War Minus the Shooting

First of all, the question of allowing Israeli football fans to attend matches in Britain should never have arisen in the first place. Israel should be subject to a comprehensive sporting boycott, just like South Africa during the apartheid years. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the governing body for European football, immediately banned the Russian national team and all Russian clubs from its competitions after the invasion of Ukraine. The refusal of UEFA and other sporting associations to impose a similar ban on Israel is an ongoing disgrace.

Second, the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv have a particular track record of racism and violence that they have brought with them all over Europe. The organization Kick It Out Israel found that one-third of all documented incidents of racist chanting at Israeli football matches last year involved Maccabi Tel Aviv. The most popular chant was “Let the IDF win, fuck the Arabs” — an unambiguous expression of support for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza.

When the Israeli team was playing a match in Athens in March 2024, their fans beat up a man who was carrying a Palestinian flag in the city’s main square. In November 2024, supporters of the club went on a rampage in Amsterdam, assaulting locals, damaging property, and singing songs that celebrated the destruction of Gaza (“There are no schools in Gaza, there are no children left”). When the Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans elicited the violent response from locals that they were looking for, the Israeli government presented them as victims of unprovoked aggression.

The phony exercise in victimhood became a standard talking point for the international media. A range of influential outlets, from Bild and the Wall Street Journal to the BBC, presented a video of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans assaulting people near Amsterdam’s main train station as if it showed Israelis being attacked while they were peacefully going about their business. The Dutch photographer who recorded the video protested vehemently against this flagrant misrepresentation of her work, to little avail.

These publications and broadcasters were taking their lead from the equally irresponsible reaction of the local authorities. Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema issued a statement claiming that the episode “brings back the memory of pogroms.” Halsema subsequently expressed her regret for using the term “pogrom” and admitted that her administration was “still gathering the facts” when she rushed to comment after a typically deceitful and inflammatory statement from the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the time when Netanyahu set out to interfere in Dutch politics, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, had already requested a warrant for his arrest — a request that the court’s judges granted shortly afterward. The ICC is based in the Netherlands, and in a properly functioning world, Netanyahu would now be awaiting trial for his horrific crimes in a Dutch prison. Halsema’s willingness to let this notorious figure dictate the response to an episode in her own city beggars belief.

The city mayor belongs to a center-left party. When the match was played, the Netherlands was governed at the national level by an alliance between four parties of the Right, with the far-right, rabidly Islamophobic Freedom Party of Geert Wilders as its largest component. The government parties all rushed to endorse Netanyahu’s false claims about events in their own country, and Wilders used it as an opportunity to launch yet another attack on Dutch Muslims.

The political climate may help explain the lackadaisical approach of the Dutch authorities in the aftermath of the match. Last June, the country’s prosecution service announced that it was dropping two cases against Israeli nationals because the company that runs the Amsterdam metro deleted CCTV footage that could have been used as evidence.

The abortive prosecutions arose from complaints by two women, as DutchNews reported:

One involves a woman who shouted “Free Palestine” at a group of Maccabi supporters on their way to the stadium. She claims they attacked her by hitting her, spitting, and pulling her hair. Police were at the scene but were unable to arrest her attackers. The second case involves a woman who said she had been sitting in the metro with another woman wearing headscarves, when Maccabi fans yelled at her: “We will kill all of you.”

As the lawyer representing the two women observed, it was “remarkable” that the footage should have been deleted so hastily. He also asked why it took eight months to identify another Israeli who had been filmed “clear as day” smashing the windows of a taxi.

The Biggest Risk

This was the background that informed the decision to exclude Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from their club’s fixture against Aston Villa in November last year. It is entirely routine for European police forces to ban visiting fans from games if crowd trouble is anticipated. In recent years, fans of Feyenoord, Galatasaray, Benfica, and Eintracht Frankfurt have all been prevented from attending games.

