Back home, in Israel, she led the singing at her beloved Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Bloomfield stadium, telling the crowd how, during the darkest days, soccer helped her. “When I heard in captivity on the radio that we won the championship,” she said, “I screamed even when I wasn’t allowed to.” And when the remaining hostages were released this week, the brothers Gali and Ziv Berman immediately put on their yellow and blue Maccabi shirts and asked the rescuing helicopter to fly over Bloomfield before taking them to hospital. Soccer is often about much more than just soccer.

The decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from their Europe League match against Aston Villa at Villa Park next month is similarly about far more than just soccer. It’s about antisemitism. The group responsible for issuing safety certificates for the game has decided that the risk of violence against traveling Jewish fans is just too high. The Birmingham police have agreed that they cannot guarantee their safety, and that Maccabi fans shouldn’t be allowed to come. This comes barely weeks after Keir Starmer promised “this is a country that stands up to hatred”. And on Thursday, the day the West Midlands Police announced their own inability to deal with a threat to Jewish fans, the Prime Minister was still insisting: “I will do everything in my power to guarantee Jewish communities the security they deserve.”

And yet the Birmingham police have decided that they can’t. Small wonder so many Jewish people are now asking themselves whether they have a future in this country. Emily Damari has said she is “shocked to my core with this outrageous decision to ban me, my family and friends from attending an Aston Villa game. I do wonder what exactly has become of UK society. This is like putting a big sign outside the stadium saying ‘No Jews allowed’. What has become of the UK where blatant antisemitism has become the norm.”

Aston Villa proudly supports No Room for Racism and players still take the knee ahead of kick-off before each fixture “to show their unity against racial discrimination”. Elsewhere on their website, Aston Villa boasts of its righteous history standing up to antisemitism. Under the headline “Villa says No to the Nazis” you can read the story of a series of events in May 1938. On 14 May, at a packed Olympic Stadium in Berlin, the English national team defeated Germany 6-3. The game began with a rendition of God Save the King and the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel song. To a stadium swathed in swastikas, the English team were pressured by the Foreign Office and their policy of appeasement to join in the Nazi salute, a direction with which they dutifully complied.

The following day, Aston Villa played in front of 110,000 fans at the same stadium. Some say that the Villa team bravely refused to perform the Nazi salute, indeed that is the narrative told on Villa’s website. But the truth is they did salute at the beginning of the match and while they failed to follow protocol at the end of the fractious game, there is little indication that this was due to dissent; it’s more likely that they just forgot, given that in their following match in Dusseldorf, the Villa players once again raised their arms to Sieg Heil. It would be nice to tell ourselves the story that the British stood up to Nazi antisemitism from the very beginning, but that’s not quite the reality. Meanwhile, at the match against Maccabee, Villa players will be taking the knee against racism inside the stadium, while outside there is, in effect, a bloody great big sign proclaiming Judenrien.

The current tacit policy of appeasement towards those who would ban Jews from our streets is just as disgraceful. Under the guise of public safety, a number of our MPs have celebrated this pathetic decision from the police. “Maccabi Tel Aviv should not even be playing within this international competition,” said Ayoub Khan, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, who started a petition to ban Jewish Maccabi fans from  his city. “Next, UEFA must ban all Israeli teams,” wrote independent MP Zarah Sultana.

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“Thank you all who put the safety of Aston Villa fans, Birmingham residents and the British public above the Zionist and political pressure to let Israeli hooligans run riot in our country,” said the independent MP Iqbal Mohamed. Zionist pressure? Why not just come out and talk of a Jewish lobby that controls the world?

The West Midlands police are now doing their level best to prove Robert Jenrick right. Last month, the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice was rightly condemned for his comments about parts of Birmingham having a problem with racial integration. Decisions like this will only fan the flames of those who argue that immigration has changed the nature of the UK for the worse. Personally, I don’t want that argument to win. But the Chief Constable of the West Midlands is making things so much harder.

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By Giles Fraser

This Sunday, the Tel Aviv derby will take place: Maccabi Tel Aviv versus Hapoel Tel Aviv at the Bloomfield Stadium, which both teams share. My Israeli family are all passionate Hapoel supporters. We are red, Maccabi are yellow and blue. I don’t suppose we will win. We haven’t beaten them in years. But the atmosphere will be characteristically intense. I won’t repeat what we sing about them, nor about what they sing about us. But it’s no worse than what I hear at the Chelsea. And it’s true that a number of them — the so-called Maccabi fanatics in particular — are no angels. In Amsterdam in 2024, after a match against Ajax, several Macabbi fans tore down a Palestinian flag from a local building and chanted “fuck the Arabs”. Later, five Maccabi fans were taken to hospital and dozens were injured. Prison sentences followed for those who attacked the Maccabi fans. But all this is hardly unusual. In November 2023, at Villa Park, there was a riot at the Europa League match against the Polish club Legia Warsaw, described by the West Midlands police as “some of the worst UK football disorder in decades”. Forty people were arrested, and Legia fans were banned from five consecutive away matches. Yes, there was disorder in Ajax but that was not dissimilar to what goes on at Villa Park.

