beating an Arab male unconscious in an Athens street.

In Amsterdam, they took over the streets singing genocidal chants, including "Death to Arabs". They also chanted "Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there."

This was a mocking reference to the fact that in November 2024 more than 17,000 Palestinian children had been killed by the Israeli army since 7 October attacks. The number is much higher today.

Utterly disgusting.

Stoking up tension

Much of the very troubling media and political commentary has claimed that the ban on Maccabi football supporters is a "sectarian" issue, apparently a matter of concern only to Birmingham Muslims.

"Sectarian" has become the dog-whistle term used by politicians and newspaper columnists to signal that Muslims are not truly British.

I disagree.

Maccabi supporters on the streets of Birmingham is not just a Muslim issue.

Anyone with the faintest sense of decency - or even basic patriotism - must be appalled by the prospect of violent hooligans marching through British streets chanting their murderous, obscene and genocidal songs.

Not least of all when Israel has slaughtered more than 68,000 Palestinians, including more than 20,000 children, in the course of the last two years in what most experts today define as a genocide.

Yet, Starmer remains determined to overturn the police ban and welcome the racists who comprise a significant proportion of Tel Aviv Maccabi’s travelling supporters.

It’s the overriding job of a prime minister to calm down division and hatred. Yet Starmer is determined to stoke up the tension.

It’s important to investigate the reasons behind such a reckless and irresponsible behaviour.

Since he was elected prime minister last year, Starmer has turned his back on Labour’s left/progressive base.

Advised by his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, Starmer has chosen instead to aim for the support of far right and conservative voters, especially those sympathetic to Nigel Farage’s Reform party.

There is a logic of sorts to this immoral strategy.

Some Labour voters have defected to Farage’s Reform party. Starmer wants them back. Hence Starmer’s shocking reversion to the racist politics of Enoch Powell, turning on minorities with talk of an "island of strangers".

That also explains the grotesque language about Muslims, including "shaking off the fleas", a phrase used by a Labour insider describing the slew of councillors quitting the party over the party’s policy on Gaza back in December 2023.

This policy also explains Labour’s cultivation of Britain’s far-right, Islamophobic press, and the otherwise bizarre appointment of David Dinsmore, the former editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper, for a senior communications role in government to help win back right-wing voters.

At The Sun, Dinsmore hosted columnist Katie Hopkins, who holds racist views and once labelled asylum seekers as "cockroaches".

It seems that Starmer wasn’t bothered.

A moral abyss

This is the moral abyss into which Starmer has chosen to sink. Rolling out the red carpet for violent Israeli thugs fits neatly into this strategy.

And it has earned the prime minister - who has been excoriated in the media - a very welcome respite after a long period of unpopularity.

Thanks to his intervention on the Maccabi fans affair, he now has the right-wing press on his side. "For once, Sir Keir Starmer understood what’s at stake here," exults columnist Melanie Phillips in today’s Times.

Mike Graham, a presenter on Talk Radio, voiced his support of the prime minister’s intervention: "I'm ashamed of the police in Birmingham. These people have no business in our country. And this bloke, Ayoub Khan, whoever he is, should go back to Pakistan."

Ayoub Khan is the local Birmingham MP who originally petitioned for the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.

As Graham’s repulsive remarks show, over recent days Khan has been subjected to a remorseless campaign of smear and vilification. A campaign that scarcely bothers to conceal its racism.

Mr Khan, it should be stated, is one of the few who emerges unblemished and with his reputation enhanced from the squalid controversy of the last few days.

It’s Starmer who unleashed all this.

He has been playing the politics of hatred. I do not believe these repugnant tactic will help him win votes. The British public are too decent, I feel certain, to fall for the prime minister’s inflammatory interventions.

According to a YouGov poll, a substantial majority of us - 42 percent against 28 percent - think Starmer is wrong.

And overnight it has emerged that Maccabi Tel Aviv itself rejected Starmer’s hideous tactics. In a body blow to the British prime minister, the club announced that it would not be selling Aston Villa tickets to its own fans.

Maccabi explained that "football should be about bringing people together not driving them apart" and that it had "been working tirelessly to stamp out racism within the more extreme elements of our fan base".

We can all agree with that. Sir Keir Starmer owes Ayoub Khan a grovelling apology.

Michael Odoni writes:

The failing in political theatrics that often gives the game away is it tends to be just too orchestrated. I observed this before during the ‘chicken coup’ by the Parliamentary Labour Party against Jeremy Corbyn in 2016. And again more recently when the Parliamentary Conservative Party broke out in revolt against Boris Johnson’s leadership. The orchestration sometimes crosses party lines, and even the ‘neutral’ media will often jump on the same bandwagon.

