UK Police Cave to the Mob, Ban Israeli Soccer Fans Over ‘Safety Concerns’

Street thugs across Europe are making Israeli athletes and their supporters unsafe. At the same time, bureaucrats are attempting to make Israelis unwelcome at international competitions.

Earlier this month, police in England, citing the potential for violence, barred Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending a key match against Birmingham’s Aston Villa on November 6.

As British Culture Minister Lisa Nandy pointed out in a parliamentary speech against the ban, it was the first time in 25 years that visiting fans have been barred from attending a game in the United Kingdom.

The British government — embarrassed by the effective exclusion of Jewish attendees on the heels of an attack by a radical Islamist on a Manchester synagogue that claimed two lives — attempted to reverse the decision, but Maccabi’s management opted to refuse their ticket allocation, regardless.

“The wellbeing and safety of our fans is paramount,” Maccabi Tel Aviv said in a statement, “and from hard lessons learned, we have taken the decision to decline any allocation offered on behalf of away fans.”

Violence between opposing fan bases is all too common in soccer. But fans of Italian sides Genoa and Sampdoria aren’t barred from watching games their teams play in England, nor are supporters of Spanish clubs Barcelona and Real Madrid. That’s despite the fact that all of these fanbases have participated in bloodcurdling brawls in the last year.

Israel, however, is held to a different standard.

In this case, Maccabi’s traumatic night in the Netherlands last year was cited as a reason to fear violence. In Amsterdam, local Islamist vigilantes, not fans of Ajax, whom Maccabi were playing, launched a “Jew hunt” against the traveling Israelis on various messaging apps, using the raucous behavior of a tiny minority of Israeli supporters — behavior familiar to all soccer clubs — as cover for what Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, called a “pogrom.”

Maccabi correctly grasped that a repeat experience might await their fans in Birmingham, where radical Islamism among the city’s large Muslim population has proliferated over the last decade.

Four Islamist members of the House of Commons who were recently elected as independents standing on a Gaza solidarity platform helped instigate the Aston Villa ban.

Their campaign rested on claims that Maccabi fans had sparked the violence in Amsterdam. This overlooked the Dutch authorities’ conclusion that the Israelis were not responsible for the violence despite the bellicose chants of some of them. The police also “ignored” the advice of the British government’s advisor on antisemitism, Lord John Mann, who said that responsibility for the violence did not lie with the Maccabi fans.

Indeed, Nandy pointed out that the ban “was a decision not taken [because of] the risk posed by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans; it was a decision taken because of the risk posed to them, because they support an Israeli team and because they are Jewish.”

In reaching their decision, local police are also said to have used a report by the extreme anti-Zionist Hind Rajab Foundation — run by Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Belgian-based Islamist with ties to Hezbollah — which predictably blamed all the trouble on the Tel Aviv fans. The foundation’s purpose is to hunt down Israelis traveling overseas to have them arrested on allegations of war crimes.

By banning Israelis from a public event, British authorities placated virulent anti-Israel activists rather than confronting them. This kind of response is hardly limited to soccer and is not unique to the United Kingdom.

Following the circus of demonstrators harassing the Israeli cycling team in a Spanish tournament in September 2025, a major Italian cycling tournament banned the Israeli team for “public security” reasons.

In 2024, Israeli competitors were similarly excluded from a climbing competition in the Netherlands and a hockey tournament in Bulgaria — though pressure from the NHL reversed the hockey ban. Even if officially presented as concern for their safety, sports organizers are punishing Israelis for receiving death threats rather than standing up to violent agitators.

If not for the ceasefire in Gaza, UEFA, European soccer’s top governing body, likely would have ejected Israel. The proposed move rested on activists falsely depicting Israel’s war against the terrorist group Hamas as genocide. The exclusionary move was the boardroom version of the Amsterdam Jew hunt — a tyranny of the majority that holds anti-Israel views. Both the bureaucrats and the street brawlers justify their discrimination and harassment as responses to perceived Israeli crimes.

But the reality is that the Maccabi ban is an extension of the so-called “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) campaign that solely targets Israeli individuals and associations — and which is itself the outgrowth of an Arab League boycott of Israel instituted three years before the Jewish State came into being.

Cloaked in the language of human rights, BDS seeks to eradicate the Jewish State and harass its supporters.

Jews getting chased in the streets and forced into hiding in the same city where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis is obviously abhorrent. But the anti-Israel discrimination presented as safety concerns or human rights protection is more complicated to outside observers. Among Jews, as well as all those who understand the trajectory of antisemitism, both carry an unmistakable echo of the past: Jews are not wanted here.

Ben Cohen is a senior analyst and the rapid response director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where David May is a senior research analyst and research manager. For more analysis from the authors and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow Ben and David on X @BenCohenOpinion and @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.