An erroneous report depicting Israeli victims as attackers fueled a ban on Maccabi fans and heightened Jewish community distrust.
The inversion reportedly appeared in a confidential report, in which British police officers claimed that, according to Dutch counterparts, 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.
Prominent British Jews said the new discovery further eroded their confidence in authorities at a difficult time, and when they are still reeling from the decision to allow anti-Israel protesters to picket a central synagogue on Sunday in London.
Gary Mond, the chairman of the National Jewish Assembly, told JNS that he “lost confidence in the police a while ago, like many in the Jewish community, and probably most.”
Police forces across the United Kingdom, he said, “have tolerated hate marches and their Jew-hating participants on a regular basis.” They also have “no problem in accepting calls for jihad as normal,” he said. Numerous cases of anti-Jewish discrimination have been exposed recently, he added, and “most U.K. Jews regard the situation as utterly intolerable, but feel sadly powerless to do anything about it.”
The decision to ban Israelis last month from the match in Birmingham “has sown distrust, particularly for Birmingham’s Jewish community, and undermined community cohesion,” Andrew Gilbert, a vice president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, wrote in a statement on Monday. “We are extremely troubled,” he added. “We must get to the bottom of this with full transparency and accountability.”
Dozens of Israelis, who were in the city to support the Maccabi soccer team’s match against the local Ajax club, were assaulted, including at least one who jumped into a freezing canal to escape attackers. They told him he had to say “free Palestine” if he wanted to be allowed out of the water.
Yet, according to The Sunday Times, the Midlands Police officers referred to the Israelis as the aggressors, to justify the police’s recommendation not to allow Maccabi fans at a game against the Villa Aston team last month at Birmingham’s Villa Park. Police classified the event as “high risk,” due to potential “violent clashes and hate crime offenses” that might occur during the match.
A Dutch police spokesperson told the paper that the information that had reportedly appeared in the British police’s confidential report was inaccurate.
The West Midlands Police defended its claims, telling the newspaper that its “evaluation had public safety at its heart.” A police spokesperson added: “We met with Dutch police on October 1,” and “Informed by information and intelligence, we concluded that Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters—specifically the subgroup known as the Maccabi Fanatics—posed a credible threat to public safety.”
On Sunday, police ignored pleas to ban anti-Israel protesters from gathering outside St. John’s Wood Synagogue in London. After dozens of protesters arrived, and some of them projected the words “stolen land sold here” on the synagogue, police moved the rally to a nearby street corner.
“What happened last night in St John’s Wood came as no surprise and indeed, was expected,” Mond said of that incident.
“Once again, a red line has been crossed in Britain,” wrote the Campaign Against Antisemitism group in a statement about the synagogue incident, which reportedly involved both Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Israel protesters.