Ayoub Khan dogpiled

The ludicrous outcry over the one-match ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans attending Villa Park on the 6th of November has given us another disturbing example. Now, the riot in the Tel Aviv derby over the weekend has shown the silliness of the outcry, and the danger of letting the Maccabi fans loose in a city like Birmingham, with its large Islamic community. But before the weekend, MP Ayoub Khan posted a tweet on Twitter/X welcoming the ban, and it was as if the entire chattering classes of the centre and the right piled in to condemn him.

All the major parties had representatives joining in with this unashamed ‘dog-piling’, as well as countless media figures, all lambasting Khan’s entire being, just for saying, in effect, that football hooligans should be stopped. As I pointed out previously, this sudden concern for liberties of hooligans is a startling reversal-of-attitudes on the part of the British Establishment, given its venomous response to the Heysel Stadium Disaster in 1985. But it is also very clear that some form of cross-party-co-ordination was at play, given how everybody from the mainstream seemed to be getting involved.

The fakery of this should already be perfectly obvious to anyone with even one objective brain-cell. The way that those who cast the ban as “antisemitic,” without any reference whatever to the serious hooligan problem that dominates the Maccabi fanbase, is infantile. It is like the class sycophant defending a school bully caught stealing lunch money, by complaining on the bully’s behalf that he is being “picked on” by the teachers, with no acknowledgement of what the bully has done to their classmates.

But this is underlined by the blatant dual attitude to antisemitism when it really happens. It happened to me personally on the Sunday.

At the risk of soiling Underpants

In recent weeks, I have semi-regularly been part of a group of activists who have been defending the Manchester South Hotel. The hotel, which is being used to house refugees while their asylum applications are assessed, has been routinely besieged every Sunday by an extreme right-wing racist brigade since August. The counter-activists have gathered each time to get between the racists and the hotel.

Some of the racists are aware that I am Jewish, and they are rabidly pro-Israel (because they perceive Israel as being a “white” country, as well as a “bastion against Islam”). And because Israel calls itself “The Jewish State” – without getting permission from Jews globally beforehand – the racists assume all Jews just should be Zionists. It is impossible for their primitive brains to process the idea that I am anti-Israel, and they resent the way I distort the simple picture they want to maintain for themselves.

One of the most prominent of the racists, a guy we nickname Captain Underpants because of his uncanny resemblance to that cartoon figure, decided to spend half the day targeting me with invective. He accuses me of looking like Jabba The Hutt, which is a little like Donald Trump accusing Bernie Sanders of sleaze. I can snigger at that, and I do.

Open antisemitic abuse

But also, Captain Pants repeatedly snarled at me that I was a self-hating Jew. Moreover, no fewer than three times, he snapped off a Nazi salute in my direction. This was clearly intended as a threat, suggesting that if he had his way, I would be sent to the gas chamber.

At one point, I complained to the watching police officers about him doing it, and several activists presented video to them of the salutes. The police did nothing, insisting that it was not a Nazi salute and that we had “misconstrued” what he was doing. When one of my friends asked them to clarify exactly what they thought Captain Pants was doing, they did not offer an answer. So they did not know what it was, they just “knew” what it was not, even though it so very thoroughly resembled it.

The police were more interested in arresting a teenage girl for grabbing a flag that the racists had left abandoned by the roadside, on the grounds that she had committed a ‘theft’. While the rest of us stepped in to demand they release her, several of the racists walked up and loudly threatened violence to me personally. Again I reported the threats to the police, again they just ignored them.

THE POLICE SIMPLY DID NOT CARE.

I doubt the great majority of MPs would give a hoot either, if they were made aware.

Anger about antisemitism only happens when there is none

This episode alone demonstrates that the renewed “antisemitism” hysteria is an absolute fraud. When real examples of antisemitism manifest themselves, they are routinely ignored by servants of the state. It is only when the notion of antisemitism is politically convenient that complaints are taken seriously. And in practice, political convenience is exclusively about what helps Israel and its amoral supporters.

This is further underlined by how a lawyer who supports Israel was arrested in August. The claim is that he was arrested for wearing a Star of David. This is untrue, he was arrested for defying orders to keep different protest groups apart. Whether you approve of that ruling or not, that is the real reason. But again, the “antisemitism” clamour in response has been everywhere.

