As the manufactured controversy surrounding Maccabi Tel Aviv’s visit to play Birmingham club Aston Villa demonstrates, the once-sacrosanct sport has been reduced to another front in the battle over immigration.
When the Israeli team withdrew its tickets for this Thursday’s game, claiming that the safety of its fans could not be guaranteed, reactionaries rushed to exploit the situation, summoning the
spectre of Antisemitism.
Most Britons had never heard of Maccabi Tel Aviv until last month. Even football fans who were aware of the team’s existence were unlikely to know much about Israel. Now Maccabi is all over the news.
How many people are actually outraged that Maccabi fans won’t be able to watch their team in person is unclear. Polling shows that 42% of the public favoured banning the team, while 28% opposed such a move and 30% don’t know. But it’s hard to draw firm conclusions from this data, since most people’s opinions reflect which media they consume, rather than a longstanding position.
The Westminster class formed a tight consensus that the West Midlands Police should be able to guarantee the safety of Jewish fans at football matches. Yet this was never the real issue.
The reactionary politicians and pundits making a big deal of the Maccabi Tel Aviv situation aren’t really interested in the fate of foreign football fans. They want to use the opportunity to show how “un-British” cities like Birmingham have become and stir up more anxiety about the place of Islam in the United Kingdom.
Tellingly, no one in the country is talking about banning Tottenham Hotspurs FC, the English club known for its large Jewish fan base in the country. Their followers are not associated with violent, racist thuggery.
By contrast, Maccabi diehards are notorious for their chants about raping and killing Palestinian girls.
Even at home, Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters are a problem. Israeli police recently had to call off a game between Maccabi and Hapoel Tel Aviv because fans rioted.
Birmingham MP Ayoub Khan chastised politicians who fanned the flames of controversy, declaring that “it was never about religion but everything to do with hooligans! These hooligans are not welcome in my constituency!”
The most noteworthy aspect of this manufactured crisis is that the political class, along with mainstream media, are treating Israeli football fans differently from British ones.
Great British Kulturkampf
Israel holds a unique place in British culture wars.
That’s why the West Midlands Police making a risk assessment for fans of an Israeli football club coming to Birmingham gets reframed as “sectarian politics” and worse.
The British right promotes a narrative equating urban decay with demographic change and national decline.
Probable future Tory leader Robert Jenrick claimed he didn’t see any white faces in Handsworth, Birmingham. About 8% of Handsworth residents were white in 2021, according to census data, with South Asians accounting for about 58% and Black residents accounting for 16%.
It goes without saying that Jenrick wanted to signal right-wing voters, who are increasingly enthralled by Nigel Farage, that he’s capable of race-baiting. But the talking point about Brown Britain was still taken up by many.
Elon Musk, who has devoted himself to the argument that whiteness is in mortal peril, has ensured that his X platform foregrounds such concerns.
Right-wingers soon claimed that calls to ban Maccabi’s fans were proof of Jenrick’s point: Birmingham is just too Muslim. This argument wasn’t intended for pro-Israel right-wingers so much as the broader electoral coalition of Reform UK.
As historian Andy Beckett has pointed out, the urban-rural divide is back. Diverse, liberal cities are now encircled by white-flight towns. London is the most demonised example of Brown Britain. But Birmingham isn’t far behind. These cities are no longer sufficiently “English” for nativists.
The problem goes even deeper.
The British state, the civil service, the police and even the rule of law, are subject to a campaign of delegitimisation, not by the left but by the right. The nationalist right has been waging Antonio Gramsci’s long march through the institutions with social media and tabloids.
Within this context, the Israel-Palestine conflict is just another useful node in the culture war. Gaza is a left-coded signifier for Islam and mass immigration, whereas Israel is right-coded with associations of Western civilisation, particularly the heights of British imperial power.
As a result, the right frames Israelis as “more like us than Palestinians”, even when those Palestinians are Christians.
There is no time to appreciate historical nuance in this culture war. The King David Hotel bombing is conveniently forgotten by British conservatives, who would’ve been outraged at the time.
Indeed, until the end of the Cold War, there was no consensus that Israel should be exalted over its neighbours. The British Foreign Office was known for its affinity for the Arab Gulf petro-states throughout the post-war period. Even Margaret Thatcher, the most pro-Israel prime minister of the era, imposed an arms embargo on the Jewish state in response to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
Despite this legacy, we’re meant to believe Antisemitism is an import to Britain.
Anyone with a limited grasp of Jewish history might ask why we should assume Antisemitism doesn’t have deep roots in the UK. It wasn’t an Islamic state that expelled Jews from England in the 13th century.
That history is buried. It’s all the fault of Muslims, who’ve supposedly brought the Israel-Palestine conflict to British shores.
Culture wars require amnesia.
Manufacturing a controversy out of the Maccabi-Aston Villa match requires stripping the Israeli side’s fans of their history. Despite Maccabi Tel Aviv fans’ reputation for violence and verbal abuse, both at home and abroad, they are transmuted into avatars of Jewishness.
Even using the word “hooligan” to describe the extreme team’s supporters, as Ayoub Khan did, is enough to trigger allegations of Antisemitism.
No More Hooligans
This de facto censorship erases British history as well.
Almost all English clubs have had trouble with violence in the past. Some London clubs, such as Chelsea, West Ham and Millwall, were notorious for it.
Yet since the end of the Cold War, massive progress has been made toward reducing domestic hooliganism.
The most pugnacious firms of the 1980s are a shadow of their former selves, no longer able to get away with outbreaks of mass violence.
Football culture has changed a lot since then. The UK spends £70 million on security per season with specialised policing. The Thatcher government designed the 1986 Public Order Act partly to crack down on football violence.
This was just after all English clubs were banned from European competitions following the Heysel Stadium disaster. The UEFA ban was in place from 1985 to 1990, with a separate ban for Liverpool lasting until 1991.
The worst football thugs were banned for life. Many of them have moved on with their lives, if they aren’t serving time. Some of them, like Cass Pennant of the InterCity Firm, have written books and got film deals. Others have fallen in with the ranks of the far right.
It wasn’t just that the British state stopped tolerating the violence. A popular theory is that the death of hooligan culture dovetailed with the rise of rave culture at the end of the Cold War. Maybe the meanest goons of the terraces found a new hobby in taking MDMA and LSD.
Then again, many of the football casuals moved into far-right street activism. Some of them became the muscleheads of the British National Party, later joining the English Defence League.
Once lifetime bans came into force, many of the thugs had nowhere else to go aside from prison. This only changed in the 1990s and 2000s, with the culture industry absorbing Stone Island-clad yobs as ephemera for novels and films like The Football Factory.
How deeply ironic, then, that decades after a largely successful war on football violence, the UK is confronted by this terrible history in the form of a pseudo-scandal about an Israeli team. We’ve come a long way from the days of pitch invasions and away-day brawls.
But the manufactured outrage over the treatment of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters is making a mockery of that progress.
It’s maddeningly perverse that hooligans from abroad are getting a pass from right-wingers when their domestic forebears never did.
Photograph courtesy of joshjdss. Published under a Creative Commons license.
