Maccabi Tel Aviv row breaks Starmer’s cover story for colluding in genocide

The legal and ethical earthquake from Israel’s carnage in Gaza was never going to be contained there. As the Aston Villa row shows, the shockwaves for Britain will keep growing louder

[First published by Middle East Eye]

No one should be surprised that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer confected yet another duplicitous antisemitism furore last week – one in which he implicitly cast West Midlands Police as colluding in Jew hatred and insisted that British Muslims be exposed to racist violence from visiting foreign football hooligans.

Starmer had demanded that a decision by the police to bar fans of an Israeli club, Maccabi Tel Aviv, from attending a Europa League match in Birmingham next month be overturned.

He indicated that the West Midlands force had approved the ban on the grounds that hatred towards Jews in Britain had reached such fever pitch that police could no longer guarantee the Israeli fans’ safety from antisemitic violence.

His reasoning defamed both the British public and the police. The media lost no time in amplifying his narrative.

But Starmer’s claims were pure disinformation – as he surely knew from the police intelligence reports that must have been submitted to him before he called for the ban to be reversed.

Sadly for Starmer, those assessments were leaked to the media. They show that West Midlands Police made the decision after receiving reports from Dutch police that Maccabi fans had instigated racist violence in Amsterdam last year – before, during and after a match with local team Ajax.

As one source with inside knowledge of the police assessments told the Guardian: “The biggest risk was always the extreme Maccabi fans who want to fight.” It had taken 5,000 Dutch police officers three days to bring the violence to an end.

The likely cost of policing next month’s Aston Villa game was estimated at at least £6m ($8m), and would have required the deployment of large numbers of specialist riot squads from across the UK.

Not unreasonably, the police concluded that giving licence to Israeli football hooligans seeking to make good on chants of “Death to Arabs” in an ethnically diverse city like Birmingham was a bad idea.

According to the assessment, even members of the Jewish community opposed letting Maccabi fans attend.

Many of the Israeli club’s hardcore supporters – those that attend away fixtures – are likely to be current or reserve soldiers who have participated in the Gaza genocide. They deserve arrest, not the UK rolling out the red carpet.

Race relations fires

But strangely, Starmer did not see it this way. In his eyes, it seems, foreign thugs and war criminals should enjoy greater privileges in Britain than local ethnic minorities. Maccabi hooligans’ right to bring their genocidal incitement and violence to the UK trumps the right of minorities to be protected.

What political advantage his advisers thought he would gain is hard to grasp. Starmer simply added yet more fuel to Britain’s race relations fires – by smearing, once again, Muslims as antisemitic and “un-British”. The only beneficiary will be Nigel Farage’s Reform party.

So what on earth is going on?

In normal circumstances, this kind of behaviour from a government whose polling figures are in freefall – and whose traditional urban heartlands are deserting it – would look like demented self-sabotage. But these are not normal times.

Starmer knows that US President Donald Trump’s “peace plan” has done nothing more than slow Israel’s genocide, and that the so-called “ceasefire”, which Israel is violating on a daily basis, will crumble sooner or later – more likely sooner.

The bad news from Gaza is not going away. But this time Israel will no longer be able to claim as a pretext that the carnage is necessary to “bring home” captives held by Hamas.

Israel’s criminality will be even more starkly on show – and so will Britain’s extensive collusion.

Starmer’s solution has been to furiously pump up fears of “antisemitism”, even if doing so – as with his implicit criticism of the West Midlands Police – makes him and his ministers look ridiculous, incompetent and bad-faith actors.

But there is a logic here – of sorts. The prime minister’s two-fold strategy on Gaza has been evident for a while.

On the one hand, Starmer has done the bare minimum to oppose Israel’s atrocities, and in the most mealy-mouthed way he can, so he can at least claim, however disingenuously, to be respecting international law.

That is what primarily drove his very belated and grudging recognition of Palestinian statehood, though he appended a raft of near-impossible conditions to hollow out the move.

And it is the rationale for his claimed – but entirely bogus – curbing of UK arms sales to Israel. In fact, Britain has been making record weapons sales to Israel since he became prime minister.

On the other, Starmer has sought to deflect attention from his core policy of inertia on Gaza – designed to keep him onside with Washington – by denouncing any meaningful criticism of Israel as posing a threat to British Jews.

Fortress state

To achieve this end, it has been necessary to wildly misrepresent the true source of the antisemitism threat in Britain.

Starmer needs to pin the blame for Jew hatred on those who oppose both Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza and his own complicity in supporting Israel with arms, surveillance intelligence, and rhetorical and diplomatic cover.

That means his main target is the anti-racist left – a left he has been industriously purging from his own Labour Party since he became leader – and Muslim communities that identify most closely with Gaza’s suffering.