At the same time, Kemi Badenoch, demonstrating she really is a “bad Enoch Powell,” has openly called for the burqa to be made illegal, to warm applause from many of the same people losing their heads over the lawyer’s arrest. Even if the arrest had happened for the reasons claimed, how would that be morally any different, given both the Star and the burqa are religious symbols of some importance (though not as fundamental as is sometimes assumed) to the respective faiths?

The Scam renewed

It was a scam, it still is a scam. The battle against racism has been subverted to advance the interests of those committing a genocide. To call that a tragic irony is to downplay the enormity of the horror of our current times. It is the most guaranteed path to unlearning the most terrible lessons of the twentieth century, and the dreadful world it is shaping is one that everyone should shudder to foresee.

And Ricky Hale writes:

If you hadn’t been paying attention to politics, you might have found it weird how the British government reacted to the ban of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the upcoming UEFA Super League match with Aston Villa.

If you had heard the club had acted after intelligence from police showed a high risk of violence from fans with a reputation for racism and violence, you might have found it even weirder.

If you joined the dots and realised our ministers were keen for Russian teams to be excluded from sports competitions, due to the Ukraine war, but are not applying those same standards to Israeli football clubs, you would surely find it baffling, but only if you had not been paying attention...

Those of us who have been paying attention know that when Israel says “jump”, the British government says “how high?” You will not find a clearer example of this than Lisa Nandy’s recent speech in parliament in which she made a passionate defence of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans while throwing British fans under a bus.

Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have just been banned from the Tel Aviv derby for throwing pyrotechnics and smoke bombs and engaging in violent acts that left 13 injured, including three police officers. Those fans regularly chant the most hideously racist things about killing children and raping women, and they were responsible for outrageous violence in Amsterdam last year.

It should surely be a no-brainer for a British politician to support a ban on such violent and racist fans. After all, our politicians are not slow to condemn our own fans when they misbehave. But Lisa Nandy did not condemn Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, she did the very opposite...

Zarah Sultana stood up in parliament and laid out everything I have just laid out above, saying:

Maccabi Tel Aviv’s racist fan hooliganism cannot be separated from Israeli militarism. Many of these fans are active or former soldiers who have taken part in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They should be investigated for war crimes the moment they set foot on British soil, not welcomed into our stadiums. And let’s be clear, this Labour government is no innocent bystander. It has armed Israel’s genocide, it has provided diplomatic cover, and it has shamefully denied that genocide is even taking place. So I ask the minister, is there anything this Labour government won’t do to defend the genocidal apartheid state of Israel?

The honest answer would have been “none whatsoever”.

Nandy’s response was a vague and barely quotable word salad, in which she implied that Sultana was being antisemitic by conflating being Jewish with being Israeli. Only Sultana did not do that, Nandy did!

Nandy’s logic would be the equivalent of saying it was racist to exclude apartheid South Africa’s teams from sports competitions - something we did for many years!

It somehow got worse. 

Nandy resorted to outright lying to defend Maccabi Tel Aviv’s violent and racist fans. She insisted this is the first time since the early 2000s that such action has been taken against away fans, and yet, this is not exactly true. Napoli fans were banned from Rangers in 2021, Legia Warsaw fans were banned from Aston Villa in 2023, and Rangers fans were banned from Celtic in 2025.

I don’t remember passionate defences for the violent fans from Lisa Nandy in those cases, do you? Fortunately, Oisín has made a passionate call out of Aston Villa’s anti-Polish racism in 2023. Someone had to do it... 

You see how stupid Nandy sounds yet? Aside from anything else, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have just been banned from a game in their own city! Is that antisemitic too? Or is it only antisemitic when we want British fans to be afforded the same safety as Israeli fans?

Absurdly, Nandy is moving heaven and earth to accommodate Maccabi Tel Aviv’s fans:

We will find the resources that need to be made available, once the West Midlands police has come forward with the risk assessment.

In other words, Nandy has not seen a risk assessment, but she has already made up her mind. How is that rational?

If you don’t follow football, you should understand that when a team has a problem with hooliganism, those hooligans are the most fanatical fans, and much more likely to attend away games. When Nandy moves heaven and earth to accommodate such fans, she will be accommodating those hooligans, and any violence will be on her and the Labour government.

Now you must ask why politicians like Lisa Nandy are determined to bend over backwards for Israeli football hooligans. You must ask why she puts the feelings of violent racists before the physical safety of our people. You must ask why our politicians are still sending weapons to a genocidal state. The problem is that as soon as you ask those questions, you will be accused of antisemitism before you have even come up with the answer.