I have been to a football match before where the away supporters had been banned from the stadium because of safety fears. As it happens, it was in Jerusalem, and the away fans were the Arab team, Bnei Sakhnin. It was ridiculous. The Beitar Jerusalem ultras chanted abuse at rows of empty seats. The Israeli authorities should have done better, and so should we. and so should we. Aston Villa and the local police are not taking the knee to support anti-racism. They are taking the knee to the mob instead of standing up to it.

If the police refuse to protect Jews when watching football, one day they won’t protect them from going to school or walking the streets. This decision is a national disgrace.

The example from history’s portmanteau of analogies which almost everyone has instinctively reached for has been – of course – the Munich Crisis of 1938. What else? No foreign policy drama is complete without a summoning of the ashen shade of Neville Chamberlain onto the stage, as essential to the plot as the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

Back in November last year, Stephen Blank, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, was already warning that “appeasement of Russia would deliver exactly the same outcome as the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich—dishonor and disaster”. The following month, Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, a Republican member of the US House Armed Services Committee, tweeted after a visit to Ukraine that “Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement allowed Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then France to fall to Nazi Germany…Biden risks taking the world down the same slippery slope.” Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post solemnly denounced the American President for “channeling his inner Neville Chamberlain” in the matter of Ukraine.

Allusions to Chamberlain’s appeasement are not restricted to one side of the Atlantic. UK defense secretary Ben Wallace detected back in February a “whiff of Munich” about western attempts to dissuade Putin from attacking Ukraine. But there does seem to be a particularly American obsession with routinely digging up the corpse of the Right Honourable Member for Birmingham Edgbaston for a ritual denunciation. Chamberlain himself would presumably be bewildered, as well as horrified if he knew that, 80 years after his death, he is not only well-remembered in a country he never visited during his lifetime, but that his name there has become a byword for catastrophic political failure.

Even a fogginess about the details of what happened at Munich has been no impediment to deploying it. Radio talk show host Kevin James compared President Obama with Chamberlain on MSNBC’s Hardball in 2008, but then had to admit that he had no idea what the former British Prime Minister did exactly in 1938. The magic of the word “Munich” was enough.

Invocations of “Munich”, “appeasement”, and “peace for our time” have accompanied every single American foreign policy crisis of the modern era, from Syria to North Korea to Iran to China. The debate in 2003 about the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq was peppered with sententious references to Chamberlain, Munich, and the “lessons of history” (which always, funnily enough, turn out to correspond to whatever the speaker wishes to argue at that given moment).

No American political party has a monopoly when it comes to rubbishing Neville Chamberlain. In a country deeply polarised by partisanship, there is one thing, at least, that everyone seems to be able to agree about: Munich is a dirty word, and appeasement is a strategy of cowards and fools.

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But what is it about that September 1938 conference — at which Chamberlain and his French counterpart Édouard Daladier agreed to defer war with Nazi Germany by an accord that ceded the German-speaking Czech Sudetenland to the Third Reich — that has kept people coming back to it?

Munich offers a superficially compelling nugget of wisdom from the past — that seeking any kind of negotiated settlement to a crisis, especially one involving some compromises or concessions to your diplomatic opponent, will only embolden it to make further aggressive demands. Appeasement never prevents conflict with an ambitious rival power; it merely postpones it. When it does break out, it will do so under conditions that have become more favourable to them than to you because of your naïve attempt to conciliate them. The only strategy that is respected in great power politics is uncompromising deterrence. Conceding even the slightest point, exercising even the slightest restraint, is an admission of weakness in a world that values only strength.

On the face of it, the historical Munich seems to provide a persuasive demonstration of just that truth. Chamberlain and Daladier did offer concessions to Hitler (without reference to the Czechs whose territory they were handing over) in the hope that this would represent a lasting settlement of European affairs. Hitler agreed, for his part, that he had no more territorial demands and that henceforth he would practice only peaceful diplomacy — then six months later, ripped up the treaty by annexing Bohemia and Moravia and threatening war with Poland over the fate of Danzig.

War was only postponed by a year, and some historians have argued (though the matter is far from clear) that Nazi Germany began fighting it in a far stronger position than in 1938. What otherwise would have been the relatively brief destruction of Hitlerism was made into a calamitous six-year conflict that killed perhaps 85 million people.

