Maccabi Tel Aviv is far from winning this season's EuroLeague - It lost its last game by a score of 100-74 against Milan in its "home" arena in Belgrade, and dropped to a record of 15-5. And if all this is not enough, the championship Israeli team is now being forced to deal with difficulties unrelated to basketball ahead of its game Tuesday night against Real Madrid.
The Spanish far-left Podemos party announced Monday morning that it will send an official request to the Interior Ministry asking that it prevent the Israeli champions from entering the country.
"We submitted a request to prevent the entry of Maccabi Tel Aviv players, staff and fans," said Pablo Fernandez Santos on behalf of the party, explaining the move by saying that "the goal is to prevent acts of violence as we saw a few months ago in Amsterdam, where Maccabi Tel Aviv's Israeli fans sang offensive songs against the Palestinians, and mocked the murder of children and babies in Gaza."
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Santos added in his speech to the Spanish parliament: "The arrival of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans will encourage the glorification of genocide, and none of us are interested in that. Maccabi Tel Aviv represents a murderous and cruel country, and we must not allow its entry - and especially not the entry of its fans. We demand that the Interior Ministry respond to our request as quickly as possible so that this is possible within the framework of the law."
Several months ago, Podemos threatened to vote against the 2025 state budget if Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez did not sever the country's relations with Israel. The party is led by Ione Belarra, who served as minister of social equality from 2021 to 2023 and has argued that Israel's actions should be dealt with similarly to the way the world dealt with Nazism.