Meanwhile, he must distract attention from the real antisemites – those on the far-right, ranging from sections of the Conservative and Reform parties to an army of white nationalist goons led by Tommy Robinson, a notorious Islamophobe with multiple criminal convictions.

The ultra-right may hate Muslims and Jews equally, but they love the muscular, militarised fortress “Jewish state” of Israel, which prioritises the kind of ethnic purity and anti-Muslim bigotry they would love to see replicated in Britain.

In these circumstances, Starmer’s switch-and-bait has not been easy. Nonetheless, with the media’s backing, he has relentlessly smeared as “antisemites” anti-racists and British Jews – the “wrong sort” – who recoil from a genocide Israel claims it is doing in the name of all Jews.

Meanwhile, he has endorsed the conflation of a genocidal Israel, including its most violent football hooligans, with supposedly “right-thinking” British Jews – that is, those who identify with Israel so strongly they are blind to its crimes.

‘Clash of civilisations’

Starmer now serves as a prominent champion of the hard right’s much-loved “clash of civilisations” thesis, in which a Judeo-Christian West is assumed to be in a life-or-death, defensive war against a supposedly savage, bloodthirsty Islamic East.

In this narrative, Israel is the rampart against “barbarian Muslim hordes” seeking to storm the citadel of western civilisation.

Naturally, the right brushes aside any other explanation. Such as that Israel’s decades-long meddling in the region and relentless onslaughts on local populations – under the banner of Jewish supremacy, and brazenly as a western client state – may have incited the very response western publics are now encouraged to fear.

Starmer is no less dismissive of the self-sabotaging nature of the West’s foreign policy and its unstinting support for Israel, even in the midst of the Gaza genocide.

He cannot countenance the idea that the western-backed slaughter breathes life into assertions – once confined to more extreme groups – that there can be no accommodation with the West. That the West acts in bad faith. That it treats the lives of non-westerners as entirely worthless.

Starmer’s commitment to the “clash of civilisations” worldview was less obvious when he was continuing the previous government’s manufactured fight with “pampered, out-of-touch students” in encampments or “Hamas-sympathising lefties” on anti-genocide marches.

But he has chosen to go further.

He has proscribed as “terrorists” – apparently an upgrade from “antisemites” – the activists of Palestine Action. Their unforgivable sin was to move from street protests to direct action. They sought to put a spoke in the wheels of the British government’s complicity with the genocide, targeting factories in the UK supplying weapons to Israel.

According to Britain’s draconian terrorism laws, it is also a terrorism offence to show any support for a proscribed organisation.

Starmer appears not to have foreseen that, as a result, the police would be forced to arrest thousands of upstanding citizens – including doctors, lawyers, barristers, retired military officers, and even a former adviser to King Charles.

They have refused to bend to his decree that no debate about the legality, let alone the morality, of Britain arming Israel’s genocide can be tolerated.

Face-off with police

But now things have turned even darker. Starmer’s current duplicity has led him into siding with violent Israeli football hooligans against his own police force and Muslim communities.

The fallout from his four-square support for Israel’s genocide is that Starmer has had to import more deeply into British domestic politics the inherently divisive “clash of civilisations” ideology.

In the process, he has risked revealing how much of a charade his antisemitism narrative has been from the start.

The government’s actions were never really about protecting the Jewish community. Rather, it has been cynically using British Jews as a collective human shield, allowing Starmer to denounce any meaningful criticism of Israel as posing a threat to the Jewish community.

Starmer’s need for a cover story has been especially urgent because he was himself once a distinguished human rights lawyer, one who even served as the lead advocate in a case before the International Court of Justice in 2014 arguing that Serbia had committed genocide in the Croatian city of Vukovar.

How is he to explain his behaviour partnering with Israel and Washington over Gaza’s destruction, when it has required him to shred Britain’s obligations under international law?

He cannot claim ignorance, should there come a day when he is brought before the judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

So the story Starmer has been crafting instead is that he is the saviour of Britain’s Jewish community, that he has been charting a difficult course in the face of a supposedly rampant antisemitism from the left, from Muslims, from anti-genocide marchers, from student encampments, from human rights groups, from Holocaust scholars, from the United Nations, from the ICC, and now from the British police.

The over-arching narrative is that Starmer has been one of the key bulwarks against the return of Jew hatred to Europe.

The price required to protect British Jews, so this story goes, has been his role as a “critical friend” to Israel, working behind the scenes to curb its worst excesses, while damping down criticism of Israel that risks inflaming antisemitism.

The main problem for Starmer is that he is being forced to confront more and more groups and institutions to sustain this narrative – to the point where he put himself effectively in a face-off with the British police.