In Birmingham, the West Midlands police stopped Legia Warsaw supporters from entering Aston Villa’s stadium after there were violent clashes before a match in December 2023, having already reduced the ticket allocation for the Polish club. UEFA subsequently barred Legia fans from their next five away games.

The police had every reason to anticipate more problems from Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans than from their Legia Warsaw counterparts, since the former have a track record of attacking random people they see as political opponents or racial enemies as well as the supporters of rival clubs.

This did stop Keir Starmer from launching a broadside against the police commanders who made the call. Starmer claimed that they had ordered the ban because they were unable (or unwilling) to protect the Israeli fans from attack: “This is the wrong decision. We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets. The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.”

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy linked the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv to “a backdrop of rising antisemitism in this country and across the world.” Nandy’s comments in the House of Commons were a master class in doublethink: she repeatedly conflated Jewish and Israeli identities before wagging her finger sanctimoniously at the left-wing MP Zarah Sultana, telling her that “conflating being Jewish and being Israeli is in itself antisemitism.” Unlike Nandy, Sultana had done nothing of the sort.

Like Starmer, Nandy asserted repeatedly that the Israeli fans were the ones at risk of violence rather than its likely perpetrators. The West Midlands police briefed the media with their side of the story. As one source told Vikram Dodd of the Guardian:

The biggest risk was always the extreme Maccabi fans who want to fight. . . . If you don’t know the details and have not read the intelligence, you could conclude it was because the traveling fans were Jewish. That is just not the case.

The Birmingham chief superintendent Tom Joyce later went on the record for Sky News making the same case: “We have intelligence and information that says that there is a section of Maccabi fans, not all Maccabi fans but a section who engage in quite significant levels of hooliganism.”

Joyce observed that this section of Maccabi fans were “probably quite unique” for their willingness to go beyond clashes with rival hooligan gangs: “We’ve had examples where a section of Maccabi fans were targeting people not involved in football matches, and certainly we had an incident in Amsterdam last year which has informed some of our decision-making.”

Shortly after the match against Aston Villa, Maccabi Tel Aviv played another away game against VfB Stuttgart in Germany. UEFA fined the Israeli club for racist chanting by its supporters.

Hate Preachers

The online version of Joyce’s interview still contains a link to another interview denouncing the ban. Sky News identifies the speaker, Andrew Fox, as “Honorary President, Aston Villa Jewish Villans supporters club.” Fox is not Jewish, and there is no public record of his role as an advocate for any part of the club’s support base before he issued an outrageous statement claiming that Aston Villa had been “forced by the local authorities to salute modern day Nazism” and that Jews would not be safe in the districts around the club’s stadium.

On the other hand, there is an extensive public record of Fox’s role as a vociferous defender of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza. He is an employee of the Henry Jackson Society, a right-wing, Islamophobic pressure group whose director, Alan Mendoza, recently defected from the Conservative Party to Reform UK. The Israeli government has enthusiastically promoted his work, which denies the overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces have engaged in deliberate mass killing of Palestinian civilians.

Not content with spreading his poisonous disinformation in the British media, Fox actually traveled to Gaza last year to express his solidarity with the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israeli scheme to use food aid as bait to lure starving people into killing zones where they could be gunned down in broad daylight. The fact that Sky allowed this cartoonishly evil man to pose as an ordinary football supporter, when a simple Google search would have revealed his affiliations and his ghoulish trip to Gaza, sums up the general calibre of public debate about the controversy.

Starmer and Nandy opened the floodgates for a torrent of racist filth from right-wing politicians and media commentators like Robert Jenrick and Douglas Murray, who presented British Muslims as a sinister fifth column imposing their wicked agenda upon the police in Birmingham. Having developed a taste for carnage by cheering on the Gaza genocide for the past two years, the leaders of Britain’s hard-right bloc are now determined to bring the war home, and they were delighted to use the ammunition that Labour handed to them, free of charge.

