23.10.2025

Sir Keir Starmer’s ultras

Why is the British government and the entire political class doing PR for Israeli football hooligans? It is just the perverse consequence of subordination to American interests, argues Paul Demarty

The furore over the West Midlands police ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans, ahead of the club’s Europa League fixture against Aston Villa on November 6, has been quite bewildering.

This is, on the face of it, a pretty routine police action. The travelling supporters of this club contain a substantial contingent of violent, racist hooligans. At a match in Amsterdam last year, these louts provoked a near-riot by indiscriminately assaulting Muslims and vaguely ‘Muslim-looking’ people, with the end result that the Israeli state stepped in to evacuate them. The attempt to spin this as an “anti-Jewish pogrom“ failed the test of common sense, failed to sway public opinion - and evidently failed to fool the continent’s coppers. The local constabulary had banned travelling support on the advice of Europol, the EU policing agency, which seems to be quite united in its professional opinion that these fans are not worth the bother.

In the abstract, leftwingers ought to be wary, at least, of this ban. We do not favour the arbitrary power of the police to suppress free assembly in the name of public order. It is asinine to say that such powers will be used against us: they are being used against us. Freedom of association and assembly goes for everyone, including racist football hooligans, or it goes for no-one. That said, at issue here is not direct ideological suppression, but the ‘spontaneous ideology’ of the cop: public order is only protected by deliberate action of this sort, and everyone is basically a thug until proven otherwise. The cops’ fear of disorder is quite genuine and, in this case, clearly well founded.

United front

The real story, then, is the spontaneous united front that formed among the political and media elite that this was a disastrous move. Sir Keir Starmer immediately denounced it as the “wrong decision”. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey decried the lunacy of banning travelling fans for their own protection (apparently unaware that it was not the MTA fans’ safety that was at issue). Robert Jenrick, still at his perpetual job of positioning himself for the fall of Kemi Badenoch, weighed in, complaining that a little saucy chanting at Villa home games was never a problem, when he was attending them as a lad. Of course, at that time, English football violence got so bad that this country’s clubs were entirely banned from European competition - a fate that has not befallen Israel yet.

Things took an even more farcical turn on October 19, when it emerged that these poor, innocent “Jewish fans” had caused such calamitous disorder in Tel Aviv that a Maccabi match against local rivals was called off. Surely, by the logic of the insinuations against West Midlands Police, the Tel Aviv coppers were guilty of grotesque “anti-Semitism” against their own neighbours. This unfortunate coincidence has, naturally, been passed over in silence by the great and the good in this country - never mind the uncomfortable fact that even within Israel Maccabi is historically and presently associated with the extreme right.

The Villa/Maccabi affair is a particularly degraded instance of a general tendency in the politics of the imperial countries - for Israeli violence to come almost pre-packaged as acts of self-defence. The real issue is the actual violence: the two-year onslaught on the Gaza Strip, currently under a ‘ceasefire’ that has been repeatedly and continuously violated by Israeli forces, plainly in the interests of collapsing the deal and getting back to good old-fashioned mass murder. Rest assured that somehow Hamas will be to blame in the eyes of the British establishment: there is no extremity of bloodshed denied to the IDF in the name of “protecting themselves”.

So it is, on a smaller scale, with the Maccabi fans, whose conduct is perfectly familiar to British society from the antics of the Inter-City Firm, the Chelsea Headhunters and whichever other football hooligan gang in their 80s and 90s prime. Indeed, such people are now prominent political figures - Stephen Yaxley-Lennon began his adulthood as a Luton Town casual, and adopted the nom de guerre “Tommy Robinson” from a particularly legendary predecessor. The overlap of football violence and far-right ideology has been the basis of most of Yaxley-Lennon/Robinson’s political outfits ever since (and he has announced his intention to attend the Villa match as a Maccabi fan). Despite this familiarity, our rulers and betters choose not to see it: in the case of the last fanbase, as I remember, to actually cause serious violent disorder in Europe.

One context for all this is the increasing pressure on cultural institutions, including sports, to exclude Israel. Within football itself, Israel’s membership of the UEFA European football federation has come into question once again, although a vote on the matter has, for now, been successfully avoided by UEFA tops - above all the federation’s Machiavellian chairman, Aleksander Ceferin. (Somewhat more successful have been attempts by pro-Palestine protestors to disrupt the activities of the Israel-Premier Tech cycling team, which has been excluded from the Giro dell’Emilia race.)

