You did ask!

Some responses to your questions about Maccabi Tel Aviv and how our government sided with Israeli football hooligans over police chiefs

Thanks to everyone who sent in excellent, thoughtful questions about my recent post, about the screaming media and political pile-on directed at West Midlands Police over a decision to ban fans of an Israeli football team from attending a match in Birmingham last year. With head-spinning speed, the news cycle has long moved on to multiple crises, everywhere. Still, I wanted to respond to your questions and so here is what came up.

The picture you paint is a depressing one: government interference; an agenda pushed by a very focused newspaper and a bumbling police force that made serious errors. The head of the regional police force took the fall. What do you think should have happened?

This question helpfully sets out the interlocking pieces of this fiasco. West Midlands Police did make serious errors in producing the report used to prevent Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa late last year. But despite the errors in the info-gathering, their security assessment over safety concerns still stands. That’s because Maccabi Tel Aviv has a known violent, racist hooligan element of its fanbase with a long track record of racist hooliganism. It is reasonable to not want to host such fans at any time, much less at a time when Israel has decimated Gaza and Maccabi Tel Aviv fans peddle racist chants celebrating that fact. West Midlands Police made the right call. A report from an independent body that monitors police found no evidence of antisemitism or malign intent in the assessment over banning Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. When I posted on this issue, several readers from Birmingham told me they were glad that local police had acted in the interests of local residents – all local residents. So yes, hold West Midlands Police to account for the errors, but that should have been the end of it.

It’s rare for a home secretary to lose confidence in a police chief and for them subsequently to step down over lies, mistakes or misconduct. We don’t have to look far to find a litany of policing scandals: the UK’s Spycops undercover policing scandal, the undercover spying on the Stephen Lawrence family, the shooting and killing of Mark Duggan in London in 2011, or the shooting and killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in London in 2005, to name a few. Heads do roll sometimes, of course. But speaking about the government pressure on West Midlands Police, one veteran criminologist told me: “I can’t recall another time when it was like this.” Another said the key difference in this case was the “hugely political context”.

How do we protect multiple minorities in our communities without making it seem like one always trumps another?

This gets to the damage stemming from this “hugely political context”. While the news has moved on. the fallout is long-lasting and corrosive. The whole thing smashes our sense of unity and capacity collectively to fight to secure freedom from prejudice, for all. In its handling of the issue, the government unleashed several harms all it once. It effectively suggested we locate British Jewish communities and violent Israeli football hooligans in the same category. It visibly prioritised politicised claims of antisemitism above other considerations. It demonstrated a lack of concern over the consequences of allowing racist Israeli football hooligans to descend on a diverse city with a large Muslim population. And it gave oxygen to a noxious conspiracy of ‘two-tier policing’ – in this case, the deranged idea that British police were cowed by the demands of the local Muslim population.

I recently tuned into a Guardian podcast entitled How did British Muslims become ‘the problem’? In it, panelists discuss the sheer volume of violent and vitriolic verbal attacks on British Muslims, with the hatred out in the open now more than ever before. One of the panelists, the director of media monitoring for the Muslim Council of Britain, Miqdaad Versi, noted that “major figures in our country are demonising ordinary Muslins going about their daily life – that’s my children, that’s my community, that’s my friends.” The podcast sharply illuminates part of the picture that so often gets ignored: that Muslims in Britain face unprecedented levels of hate and that, in casting Muslims as somehow inherently antisemitic, political and media figures are actively making things worse for these British communities.

Our challenge is to remain united and consistent in our antiracism. And we have to do that despite the divisiveness pushed on us by the media and political conversation around such issues. Which brings us on to the next question…

If this isn’t how you’d go about fighting antisemitism, how should we be tackling it?

When it comes to the government’s approach, I do often produce some variation of the sentence that appeared in my last post: “If you wanted seriously to tackle antisemitism, which is frighteningly on the rise globally, you would not go about it like this.” So I appreciate this logical follow-up question!

For me, the main thing is to tackle different racisms together, rather than in silos. And one element of this de-siloing is about understanding and taking seriously when Jewish friends and colleagues are fearful of actually rising antisemitism. Currently, talk of tackling antisemitism is mostly coming from right wing voices. Now, those voices are mostly invoking false claims of antisemitism concerning legitimate criticisms of Israel. And their suggested responses are terrible: censorship and curbs on free speech, for example, or attacks on antiracist groups such as Black Lives Matter, or giving police even more powers to clamp down on protest. But I think progressives should be reclaiming the fight against antisemitism and reconnecting it to the broader antiracist struggle. And a crucial part of this is raising levels of literacy about antisemitism: what it is, what it looks like and its impacts today. Fortunately, many progressive organisations are around to help. For more resources, I recommend the Diaspora Alliance guide to antisemitism, as well as L’Taken and the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, both in the UK.