The Munich analogy does more than just lay out this seemingly unchallengeable insight. It also implies that the latest antagonist, whomsoever that might be — Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Vladimir Putin — is the new Hitler: a mad dog, insatiable in his murderous demands, representing an urgent existential threat to western life. It implies that anyone foolish and unworldly enough to try to meet such a monster half-way is the new Chamberlain, complete with grey hair, starched wing collars, and the look of a baffled, rather put-upon clerk. Perhaps most important of all, it implies that the speaker is the new Churchill – the indefatigable defender of liberal democracy who can see through the facile temptations of appeasement (never mind that the real-life Churchill had a rather mixed record when it came to seeking accommodation with dictators, from Mussolini to Stalin). The Munich analogy conveniently demonises, tarnishes, and flatters.

It also turns the story of Thirties appeasement into a trite morality tale rather than the complex story about the possibilities and limitations of great power politics in a democratic age that it actually was. What Chamberlain did at Munich was framed by his belief that Britain and France did not yet offer a credible deterrent to German military power, and that neither his country nor the empire it led was psychologically prepared in 1938 for a second brutal world war. Whether he was right or wrong about this is a matter for counterfactual speculation only. But it was a position that was endorsed by all the professional military advisors that he had to call on.

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Chamberlain did believe, wrongly, that he understood Hitler and that the Nazi leader was a fundamentally rational actor with limited goals – the former managing director possessed the conceit, not uncommon in businessmen who later turn to politics, that he was a master of the art of the deal. Chamberlain sincerely hoped that he had secured peace at Munich. But his fallback position was that, if Hitler continued to make demands, then Britain could turn to deterrence rather than appeasement once its rearmament program (which Chamberlain’s government had been spending vast amounts of money on since 1934) was sufficiently advanced. And if deterrence failed then it was necessary to exhaust every reasonable possibility of peace first. This was partly because that was inherently the right thing to do — a second war with Germany would unleash untold new horrors on the world, though Chamberlain expected, in the end, that Britain would win it.

More practically, though, it was vital to demonstrate to domestic and international audiences that Britain had truly been left with no alternative but to go to war. What appeasement did was not so much “buy time”, as is sometimes suggested, but buy legitimacy, particularly in the eyes of important neutral nations such as the United States. Had war broken out over the Sudetenland in 1938, many Americans would have regarded it as just another pointless European squabble that their country was well advised to keep out of. President Roosevelt, even if he had had the mind to do so, would have found it much more difficult to revise the Neutrality Acts to assist the Allies, a blow to the British and French war effort of which it is impossible to calculate the exact effects — but which certainly would have been serious.

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It’s interesting, that while allusions to Munich were flying thick and fast in America during the weeks leading up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, they are rather less in evidence now that the war is upon us. Probably this has something to do with the Republican Party’s schizophrenic attitude towards Putin, with its traditional neo-conservative hawks finding themselves outflanked on the populist right by Trumpian isolationists who see no reason to quarrel with the Russian leader.

But it might also be the case that the Munich analogy has finally collided with some cold hard facts about confrontation with a nuclear-armed state. Despite all the hyperbolic American rhetoric at the time about new Hitlers, it was possible to contemplate earlier wars with non-nuclear powers such as Iraq or Iran precisely because they didn’t represent an existential threat to the United States — any war with them would be, relatively speaking, low stakes.

Clearly that is not the case in Ukraine, given the hundreds of ICBMs Putin has pointing at the North American continent. The fact is that the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction means that escalation with such an opponent risks suicide. No amount of talk about “the lessons of history” will change that.

So either Ukraine represents a brief hiatus in the enduring popularity of the Munich analogy. Or it reflects a new consciousness that some opponents are simply too dangerous to forego entirely the idea of negotiation, compromise, and restraint — and even appeasement.

And that greed could prove fatal. China’s “civilisation state”, deeply rooted in thousands of years of history, represents the most profound philosophical challenge to liberal values since the end of the Cold War. But our oligarchs choose to ignore this, preferring instead to genuflect to Beijing for financial gain.

The cost of such avarice is slowly coming into focus: China’s economy may surpass the US by as early as 2028, and by some measurements already has. Of course, China deserves credit for its remarkable performance, which is mostly thanks to the efforts of its citizens, in particular its rural migrants, the key fodder for the country’s dominant manufacturing base.

But the Middle Kingdom’s ascendency would not seem as inexorable if not for the efforts of the West’s ‘kowtow crowd’, a group of self-interested cheerleaders and enablers of China’s autocratic state. At the height of the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev threatened that the USSR would “bury” the West. China’s President Xi can count on the West burying itself.

