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The whole article is very much worth a read, but a few quotes:
Maccabi attracts a fervid following of young men from the far right, who gather at weekends to chant racist and anti-Arab slogans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maccabi attracts a fervid following of young men from the far right, who gather at weekends to chant racist and anti-Arab slogans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