For the past three months, the Labour and Conservative parties have joined forces with the right-wing media to bully the West Midlands police into accepting the false narrative about what happened. The Home Affairs Committee at Westminster called in senior officers from Birmingham to face aggressive questioning. Now a critical report has been published by Sir Andy Cooke, former chief constable of Merseyside Police, who received a knighthood in last year’s awards list.

Torturing the Evidence

Mahmood claimed that the report from Cooke was a damning indictment of the West Midlands police, showing that the intelligence it used to justify the ban was “exaggerated or simply untrue.” On closer inspection, the list of purported inaccuracies raises far more questions about Cooke’s motivations than it does about the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban.

Most of the problems that his report identifies concern the brief summary by an internal police document of what happened in Amsterdam. Cooke objects to a statement that several hundred Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were “apparently intentionally targeting Muslim communities” on the following grounds:

There is evidence that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans targeted Muslims and pro-Palestinians, but they targeted individuals rather than residential communities. The Dutch police told us that Amsterdam’s Muslim residential communities are generally outside the city centre and that there was no significant disorder outside the city centre.

When giving evidence before the Home Affairs Committee in December, West Midlands chief constable Guildford said that Israeli hooligans “specifically targeted the local Muslim community,” according to the information his force had received from Dutch police. Cooke’s entire argument hinges on the distinction between two words, “communities” and “community,” and the assumption that “communities” can only be residential in nature. To describe it as trifling would be far too generous.

The report applies the same hair-splitting logic to a statement that Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters were “tearing down Palestine flags” in Amsterdam: “The Dutch police told us one Palestinian flag had been pulled down. In official Dutch reports, there are three recorded incidents involving flags.” This example has no place in a list of inaccuracies; at most, it suggests a need to clarify what the “three recorded incidents involving flags” actually entailed.

Cooke also includes a phrase about “serious assaults on Muslim taxi drivers” in his list of alleged factual errors, before acknowledging that there was at least one recorded assault and may well have been others:

One of the official Dutch reports contains a reference to a single report of an assault on one taxi driver. Other taxi cars and motor scooters were attacked and damaged, but it is unclear if they were occupied at the time.

It is impossible to picture any other group of football hooligans inspiring the same demand for absolute and unambiguous clarity of expression in what was after all a private briefing document, not a legal indictment to be used for criminal charges.

Cooke does identify some genuine mistakes in the document, notably a reference to a football match that never happened, which appears to have been the result of using AI for research purposes. This is certainly embarrassing for the authors and shows how foolish it is to rely on such tools (Starmer’s government has strongly endorsed the use of AI by government departments and police forces). However, the fictional match played no part in the case for excluding Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters. That decision rested upon the events in Amsterdam, which Cooke appears determined to bowdlerize.

Global Consequences

When he was preparing his report, Cooke spoke to Dutch police officers, and he takes it for granted that they gave him a full, accurate, and impartial account of everything that happened in Amsterdam. There is good reason to doubt the safety of his assumption on that score.

As we have seen, the Dutch police have major questions to answer about their own conduct, having failed to protect their citizens from attack before neglecting to secure evidence that could have been used to prosecute some of the assailants. They operate in a country that, like Britain, has a strongly pro-Israel line in foreign policy and a powerful far-right movement that wants to divert blame for the disturbances away from Israelis and toward the local Muslim population.

If Dutch police commanders refused to play along with this game, they would be making several rods for their own backs, so they have good reason to minimize the violence of the Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters. In his testimony to MPs, Guildford insisted that his force received a far more critical picture of the Israeli club’s fan base before the issue became such a hot potato in British politics: “The Dutch commanders were unequivocal that they would never want to have Maccabi Tel Aviv playing in Amsterdam again in the future, and that is what they said to our chief inspector.”

