Show Antisemitism the Red CardAgainst the Israel Boycott Movement in Football

Our 1. FSV Mainz 05 took us on a very special journey across Europe last season. We got to enjoy six away games, each one a unique experience. Scheduling, ticket availability, travel routes and local security requirements sometimes made the whole thing a nerve-racking undertaking – but all that mattered was that it somehow worked out in the end. And it always did. Besides, a bit of adventure is simply part of the experience, especially when it comes to international fixtures.

What Israeli football fans – or fans of Israeli clubs – are currently experiencing in UEFA competitions, however, has nothing to do with the usual hardships or “adventures”. Instead, their entire European campaign is overshadowed by the growing normalisation of an antisemitic pogrom mentality and the ever-present prospect of antisemitic exclusion. It is long past time to grasp the gravity of the situation: Israelis are increasingly being targeted in attacks across Europe, while Jews in Germany have long been “sitting on packed suitcases”.^[1]

Home Games in Exile and Fans in the Crosshairs

The fact that Israeli football clubs have no longer been allowed to stage their European home games in Israel since 7 October and the subsequent war in Gaza^[2] is at least understandable given the security situation there.^[3] Yet it remains a distressing sight and a precarious arrangement: Israeli fans, unless they themselves are barred from attending,^[4] can experience their magical European “home games” only hundreds of kilometres away, subject to heightened security checks, a massive police presence and, all too often, without any “away fans” at all.^[5] At least the international Israel boycott movement, which hastily regrouped in the wake of the largest antisemitic massacre since the Shoah and is currently mobilising under the slogan “Show Israel the Red Card”, has so far failed to achieve its maximal demand of banning Israel from international football altogether.^[6][7] What is gaining ground with increasing confidence, however, is a practice of exclusion at Israeli teams’ European away fixtures that must ultimately be understood as a dispassionate capitulation to the antisemitic mob, if not as eager collaboration with it.

It has long been known that this mob regularly runs riot when Israeli teams play away in Europe. One low point dates back almost 20 years: in November 2006, several dozen right-wing hooligans from PSG’s Boulogne Boys hunted down a Jewish Hapoel fan after a home game against Hapoel Tel Aviv. The Black plain-clothes police officer Antoine Granomort came to his aid, only to be subjected to racist abuse, threatened with death and knocked to the ground himself. He fired a fatal shot in self-defence.^[8]

We should also recall the antisemitic attacks by Union Berlin supporters in 2021,^[9] and especially the shocking violence in Athens in April 2023. At a basketball game against Hapoel Jerusalem – before 7 October – AEK fans were no longer content, as they had been in 2019,^[10] to burn Israeli flags, display Hezbollah flags and glorify a terrorist convicted of five murders.^[11] Their symbolic support for Islamist terrorist organisations now turned into action: they attacked, of all people, the most left-wing of all Israeli fan communities^[12] with stones and fireworks.^[13] These examples alone – together with a look at history – show that hatred of Israelis has nothing to do with understandable support for Palestinian peace movements.^[14] It is simply hatred: hatred of Israel, whose logical consequence is warmongering.

The Current Situation

As serious as such antisemitic hostility and attacks have always been, at least Israeli fans were not categorically barred from matches in advance by authorities or institutions as “unwelcome persons”. Yet that too changed after 7 October – an event met, incidentally, with a deafening silence in European sport. As early as December 2023, the Spanish authorities decided to classify Villarreal’s match against Maccabi Haifa as a “high-risk fixture” and prohibit away fans from attending.^[15] Of course, there is nothing new about away fans being banned from UEFA club competitions, whether by order of the authorities or at UEFA’s behest. Sometimes such decisions are based on abstract “risk assessments” rather than specific misconduct by fans.^[16] Usually, however, they rest on concrete indications relating to the respective fan communities that give grounds for concern about safety.^[17] Only recently, UEFA stressed that collective bans should be imposed “only in exceptional cases” and must be based on “clear, objective and up-to-date documented evidence”.^[18]

