Why are Israeli football fans facing bans?

Senior ministers are discussing whether to overturn the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans attending their club’s Europa League game with Aston Villa next month over safety concerns.

West Midlands Police said they classified the 6 November fixture as “high risk” after “violent clashes and hate crime offences” took place in Amsterdam last November when Maccabi Tel Aviv played Ajax.

Following an outcry over the initial decision to prevent Maccabi supporters from travelling to Birmingham, Keir Starmer said it was “wrong” and insisted his government “will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets”. The prime minister’s official spokesperson said discussions are happening “at pace, across government”.

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Lisa Nandy, the culture, media and sport secretary, is “meeting officials to discuss what more can be done to try and find a way through to resolve this, and what more can be done to allow fans to attend the game safely”.

What did the commentators say?

The “sick ban” is “an admission that Britain is no longer a safe place for Jews”, said Brendan O’Neill on Spiked. “Because the usual suspects – the keffiyeh cocks, gurning Islamists, hard-right Jew haters who pose as ‘critics of Israel’ – might turn up and scream blue murder at these visiting devils from Israel, the Israelis themselves must be kept out.”

This is a “shaming moment”, said Oliver Brown in The Telegraph. “You might think” that the priority would be to “crack down on the virulent antisemitism” that’s made it “dangerous for Israelis to attend matches in this country”. But “sadly”, the police have chosen the “cruder response” of “simply banning Maccabi followers from coming at all”.

In the aftermath of last year’s Ajax game, Dutch police said that Maccabi fans tore down a Palestinian flag and burned it, and shouted “f**k you, Palestine”. They also chanted that there were “no children” left in Gaza, said National World. Fans of the Israeli club faced hate crime attacks in the Dutch capital.

This isn’t the first time that a club’s fans have been banned on safety grounds from travelling to a European tie, said The Guardian. Last month, Ajax fans were not allowed to attend a Champions League match in Marseille and Naples banned Eintracht Frankfurt fans from their club’s game with Napoli. In January, police arrested 17 Dutch fans at the border after France banned Feyenoord fans from travelling to their Champions League tie in Lille.

Ayoub Khan, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, said on X that he welcomed the ban. It’s “clear that there were latent safety risks” around the game, and although sporting events “should be enjoyed by all”, there are “rare instances” where the “political dynamics” surrounding the spectacle “cannot be ignored”.

In these examples, “drastic action must be taken to ensure the safety of fans, players, staff and local residents”.

What next?

Senior government figures met today to discuss the ban. Ian Murray, the science and technology minister, said the officials were gathering to “see if there’s a way through” the issue.

“We can’t allow a country to become a place where we’re excluding people from public events,” said Murray, though he added that it is an “operational issue for the police” and “government doesn’t get involved in operational issues for the police”.