Pro-Israel Fans Forced into ‘Jew Cage’ at Villa Park Ahead of Maccabi Tel Aviv Match

Protesters against the ban on Israeli fans attending Aston Villa’s Europa League game found themselves inside a steel-ringed enclosure outside Villa Park on Thursday night, a move that many called a “Jew cage.”

For those inside, the experience was humiliating after a tense buildup to the match. The location of the enclosure had been agreed between West Midlands Police and the British pro-Israel group organizing the protest and was intended for the demonstrators’ safety. Yet seeing Jews confined while rival protesters moved freely around Birmingham highlighted the broader tensions surrounding the game.

The fan ban had been controversial from the start, with police later admitting it aimed more at preventing who they called “Israeli hooligans” from traveling than protecting Maccabi supporters. Masked anti-Zionist demonstrators had also put up signs around Villa Park, reinforcing feelings of being unwelcome in the majority-Muslim Birmingham suburb.

Protests began hours before kickoff, including trucks carrying giant screens displaying slogans like “KICK OUT ANTI-SEMITISM,” linked to Tali Smus’s Instagram account @the.britishzioness, who identifies as an “unapologetic Jew and Zionist.”

Arab Christian visitor Yoseph Haddad from Israel attended to protest the ban, telling Telegraph Sport: “It feels like going back to the 1940s all over again.” He had also attended Manchester City’s Champions League game the night before and argued there was no reason he shouldn’t support his team at Villa Park. Wearing a Maccabi scarf, he was later escorted by police, presumably for his safety.

Formal demonstrations continued, including by pro-Israel group Our Fight. Jewish activist Itai Galmudy said: “For some reason, we need to find ourselves surrounded in a steel cage. It’s a sad, sad day for the United Kingdom that Jewish people have been made to feel that unsafe and unwelcome.”

Speeches through megaphones included Our Fight founder Mark Birbeck: “A lot of people are talking about this as if it’s just something to do with football fans; it’s just something to do with policing. And we’re here to say: ‘No, it isn’t.’ This is part of a wider pattern, an attempt to exclude Israel from sport, from culture, from politics, and to paint and present Israel as a pariah state.”

Another speaker, known only as Russell, criticized rival pro-Palestinian protesters: “They think they own the streets. They think they can create no-go areas for Israelis, for Jews, for anyone who doesn’t agree with their twisted, warped, worldview.” He also called out MP Ayoub Khan, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Birmingham City Council’s Safety Advisory Group: “Will the authorities, will the police, will the politicians, will the Government continue to appease the Islamo-fascist mob who abuse the Palestinian cause for their own political and religious gain? If we let them get away with this, what’s next? Birmingham will fall, London will fall, Britain will fall.”

Galmudy spoke again before GB News presenter Josh Howie addressed the crowd: “It’s not fair that the racism and lies of sectarian extremists can determine which ethnic groups can attend a football match, can go to different areas of a city, even go to different areas of this country’s second city itself. And it’s not fair that, for our safety, we’ve been put in a Jew cage. But that is the reality of what we are seeing today, when Jewish Villa fans have been scared off from coming to support their own team.”

Birbeck concluded the protest, referencing Remembrance Sunday: “We have to remember that people of Britain – and our ancestors – they fought in wars for democratic rights, they fought for our freedoms, and this is exactly the kind of freedom that they’d have been fighting for.”

The demonstrators were then escorted away from Villa Park, moving from one police-formed enclosure to another, while outside they faced chants of “Death to the IDF,” “Stop the genocide” and “Free Palestine.”