Banning Maccabi fans is not enough. Expel Israel from all sports

The messy politics of football have been on full display in Britain over the past weeks. Our campaign to have the Maccabi Tel Aviv vs. Aston Villa match cancelled is growing, even after the government has weighed in with lies and misinformation about why the fans were banned in the first place.

This controversy is not simply about this game, or the racist fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv team, but rather a picture into one of the ways in which Israeli football is implicated in apartheid and genocide, and the growing global movement to kick Israel out of international football. 

As soon as we became aware of the fixture, PSC has been calling for the footballing authorities to stop it from going ahead, and to act to exclude Israel from international football. On 17 October, the Safety Advisory Group, backed by the West Midlands Police, banned Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending the match.

Leaks reported in the Guardian show that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were banned because of police intelligence that recognised the threat of violence posed by the club’s fans. The grotesque narrative spun this past week by government ministers has fallen apart. The decision to ban the fans came not because, as Sports and Culture Minister Lisa Nandy said in Parliament, of a risk assessment “based in no small part on the risk posed to fans attending to support Maccabi Tel Aviv” but because of a recognition of the threat of violence posed by those fans.

Over the past days, the government and many media pundits have whitewashed the long and sordid history of racism from Maccabi Tel Aviv’s fans, including their genocidal chanting celebrating the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and their attacks on local residents last year in Amsterdam, which included attempting to drag a taxi driver out of his car.

One of the reasons that government politicians have refused to recognise this racism is because to properly understand it, it must be seen not as an aberration, but as a nasty by-product of Israel’s racist apartheid system over the Palestinian people –  a system that the British political class continues to support.

Over the weekend, as British politicians lambasted West Midlands Police and local politicians for deciding to ban the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, and demonised the local MP, Ayoub Khan, for standing up for the safety of his constituents, Israel resumed its genocidal bombing of Gaza, killing close to 100 Palestinians since the ceasefire came into effect.

While, in the West Bank, armed Israeli settlers, protected by the Israeli military, rampaged through towns and villages, attacking Palestinian families harvesting their olive crop, including beating a woman unconscious as she picked olives, and injuring a young girl on her way to school. This is a nearly daily occurrence, with nearly 50 Palestinian communities having been partly or completely forcibly displaced in the past two years because of land grabs and relentless settler violence.

This violence is part of Israel’s system of racist oppression, which dehumanises Palestinians to such an extent that they have been subjected to two years of horrific genocide in Gaza, along with decades of ethnic cleansing and military assaults across the rest of Palestine. 

Palestinians, including sports teams, have for many years demanded that Israel is banned from sporting and cultural bodies as a meaningful form of accountability for the oppression that they face.

The call for Israel’s exclusion from UEFA and FIFA recognises that allowing football teams from a state responsible for genocide and implementing apartheid to compete in international competitions normalises its atrocities, and sends the signal that there are no consequences for them.

Just as apartheid South Africa faced bans from international sporting and cultural bodies,  including the South African FA being formally suspended from FIFA in 1976, so must apartheid Israel today.

When calling for a sporting boycott of Israel, we sometimes hear the response that politics should be kept out of sports. But Palestinians can’t avoid politics when trying to play football – in the last two years, Israel has killed many hundreds of Palestinian footballers and destroyed footballing infrastructure, including stadiums, training facilities and pitches, both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Palestinian footballers cannot separate sport from politics when they find themselves unable to play matches or train due to Israel’s suffocating restrictions on their movement, or because they have been subject to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment by the Israeli military.

Sport is not an isolated domain that can be divided from the political context in which it takes place. Israeli football is completely interwoven and interconnected with Israel’s regime of oppression.

Maccabi Tel Aviv has been directly involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including by sending “care packages” to serving Israeli soldiers. The club is part of the Israel Football Association (IFA), which includes at least 6 teams located in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, on land stolen from Palestinians. These clubs are a part of the infrastructure of Israel’s illegal military occupation.

Calls for Israel’s removal from international sporting bodies continue to grow in momentum. They are supported by, among many others, UN experts, human rights bodies including Amnesty International,  the Spanish Prime Minister, the Italian Football Coaches Association, and millions of football fans around the world, including many here in Britain.

Over 15,000 people have already signed our petition calling for the match to be cancelled and for Israeli teams to be excluded from international football, and the number is growing daily.

The FA and UEFA must take action so that Aston Villa’s match against Maccabi Tel Aviv does not go ahead on 6 November, and Israel and its teams must be banned from international football.

Lewis Backon is a Campaigns Officer at Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the largest organisation in Britain working in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.