Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday accused British police officers of antisemitism after they defended a November ban on Maccabi soccer fans by claiming they might have assaulted random residents of Birmingham.
The Foreign Ministry responded to the claims on X, writing: “The revelations concerning the conduct of the West Midlands Police toward Maccabi fans are utterly disgraceful. There is a specific term for the phenomenon of scapegoating Israelis and Jews while exonerating the true perpetrators—jihadists seeking to harm Jews. It is called antisemitism.”
The condemnation followed remarks by a top police officer on Tuesday at the British parliament’s home affairs committee. He insisted that Maccabi fans were banned from attending a soccer match in Birmingham in November, partly due to information that they might attack “members of the community.”
The West Midland Police’s Assistant Chief Constable, Mike O’Hara, did not specify the source of the information, or whether it came from disputed accounts that his department had attributed to Dutch police.
The police’s handling of the match and inaccuracies in how they’ve conveyed information about the affair have resulted in an ongoing scandal and an ongoing parliamentary review. The police’s conduct has eroded the confidence of many British Jews and others amid the proliferation of antisemitic violence in the United Kingdom.
At the home affairs committee meeting Tuesday, O’Hara said: “We had the rising tide of concern locally and then we had the additional information about Maccabi Tel Aviv and the potential threat of them attacking community members as opposed to rival fans and those two things together I think presented a reasonable position for the police to say we want to protect the public.”
In November, an Amsterdam police spokesperson denied the West Midlands Police’s claims that Dutch police had warned British colleagues about Maccabi fans. The Dutch police were consulted because of violence that broke out in November 2024 after a match between Ajax and Maccabi, West Midlands Police have said.
O’Hara and other top West Midlands police officers appeared before the committee to answer critical questions by lawmakers, including on whether the Labour government, which has adopted a hostile line on Israel, had interfered to enforce a ban. The officers said there had been no government intervention.
In a confidential report, West Midlands Police officers claimed that Dutch counterparts had told them that the Israeli fans had pushed “innocent members of the public into the river,” and that 500-600 of them “intentionally targeted Muslim communities,” requiring a deployment of 5,000 police officers, The Sunday Times reported.
This account was inverted, as only Maccabi fans had been pushed into the water on Nov. 6, 2024, according to Dutch police. Dozens of Arab and Muslim men coordinated on social media what some of them called a “Jew hunt,” resulting in the targeting and injuring of several Israelis.
West Midlands Police nonetheless defended the ban, telling the Sunday Times that its “evaluation had public safety at its heart.”
An initial report by the West Midlands Police on the ban cited “open source intelligence” on Maccabi. Critics said this amounted to Google searches in which police looked selectively for information to justify a ban, though O’Hara denied this on Tuesday.
A separate uproar followed O’Hara claims last month that the Jewish community of Birmingham had supported the ban.
He apologized for making this claim after the leaders of the local Jewish community disputed and protested it.
“Please can I apologize and make very clear that it was not my intention to imply that there were members of the Jewish community who had explicitly expressed support for the exclusion of Maccabi fans,” O’Hara wrote in a letter to Jewish community leaders in December, The Sunday Times reported.
In the tweet about antisemitism, the Israeli foreign ministry also wrote: “Regrettably, this is the reality of Britain today. There must be action and accountability for such actions.”