‘Lab rats’

Opponents of the genocide warned from the outset that what started in Gaza could not be contained there. The slaughter would inevitably provoke polarising dissent in the West, require the crushing of basic rights to silence critics of western complicity, and gradually normalise authoritarianism.

Starmer’s behaviour has proved just how correct those prognoses were.

The British prime minister’s woes are not about to end, as recent developments demonstrate. Rather, the danger continues to grow of him being charged one day as an accessory to genocide.

Francesca Albanese, the UN’s international law expert for the occupied Palestinian territories, helps make that case in a report published last week. Entitled “Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime”, she highlights the collusion of western states in Israel’s litany of atrocities.

She notes how keen western leaders have been to portray Israel’s onslaught “as a battle of civilisation against barbarism”. In doing so, “they have reproduced the Israeli distortions of international law and colonial tropes, seeking to justify their own complicity in genocide”.

She identifies four sectors where western support has been indispensable in allowing Israel to continue its crimes: diplomatic, military and economic backing, as well as the ideological framing of Israel’s bombing and starvation of Gaza’s people as self-defence, producing a “humanitarian” problem that needs addressing rather than serving as proof of Israel’s genocidal intent.

In this last regard, she specifically names Starmer. In three separate interviews as opposition leader, he claimed that Israel had a “right” to carry through threats to cut off water and power to Gaza’s population.

As she points out, Israel cannot invoke a right to “self-defence” in Gaza under Article 51 of the UN Charter, when it has been holding the enclave’s people under a belligerent, decades-old occupation.

Starmer knows this.

Instead she argues that western leaders like Starmer have echoed the assumptions of a racist, colonial discourse in which non-westerners are viewed as “savages” who are undeserving of the protections of international law.

That discourse serves to conceal the huge profits western corporations have been reaping by colluding in Israel’s long occupation, as she documented in a previous report.

Western businesses and governments have looked to Israel to use Palestinians as lab rats for testing new surveillance technologies, systems of control and displacement, and killing machines.

These forms of oppression are already being turned against domestic populations in the West.

She points out that Starmer’s government has made the most cursory of nods to international law, such as imposing entry restrictions on two fascist ministers in Netanyahu’s government, while treating other genocide-cheering figures, such as President Isaac Herzog and senior Israeli military officials, as honoured guests.

The UK has been evasive about whether it would enforce the ICC’s arrest warrant against Netanyahu for crimes against humanity – for the starvation of Gaza that Starmer endorsed. And the UK has done nothing to prosecute British citizens who have chosen to serve on Israel’s side in the Gaza genocide, or even dissuade them from participating.

Perhaps most egregiously, a British airbase on Cyprus has served as a crucial supply line for arms to Israel and for hundreds of UK surveillance flights over Gaza.

Albanese observes: “Flight numbers and durations, often coinciding with major Israeli operations, suggest detailed knowledge and cooperation in the destruction of Gaza, extending beyond ‘hostage rescue’.”

‘Political stunt’

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), often known as the World Court, threw its own substantial weight last week behind a verdict that also implicates western leaders such as Starmer.

It was the court’s third ruling since Israel launched its campaign of slaughter in Gaza two years ago.

The first had found it “plausible” Israel was committing genocide. ICJ judges are currently investigating that charge.

The second ruling, last summer, concluded that Israel’s decades-long occupation and Jewish settlement of the Palestinian territories were illegal; that Israel must immediately withdraw from those territories, including Gaza; and that other states were obligated to put whatever pressure they could on Israel to comply.

Israel has gone in exactly the opposite direction, with its parliament last week voting to formally annex the occupied West Bank.

US Vice-President JD Vance, who was in Israel at the time babysitting Netanyahu to stop him sabotaging the ceasefire, called the parliamentary vote a “political stunt” and an “insult”.

But the White House’s concern appears to relate chiefly to the timing, which might threaten the ceasefire, rather than the substance.

His replacement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who arrived in Israel on Thursday, stated of the annexation vote: “At this time, it’s something that we … think might be counterproductive.” Note the conditional “At this time”.

The new, third ruling builds on the second – and hints at the likely outcome of the ICJ’s investigation of Israel for genocide. It finds Israel’s starvation policy in Gaza – the collective punishment of its population – in flagrant violation of international law.

The World Court justices declare: “The occupying Power may never invoke reasons of security to justify the general suspension of all humanitarian activities in an occupied territory.”

That should serve as a stinging rebuke to Starmer, who, as previously noted, declared that Israel had the right to carry out its declared policy of starving the people of Gaza.

