On October 7, two years ago, Emily Damari was kidnapped by Hamas. She lost two of her fingers when they shot her in the leg and the hand, and was kept in the dark until January this year. She was a passionate football fan, and in London, Tottenham fans would chant her name during games while she was being held. Underground. When the British-Israeli Jew finally made it to the stadium, she was greeted by the sound of: “She’s one of our own, she’s one of our own, Emily Damari, she’s finally home.”
Back home, in Israel, she led the singing at her beloved Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Bloomfield stadium, telling the crowd how, during the darkest days, football helped her. “When I heard in captivity on the radio that we won the championship,” she said, “I screamed even when I wasn’t allowed to.” And when the remaining hostages were released this week, the brothers Gali and Ziv Berman immediately put on their yellow and blue Maccabi shirts and asked the rescuing helicopter to fly over Bloomfield before taking them to hospital. Football is often about much more than just football.
The decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from their Europe League match against Aston Villa at Villa Park next month is similarly about far more than just football. It’s about antisemitism. The group responsible for issuing safety certificates for the game has decided that the risk of violence against travelling Jewish fans is just too high. The Birmingham police have agreed that they cannot guarantee their safety, and that Maccabi fans shouldn’t be allowed to come. This comes barely weeks after Keir Starmer promised “this is a country that stands up to hatred”. And on Thursday, the day the West Midlands Police announced their own inability to deal with a threat to Jewish fans, the Prime Minister was still insisting: “I will do everything in my power to guarantee Jewish communities the security they deserve.”
“Small wonder so many Jewish people are now asking themselves whether they have a future in this country.”
And yet the Birmingham police have decided that they can’t. Small wonder so many Jewish people are now asking themselves whether they have a future in this country. Emily Damari has said she is “shocked to my core with this outrageous decision to ban me, my family and friends from attending an Aston Villa game. I do wonder what exactly has become of UK society. This is like putting a big sign outside the stadium saying ‘No Jews allowed’. What has become of the UK where blatant antisemitism has become the norm.”
Aston Villa proudly supports No Room for Racism and players still take the knee ahead of kick-off before each fixture “to show their unity against racial discrimination”. Elsewhere on their website, Aston Villa boasts of its righteous history standing up to antisemitism. Under the headline “Villa says No to the Nazis” you can read the story of a series of events in May 1938. On 14 May, at a packed Olympic Stadium in Berlin, the English national team defeated Germany 6-3. The game began with a rendition of God Save the King and the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel song. To a stadium swathed in swastikas, the English team were pressured by the Foreign Office and their policy of appeasement to join in the Nazi salute, a direction with which they dutifully complied.
The following day, Aston Villa played in front of 110,000 fans at the same stadium. Some say that the Villa team bravely refused to perform the Nazi salute, indeed that is the narrative told on Villa’s website. But the truth is they did salute at the beginning of the match and while they failed to follow protocol at the end of the fractious game, there is little indication that this was due to dissent; it’s more likely that they just forgot, given that in their following match in Dusseldorf, the Villa players once again raised their arms to Sieg Heil. It would be nice to tell ourselves the story that the British stood up to Nazi antisemitism from the very beginning, but that’s not quite the reality. Meanwhile, at the match against Maccabee, Villa players will be taking the knee against racism inside the stadium, while outside there is, in effect, a bloody great big sign proclaiming Judenrien.
The current tacit policy of appeasement towards those who would ban Jews from our streets is just as disgraceful. Under the guise of public safety, a number of our MPs have celebrated this pathetic decision from the police. “Maccabi Tel Aviv should not even be playing within this international competition,” said Ayoub Khan, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, who started a petition to ban Jewish Maccabi fans from his city. “Next, UEFA must ban all Israeli teams,” wrote independent MP Zarah Sultana.
“Thank you all who put the safety of Aston Villa fans, Birmingham residents and the British public above the Zionist and political pressure to let Israeli hooligans run riot in our country,” said the independent MP Iqbal Mohamed. Zionist pressure? Why not just come out and talk of a Jewish lobby that controls the world?
The West Midlands police are now doing their level best to prove Robert Jenrick right. Last month, the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice was rightly condemned for his comments about parts of Birmingham having a problem with racial integration. Decisions like this will only fan the flames of those who argue that immigration has changed the nature of the UK for the worse. Personally, I don’t want that argument to win. But the Chief Constable of the West Midlands is making things so much harder.
This Sunday, the Tel Aviv derby will take place: Maccabi Tel Aviv versus Hapoel Tel Aviv at the Bloomfield Stadium, which both teams share. My Israeli family are all passionate Hapoel supporters. We are red, Maccabi are yellow and blue. I don’t suppose we will win. We haven’t beaten them in years. But the atmosphere will be characteristically intense. I won’t repeat what we sing about them, nor about what they sing about us. But it’s no worse than what I hear at the Chelsea. And it’s true that a number of them — the so-called Maccabi fanatics in particular — are no angels. In Amsterdam in 2024, after a match against Ajax, several Macabbi fans tore down a Palestinian flag from a local building and chanted “fuck the Arabs”. Later, five Maccabi fans were taken to hospital and dozens were injured. Prison sentences followed for those who attacked the Maccabi fans. But all this is hardly unusual. In November 2023, at Villa Park, there was a riot at the Europa League match against the Polish club Legia Warsaw, described by the West Midlands police as “some of the worst UK football disorder in decades”. Forty people were arrested, and Legia fans were banned from five consecutive away matches. Yes, there was disorder in Ajax but that was not dissimilar to what goes on at Villa Park.
I have been to a football match before where the away supporters had been banned from the stadium because of safety fears. As it happens, it was in Jerusalem, and the away fans were the Arab team, Bnei Sakhnin. It was ridiculous. The Beitar Jerusalem ultras chanted abuse at rows of empty seats. The Israeli authorities should have done better, and so should we. and so should we. Aston Villa and the local police are not taking the knee to support anti-racism. They are taking the knee to the mob instead of standing up to it.
If the police refuse to protect Jews when watching football, one day they won’t protect them from going to school or walking the streets. This decision is a national disgrace.