Having supplied Mahmoud with enough material for her performance in the House of Commons this week, where she demanded Guildford’s head, Cooke tells us that he could find no evidence of police officers in Birmingham being influenced by “political interference, antisemitism, any other lack of impartiality, or malign intent.” If Cooke did not anticipate that his tendentious claims about “inaccuracies” and “confirmation bias” would help reinforce Islamophobic conspiracy theories, it suggests a naivety about the world of politics that is rarely found among state officials who have the right to call themselves “Sir” in Britain.

Elsewhere in the report, Cooke presents an argument that should set alarm bells ringing for his readers:

I am not convinced that the force fully considered the consequences of its preferred tactical option. It focused on reducing the risk of short-term disorder and long-term damage to local community relations due to the presence of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. It lacked the necessary foresight to recognise the long-term, global consequences.

Cooke does not attempt to explain why a local police force should give priority to “long-term, global consequences” over “the risk of short-term disorder and long-term damage to local community relations,” which is surely more than enough for them to be dealing with.

Ironically, for someone who insists on precision in the language used by others, Cooke opts for a word, “global,” that has more than one meaning. In this context, he probably has the much less commonly used sense of the word in mind: “considering or relating to all parts of a situation or subject” rather than “relating to the whole world.” Even if we grant Cooke the kind of linguistic leeway that he denies to the objects of his criticism, he appears to be reproaching Guildford and his fellow officers for not anticipating an orchestrated political backlash of the kind we have seen for the last three months.

Much of the British commentariat will find it scandalous that anyone might suggest Cooke tailored his report to fit the needs of Britain’s political class. The same commentators are happy to imply (or state outright) that the police in Birmingham caved in to pressure from British Muslims and the Palestine solidarity movement. It would be remarkable indeed if senior police officers were susceptible to the influence of marginalized outsider groups, represented in the House of Commons by a handful of Green and independent MPs, but not to the groupthink of the Westminster establishment after the government and the main opposition party make it absolutely clear what they expect.

When Nandy demanded Guildford’s resignation this week, the tone and content of her remarks betrayed a palpable sense of fury that he did not seem to know his place:

Having watched West Midlands police contradict me, contradict this government, and contradict their own evidence in public over recent months, and seeing all of that laid bare in a report that the home secretary brought to this house yesterday, I do want to say to him that I believe it is astonishing that the chief constable remains in post and I hope he will seriously reflect.

Guildford finally caved in and announced his retirement after being threatened with an investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which has previously been distinguished by its willingness to give senior police officers like Cressida Dick a free pass for the most egregious forms of misconduct. It is hard to imagine any chief constable or commissioner sticking their neck out again like this in the future, whatever party leads the government. In this, as in so many other ways, Starmer is clearing potential obstacles from the path of Britain’s far right.

Destruction and Denial

This whole tawdry affair has unfolded at a time when Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians since the official declaration of a cease-fire in Gaza. It continues to occupy more than half of the Gaza Strip while blocking the supply of humanitarian aid to the rest of the territory. This week, while the British power elite was preoccupied with the right of Israeli football supporters to follow their clubs wherever they please, a report showed that there had been a staggering 41 percent fall in the number of births in Gaza since Israel began its onslaught, which included the deliberate and systematic targeting of hospitals, ambulances, and medical personnel.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump offered Starmer a place on his grotesquely titled “Board of Peace,” which is supposed to rule over the Palestinians Israel was unable to kill. Starmer would certainly not have been invited to join the board if he had not proved to be such a dedicated champion of Israel and its apartheid regime. His efforts to repress and delegitimize solidarity with the Palestinian people on the home front are the natural accompaniment to his obsequious support for Trump and Netanyahu on the international stage.

Starmer and his colleagues would rather set their own country on fire than tell the truth about what Israel has done, because its crimes are also their crimes. The Maccabi Tel Aviv farrago is a small but revealing part of their effort to rewrite the history of the period since October 2023, erasing the record of what they have done and demonizing the movement that has opposed their complicity with genocide every step of the way.