Europe map

One interesting question arising is: what the hell is Israel doing competing in European football? The last time anyone looked at a map, this country was not in Europe - though perhaps its relentless expansionism will one day take its borders through Turkey into the Balkans. The mere fact that the Israeli league features teams from settlements on illegally occupied land ought to exclude it from UEFA, according to its rules, if mere accidents of geography do not do the job.

There are two questions here - why does UEFA put up with this, and why are the Israelis so insistent on taking their place in European football? So far as the footballing authorities are concerned, it is not terribly complicated. These people are cartoonishly corrupt bureaucrats: so long as the opinions of the major political powers are made clear to them, they will obey. (The 2015 dawn raids on FIFA officials in Zurich - essentially an American act of revenge for awarding the World Cup hosting rights to Qatar - will not be forgotten quickly by canny operators like Ceferin and FIFA’s Gianni Infantino.)

On the Israeli side, part of the reason is, of course, that membership of the Asian football confederation would be awkward, given that the major powerbrokers there are largely the Gulf states, which would quite possibly be forced by internal pressure to boycott the Zionist state’s participation. Yet there is also the matter of Israel’s self-conception as the last redoubt of the west against ‘Asiatic barbarism’. For the same reason, Israeli society places a bizarrely high premium on participation in the Eurovision Song Contest - also under threat until the recent pseudo-ceasefire.

To an extent, this is not wholly senseless. After all, Israel is in origin a settler-colony founded by a European ‘surplus population’; the scale of its violence against the Palestinians, the plain need of the Israeli state to be rid of them, is more or less globally unique today, but rather typical of this species of colonialism. Much the same treatment was meted out by British colonists to the native peoples of North America and the antipodes at different times. It is, in a certain sense, ‘normal’ for western countries to be implicated in such bloodletting, all the while maintaining the appearance of an elevated civilisation among friends.

War

In the meantime - especially under the new Donald Trump regime, but also before - the commitment of the United States to its once-beloved rules-based international liberal order is rapidly atrophying. The US plainly fancies a move to hot war against China in the not too distant future, and no paper tiger of the United Nations type will stop it. It is easy to show (and international non-governmental organisations and even institutions like the International Criminal Court have shown) that Israel has acted in flagrant defiance of the norms of this order. Yet it is of dubious value, when this order is plainly being abandoned by the only force that could still give it teeth: the USA.

That is the other relevant context here. With the drift of the world towards great-power war, high principles lose their ideological force, to be replaced with brutish tribal loyalties. In the rightwing commentary on the Maccabi affair, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that, for some, the possibility of blood on the streets of Birmingham is really part of the appeal of overturning the police ban. England’s second city, along with London, looms large in the far-right imagination as an exemplary case of the supposed ‘Islamisation’ of Britain, and has done so at least as far back as the ‘Operation Trojan Horse’ scandal of 2014 (a probably confected story of an attempt to ‘Islamise’ education at a Birmingham school). If the police won’t knock some sense into the Muslims, perhaps this travelling band of knuckle-draggers will …

Global politics

The particular targets of this country’s often surreally otiose political repression follow from its thorough subordination to the US. Unquestioning support for Israel has come to serve as a litmus test for servility to the world hegemon. Without the grace and favour of our senior ‘partner’, we have no economy, and no military to speak of. Therefore this ‘special relationship’ must not be abandoned, no matter what disasters we are brought to by honouring it - from Iraq and Afghanistan to complicity in the attempted extermination of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.

And thus, also, the topsy-turvy moral logic of the recent discourse: the transformation of hardened football hooligans into doe-eyed innocent victims of racism, the use of this scandal as yet another impulse towards the suppression of the Palestinian movement, while far-right violence continues to rise in frequency and severity.

This does leave the question of getting our political bearings. On the narrow issue of the ban, we must say again that we are not in favour of the police having sweeping powers to obstruct social life - even the social life of racist louts. We are not, of course, in favour of standing professional police forces at all, but, so long as these continue to exist, their operations should be subordinated to local democratic institutions (and real ones, not the ridiculous ‘Police and Crime Commissioners’ that have been imposed on, among other places, the West Midlands).

As I write, the ban is still in place and Maccabi has announced that it will not accept any ticket allocation from Aston Villa even if the ban is overturned. Maybe, Tommy Robinson’s casuals will attempt to substitute themselves for Maccabi. We very much hope Villa fans will do what they’ve been told not to do: display pro-Palestine political slogans and messages.

Meanwhile, in Israel the Maccabi vs Hapoel derby has been called off just before kick-off. Israeli police officials blamed rioting and the “risk to life”.