Some of this can be traced to naivety and an underestimation of Chinese capabilities. Rather than recognising a potential threat, our political and financial elites saw a potential economic partner and huge market. China was still a poor, developing country; when welcomed into the World Trade Organisation 20 years ago, it dutifully supplied cheap products to a welcoming market. In the meantime, it was hoped that exposure to the West would create an increasingly liberal China.

Yet for at least a decade, particularly since Xi Jinping assumed control of the Communist Party, these assumptions have been proven fatally wrong. Xi and the Party have clearly made clear that their ambition is not any old seat at the table, but the one at its head.  

Given what seems a clear and present danger to the West and its East Asian allies, one would expect our ruling class to seek ways to fight back. Donald Trump may have been a blustering fool but at least he saw, and identified, the threat. President Biden, to his credit, has also proposed some steps to reinforce US competitiveness, and there is rare bipartisan consensus, including on the Left, to resist China’s hegemony.

Yet prospects for standing up to China from the White House are limited. As recently as 2019 Biden, a stalwart cog in the Washington consensus, minimised the Chinese threat to our economy, recently claiming, incredibly, that: “you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” More worrisome still has been the Biden family’s close business ties with Beijing. The somewhat dissolute Hunter, in particular, has profited hugely and gained expensive gifts working for the Chinese. Most recently, he helped a Chinese firm to corner the cobalt market, a key component in the administration’s  green energy strategy.

But kowtowing is hardly a partisan phenomenon. Prominent figures from both parties, including former GOP Speaker John Boehner, and many connected Washington think tanks receive funding from Beijing. Even members of the Bush family have cosied up to CCP apparatchiks, including one with strong ties to that country’s rising military.

Europe’s leaders, if anything, are even less committed to confronting the Chinese challenge. Some, including Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, seek to play the US against the Chinese civilisational challenge by treating them as moral equivalents of their long-time American allies. Meanwhile, Beijing is busily extending its presence on the continent with infrastructure investment to weak European countries such Greece, Hungary, and Romania.

Nowhere is the ineptitude of the Western policy towards China more evident than in climate change. Like its human rights record, China’s environmental footprint should be a source of embarrassment and condemnation. While the West hamstrings itself with its eco-commitments, China, not mandated to reduce its carbon emissions till 2030, continues to build coal plants to maintain its industrial engine. By 2030, when China will be able to shift to nuclear and other alternatives, the West will be effectively de-industrialised, and hopelessly dependent.

But such dependency is nothing new. For decades American companies have been handing Beijing the basis for economic hegemony: since 1990 US deficit in trade goods with China has ballooned from under $10 billion annually to $419 billion last year. China’s ratio of imports to exports was four to one in 2018. This has enriched many of our leading manufacturing companies — notably Apple — while costing an estimated 3.4 million job losses in the US since 2001.

Meanwhile, these corporate kowtowers actively promote China’s model. Apple, for instance, props up and profits from China’s ever-expanding surveillance state. Acting as if it were its own country, Apple has essentially negotiated its own $275 billion deal with China, promising to keep production there while assisting with the country’s unhidden goal is to supplant the West as a tech leader.

For its part, Wall Street, even amid the threat of government interference, plays its part the kowtow crowd. Ray Dalio, founder of giant Bridgewater Associates hedge fund and self-promoting author, has dismissed China’s repression of its Uighur population as the result of a “sacrosanct” desire for sovereignty. Even powerful figures such as Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan have decided to publicly apologise after upsetting the CCP. It’s in their interest, after all. Xi knows fully well that Western investment bankers and tech companies will do his bidding, as long as they get what Mafia dons may call “a taste”. China may be miffed if US diplomats boycott the 2022 winter games, but they can be sure that the corporations and investment bankers will likely be there, heads bowed on the floor.

All of this is made even more humiliating by the fact that China’s rise may not be as unstoppable as its Western admirers believe. China’s economic growth rate is slowing, its bloated real estate markets are showing signs of implosion, and industrial production has slowed to the lowest level since 2004. Meanwhile, its tech and innovation sector is being pummelled by continued government crackdowns.

More serious still are demographic forces. By 2050, China is projected to have 60 million fewer people under age fifteen, a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. The ratio of retirees to working people is expected to have more than tripled by then, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. By 2050 it will be roughly 20% higher than that of the US; 15 years after that, according to the South China Morning Post, China’s population will be very old and about half its current size.

None of this suggests resisting China will be easy, particularly given the disposition of our rulers. But it does mean it’s possible.

That is the real tragedy of the kowtow crowd. Just as in the Thirties, their prostration only makes their adversary stronger and more confident. Inevitably, it will be the rest of us, and future generations, who pay the price.