Tel Aviv
Bemusement seems to be the main emotion in Tel Aviv following the UK’s mad ban on Maccabi fans. A Maccabi supporter sipping an espresso in bustling Dizengoff Square doesn’t get it. ‘You’re keeping the fans out because you’re worried they’ll be attacked?’ He screws up his face. ‘You should stop the attackers, not the fans.’
He has a point. Britain seems to have rustled up a novel way to deal with Jew hatred – just hide away the Jews. No Jews, no anti-Jewish mob. No Maccabi fans, no violent outbursts of Israelophobia from that unholy, unhappy union of Islamists and leftists who think Israelis are demonic. Problem solved.
Why didn’t we think of this earlier – thwarting criminals by restricting the freedom of movement of their potential victims? Perhaps next we will solve the mugging of old ladies by making old ladies stay at home. And finally end the scourge of phone-snatching by banning mobile phones. And who knows, stop future attacks on synagogues by dismantling all synagogues.
There is something creepy, almost Philip K Dickian, about the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending their team’s clash with Aston Villa at Villa Park on 6 November. It is being justified in the lingo of ‘security concerns’. West Midlands Police say they will struggle to deal with ‘any potential protests’ arising from the game, and so the away fans should stay away.
So, what – we give the protesters what they want? We placate them by capitulating to their Israelophobia? We maintain safety at Villa Park not by clamping down on the Israel-hating troublemakers but on the Maccabi lads they’d love to wallop? It’s not a million miles from trying to end rape by prohibiting the wearing of short skirts.
This punishment of Maccabi fans to ‘save them’ from Brits who hate the Jewish homeland sets a terrible precedent. It is pure moral inversion, where bigotry’s victims are treated as a bigger problem than bigotry itself. The perversity of it all is not lost on the youths of Tel Aviv, where I am currently working. A young man in a rooftop bar tells me his friend had hoped to travel to Britain for the match. He now feels ‘marked out’ as a morally undesirable person.
Is this really how the UK wants to be seen – as a nation that treats the citizens of the Jewish state as moral lepers? And which then dolls up its restriction on their rights as a caring move designed to protect them from mayhem? My view is simple: if a football match is not safe for Jews, whether British or Israeli Jews, then it should be cancelled. It is intolerable, a crime against equality, to hold a public event that Jews cannot safely and freely access.
A friend of mine in Tel Aviv says Europe is failing Maccabi fans. He mentions the events in Amsterdam in November last year. All day today, Britain’s anti-Israel leftists and sectarian Islamists have been furiously defaming Maccabi fans as uniquely thuggish, as football’s worst hooligans. They cite the chaos in Amsterdam as proof that these wicked men from that wicked state bring hatred wherever they go.
This is an unforgivably one-eyed view of what happened in Amsterdam. Did some Maccabi fans behave badly? Sure. Football fans often do. They drink, they chant crazy things, they get rowdy. But to overlook what the Maccabi fans suffered in Amsterdam is an outrage. They found themselves the targets of an unforgiving and brutish species of racial hatred.
I feel a tad ashamed to be a Brit in Tel Aviv today
There have now been two trials on the ‘Jew hunt’ in Amsterdam. That’s not my phrase – that’s how the gangs of mostly Arab men who assaulted Maccabi fans referred to their mini-pogrom. In their WhatsApp groups they called for a city-wide ‘rage’ against ‘cancer Jews’ and ‘cancer Zionists’. Let’s ‘beat up some f**king Jews’, they said. And they did. One of the assaults on a Maccabi fan was so bad that the perpetrator was accused of attempted murder.
Let us be clear: anyone who is damning Maccabi fans as vile thugs without mentioning any of this, without mentioning the expressly anti-Semitic horrors that Maccabi fans suffered in Amsterdam, has forfeited the right to be taken seriously on this question. Their lies of omission pretty much make them apologists for the ‘Jew hunt’ that befell these young Israeli men just one year ago.
And now some UK officials seem to think the best way to avoid any such ‘Jew hunt’ here is by making the pesky Jews stay at home. This is appeasement. Appeasement of a swirling culture of Israelophobia that so often crosses the line into something far darker and baser. I feel a tad ashamed to be a Brit in Tel Aviv today. Do me a favour, Sir Keir – overturn this scandalous ban.
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