The ICJ also rules that Israel must immediately allow in full supplies of food and aid, and cooperate with Unrwa, the UN aid agency that served as the main lifeline for the people of Gaza until Israel banned its operations last year based on a claim it had been infiltrated by Hamas.

The judges found that Israel had never produced any evidence to support such an allegation.

Health ‘catastrophe’

Israel replaced UN food distribution sites in Gaza with four, hard-to-reach “aid hubs” run by a US and Israeli military front group, the wildly misnamed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It brought in a trickle of aid while Israeli soldiers regularly sprayed gunfire on desperate Palestinians queueing for food, killing and wounding many thousands.

Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” expressly required of Israel that it allow aid distribution “through the United Nations and its agencies”. And yet last Friday Rubio changed his administration’s own rules, as well as defying the World Court, by stating that Unrwa could play “no role” in aid distribution because it was supposedly “a subsidiary of Hamas”.

Tied to Washington’s apron strings, Starmer, like other western leaders, has made vague noises against Israel’s genocidal starvation campaign in Gaza, notably after images of emaciated children came to dominate social media six months ago.

But beyond the optics, he has done nothing substantive to reverse his original support for Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza, its blocking of food, aid and power.

Albanese notes in her new report that, as the Israeli-engineered famine gripped Gaza in the spring, the UK was among a handful of countries that launched operations to parachute aid into the enclave – an operation she describes as “expensive, inadequate and dangerous”.

But even worse, she concludes, the aid drops “only served to mislead international public opinion while the famine worsened”.

When British citizens recently joined an aid flotilla to Gaza, in an attempt to highlight Israel’s illegal naval blockade of the enclave, Starmer pointedly refused to offer them protection, even when they were abducted on the high seas and held in highly abusive conditions in Israel.

Despite Starmer behaving as if Trump’s so-called “peace plan” has ended the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, the UN World Food Programme stated last week that aid deliveries continued to remain well below its daily target of 2,000 tonnes.

The World Health Organisation, meanwhile, has warned that the “health catastrophe” Israel has engineered in Gaza will last for “generations to come”.

Trump’s ‘masterplan’

Last week the US news show 60 Minutes interviewed Trump’s two pointmen on Gaza: his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his special envoy Steve Witkoff.

Kushner was keen to highlight how much destruction Israel had unleashed there, explaining that it looked like a nuclear bomb had been dropped.

This appeared to be his clumsy way of underscoring what an achievement Trump had secured in bringing to a halt the orgy of violence – a campaign of destruction, of course, that was made possible only because the US endlessly supplied Israel with armaments.

But with rising panic etched on his face, Kushner could only look on as Witkoff revealed that the pair had been working on a “masterplan” for Gaza’s reconstruction for two years – long before Gaza was levelled by the Israeli military. “Jared has been pushing this,” Witkoff explained.

Analysts have preferred to characterise Trump’s earlier, stated ambition to “clear out” the people of Gaza and build a playground for the rich – a Gaza Riviera – as some kind of hare-brained, improvised response to the scale of the enclave’s devastation.

But Witkoff indicated something even more sinister. That the Trump team had been informed from the outset of Israel’s bombing campaign that the intention was to eradicate Gaza, not Hamas. And so the Trump entourage began working on a business plan to cash in on the carnage.

Gaza, long the western military-industrial complex’s laboratory for field-testing weapons and surveillance technology, would now be repurposed as the world’s biggest redevelopment site.

As 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl approvingly observed of businessmen Kushner and Witkoff: “Part of the plan is the reconstruction, the building, rebuilding of Gaza. And you’re builders. You’ve been in real estate.”

The implication from Witkoff’s slip was clear: that what looked like a genocidal ethnic cleansing operation from the start was indeed just that. Trump’s team knew of Israel’s intentions and began putting together deals – both with the oil-rich Gulf states and, according to Witkoff, with Europe too.

The only continuing obstacle are armed resistance movements in Gaza that Washington is determined to disarm.

Starmer, like other western leaders, has hitched his wagon to the psychopaths who have been running this two-year horror show. It is not going away. They are determined to see it out, and reap the financial rewards.

Which means Starmer will have to maintain his “clash of civilisations” cover story and continue miring British politics more deeply in this divisive narrative.

That will require further demonising Britain’s ethnic minorities. It will exacerbate the country’s race relations wars. It will deepen the polarisation of British politics. It will lead to an ever-greater hollowing out of fundamental democratic rights. And, ultimately, it will usher in the far right on Farage’s coat-tails.

The legal and ethical earthquake that is the Gaza genocide was never going to be contained in Gaza. Its repercussions are simply too large. As the Maccabi Tel Aviv row demonstrates, the shockwaves for Britain are only going to keep growing louder.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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