It was an infamous night in football.
More than 5,000 Dutch police officers had to be deployed to contain hundreds of Israeli fans embarking on a post-match rampage, tearing down Palestinian flags, assaulting Muslim taxi drivers and throwing innocent bystanders into a river.
The only problem with this account, supplied by West Midlands police in support of a highly sensitive decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from travelling to a match at Villa Park last November, is that this week an independent review by the chief inspector of constabulary, Andy Cooke, concluded that much of it is either exaggerated or flat wrong. (Dutch police told his inspectors that they deployed 1,200 officers, had reports regarding one flag and one taxi driver, and that a Maccabi fan was in fact thrown into a canal, seemingly by members of a pro-Palestinian group).
Though nobody disputes it was a violent night that might well have shaped police desire to ban Maccabi fans, at best they made a worryingly sloppy case for it, including references cribbed from an unreliable AI tool to a football match that did not actually exist. But perhaps most damaging is the finding that by publicly downplaying reports of locals plotting to attack the visitors, the force overstated the threat posed by the Israelis and understated that posed to them – an error with global consequences.
The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who as a Muslim MP in Birmingham needs no lectures on the sensitivities, responded that by apparently trying to smooth community relations, the force had only made matters worse. Now the city faces a toxic row over so-called two-tier policing, reactivating both incendiary rightwing claims of the police going easy on Muslims for fear of looking racist and complaints that, if anything, the reverse is true, which does little to reassure either British Jews or British Muslims fearful for their safety in a febrile climate. Meanwhile, it was left to the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, to ask why, if the police were aware of threats to harm Israeli fans, they didn’t pursue the wannabe attackers instead of telling prospective victims of racially aggravated crimes to stay at home.
For many British Jews, all this stirs deep-seated fears of being treated less as a persecuted minority than as the problem, obliged to retreat from mainstream spaces to spare everyone else the awkwardness of having to battle for their inclusion. Someone seeks to harm visiting Israelis? Well, maybe they just shouldn’t come. This fear of being squeezed out of public life is, for some, only intensified by a campaign to boycott Jewish public figures – from musicians and comedians to the MP and vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, Damien Egan, reportedly forced to cancel a visit to a school in his Bristol constituency due to a threatened public protest – deemed by pro-Palestine activists to have insufficiently denounced the war on Gaza, or to have too close a relationship with Israel. (Egan has reportedly visited the country since the war broke out, a red flag for the boycott movement.)
Though activists insist they’re not boycotting anyone just for being Jewish, it is not hard to see why a vulnerable minority would fear being singled out for political purity tests, or held unfairly to account for the actions of a foreign government over which they have no control. Arguing over whether this is or isn’t antisemitism seems less productive than figuring out how to stop Britain sliding into the kind of mutually hostile and distrustful cultural ghettoisation that extremists find only too easy to exploit.
The school says it has rescheduled Egan’s visit, which is reassuring: MPs should be able in a democracy to move freely around their own constituencies, and teenagers who will shortly be voters deserve the chance to meet – and sometimes challenge – their representatives. Meanwhile, a snap Ofsted inspection should get to the bottom of newspaper allegations that school staff, professionally obliged to be politically impartial, actively worked to keep Egan out.
Yet it’s crucial that lessons are learned ahead of the next flashpoint, for sadly there will be more. Handled badly, they can only play into the hands of all those – from the nativist far right to fundamentalists demanding that Muslims leave the decadent west to build their longed-for caliphate – desperate to prove the old lie that Muslims and Jews cannot peacefully coexist, that liberal democracies can’t absorb these tensions, that mass immigration leads inevitably to the importing of distant conflicts and what Trumpworld calls “civilisational erasure”.
Those of us who genuinely believe in the goal of a multicultural society, where people of all faiths and backgrounds learn to live together more or less tolerantly, have to accept that it won’t always be easy. Frontline professionals from politicians to chief constables, headteachers and people who never expected to find themselves navigating political minefields, will sometimes be called on to make difficult judgments – and when they turn to the police for impartial advice over handling these flashpoints, they must be able to trust it. That trust was badly damaged in the West Midlands, which is why the Cooke review has become a resigning matter.
But living together through times of war and tension also demands empathy and effort from the rest of us: a willingness to compromise, be generous and accept that tolerance isn’t just something liberals preach to other people, but something we must practise ourselves, even (or perhaps especially) when feeling morally righteous. It won’t be easy. But, trust me, it beats the alternative.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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