PSC reiterates call for cancellation of Aston Villa vs Maccabi Tel Aviv match

PSC reiterates the call for a complete cancellation of the Aston Villa vs Maccabi Tel Aviv football match, currently scheduled to take place on 6 November in Birmingham. The match should not go ahead, with or without Maccabi Tel Aviv fans present, because the club has been directly involved in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and through the Israel Football Association, is involved in Israel’s colonial settlement infrastructure in the occupied West Bank. Just as sporting events involving teams from apartheid South Africa were picketed and boycotted, so should events involving teams from apartheid Israel. If the match is not cancelled, we will mobilise with our coalition partners for a protest on the day, and we invite people from across Britain to join us. 

Much has already been said about the track record of the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans bringing racist violence to the streets of cities where the team is playing. They are known for their grotesque anti-Palestinian chants, glorifying the murder of Palestinian children. Their violence has also led recently to a game in their own city being cancelled because of ‘risk to life’. The British government has intervened to push for these fans to be allowed at the match, even outrageously suggesting that preventing these fans, with a proven track record of racism, from attending would be a capitulation to antisemitism. The government is, once again, out of step with public opinion, with a clear majority supporting the decision to stop the fans from attending.   

The racism of the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans is not an aberration; it is an ugly by-product of the racist apartheid system that Israel maintains over Palestinians. Israeli sports, including football, are deeply implicated in this system of oppression. Maccabi Tel Aviv is a part of the Israel Football Association (IFA), which includes at least 6 clubs 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 occupation and allowing the IFA clubs to play internationally normalises apartheid and gives the signal that there are no consequences for it. 

Over the weekend, as British politicians and media pundits lambasted West Midlands Police and politicians for deciding to ban the notoriously racist Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, Israel resumed its bombing of Gaza, killing at least 42 Palestinians, while Israeli settlers, with the protection of the Israeli military, rampaged through the West Bank, violently attacking Palestinian families harvesting their olive crop, critically injuring an elderly woman after beating her to the ground with a stick, and invading a school of children. This is not an anomaly but has become a nearly daily occurrence in the West Bank, where nearly 50 Palestinian communities have been partly or completely forcibly displaced in the past two years because of land grabs and relentless settler violence. If no action is taken to stop Israel’s colonial expansion, there will soon be more IFA clubs in illegal settlements in the West Bank because that many more Palestinian communities will have been ethnically cleansed. 

Allowing this match to go ahead would normalise Israel’s racist oppression of the Palestinian people. The FA, UEFA and Aston Villa must take immediate action to cancel the match. We will mobilise with our coalition partners for a protest on the day of the match and we invite all those across Britain who support Palestinian rights and oppose all forms of racist violence to join us.