The collective bans currently being imposed on Israeli away fans, however, have nothing to do with actual or alleged misconduct on their part. When Maccabi Haifa fans were barred from travelling to their game at KAA Gent in February 2024, the city of Ghent in Belgium gave a glimpse, in its explanation, of what had probably also motivated the Spanish authorities a few months earlier: there had been “complaints from politically engaged citizens”, and the match could become a “catalyst for expressing frustrations and discontent that have nothing to do with the match itself”. The authorities even envisaged the possibility of a “bomb threat”.^[19]

What happens when such “frustrations and discontent” turn into physical violence was evident in November 2024, when the roughly 3,000 travelling Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in Amsterdam became the targets of anti-Jewish manhunts.^[20] The provocative and, in some cases, racist behaviour of some Maccabi supporters before the match^[21] certainly did nothing to calm the situation. But it was not the cause of the manhunt that followed the game; at most, it provided a welcome pretext. Countless small groups gathered across the city centre to carry out antisemitic “hit and run assaults”.^[22]

Even before this violence, the hosts of Maccabi’s next away game, Beşiktaş Istanbul, and the Turkish Football Federation had shamelessly declared that Israeli away fans could only be expected to engage in “provocation and propaganda for the massacres committed by Israel in Palestine”. The match was consequently moved to Hungary and ordered to be played behind closed doors.^[23] A year later, the authorities in Birmingham, England, took a somewhat subtler approach, using the violence in Amsterdam as a pretext to prohibit Aston Villa from selling tickets to Maccabi fans on security grounds. The police’s explanation offers a disturbing glimpse of an atmosphere in which the mere visit of an Israeli football club becomes an occasion for political and antisemitic mobilisation.^[24] Such mobilisation, incidentally, was not seen against either Russia in the context of its war against Ukraine since 2014, or Turkey in the context of its attacks on Kurdish areas.

And what is particularly alarming is that this agitation is bearing fruit. In the Netherlands, various groups and organisations mobilised against Hapoel Beer Sheva’s away fixture at AZ Alkmaar on 15 October.^[25] The result: Mayor Anja Schouten, the public prosecutor’s office and the police decided that no away fans would be admitted, citing fears of “possible demonstrations” and once again referring to the violence in Amsterdam.^[26] A week later, Beer Sheva were supposed to play Union Saint-Gilloise in Leuven, Belgium. Leuven’s mayor, Mohamed Ridouani, even anticipated the protests, acting out of firm conviction and declaring that he remained “consistent” in refusing to allow Israeli sports teams to play at the King Power at Den Dreef Stadium.^[27] The current “solution”: a match in Düsseldorf without fans.^[28] There is conflicting information about the game against Beşiktaş in November: officially, it is due to take place in Istanbul, but apparently another move abroad is being planned.^[29] There has been no word from Bournemouth yet, though there is still some time before the match in January 2027.

Divided by Colours – United in the Cause?

So instead of planning trips and adventures together, Hapoel Beer Sheva fans – with whom our group and other Mainz 05 fans have close ties and friendships – are being forced to experience what it means not even to be tolerated in Europe. They cannot count on support from local civil society – quite the opposite. Meanwhile, fans in Glasgow continue to parade PFLP flags,^[30] and from Madrid^[31] to Częstochowa,^[32] from Paris^[33] to Konya,^[34] from Rome^[35] to Jena,^[36] and from Manchester^[37] to Nicosia,^[38] left-wing and right-wing terraces are united: Israel is the “Jew among states”,^[39] and its citizens are potentially fair game.^[40] Once again, antisemitism proves to be the unifying ideology par excellence. In that respect, nothing has changed.

All the more distressing, then, is the pre-emptive obedience with which European institutions make common cause with this antisemitic mob on the streets and on the terraces. If you do not want anti-Jewish pogroms, the logic in twenty-first-century Europe seems to run, you should not let any Jews in. Given this new level of antisemitic threats and mechanisms of exclusion, everyone involved in football urgently needs to live up to their much-preached responsibility within the “football family” – and confront a massive problem of antisemitism.