Football and the Palestinians
Andy Newman
The
recent UEFA cup match between the Israeli team Bnei Sakhnin and
Newcastle United at St James Park throws an interesting light upon
Israeli society and the relationship between Israel and the West. The
Israeli team were woefully bad, and their performance summed up by
goalkeeper, Energy Murambadoro, falling over and injuring himself while
throwing the ball out. Nevertheless the remarkable thing about the team
is that it was there at all.
Firstly given the physical location of Israel, it is reasonable to
question why the Israeli Football Association is a member of UEFA, while
the Lebanese FA and Palestinian FS are members of the Asian Football
Federation. The participation of Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest
may also raise eyebrows for those with an eye for geography.
Actually this is less strange than it seems. Europe has always been a
political rather than a geographical concept. The Eurasian land mass is
a single continent, and what is more because it runs East to West and
not South to North (unlike Africa) climate zones have aided not impeded
the transfer of peoples, ideas and technology across the continent. For
this reason there are Asiatic languages spoken in Europe (the
Hungarians, Finns and Estonians), and until very recently significant
German speaking populations in Asia.
Europe is a myth rooted in the ideology of Empire and scientific racism.
It is therefore entirely appropriate that Israel, a settler
colon,
tied to the imperialist domination of the Middle East should be regarded
as a European country. So the winner of the Israeli FA cup participates
in the EUFA cup.
But the
strangeness of Bnei Sakhnin does not end there, for this is not a
typical Israeli team: they have 12 Arab, seven Jewish and four foreign
players, as well as a Palestinian President and a Jewish coach. The town
of Sakhnin is forever associated with the murder of six Arab Israelis by
police during protests against land confiscation in 1976. The team
trains at the end of a dirt road, on a pitch surrounded by olive groves,
and must travel 30 km (19 miles) to Haifa for its home games, because
they haven't the money to renovate their own stadium. They are
representative of the 18% of Israel's population who are non-Jewish
Arabs, over a million people who despite Israeli citizenship have less
right than Jews.
So when Bnei
Sakhnin beat Hapoel Haifa 4-1 in the State Cup final back in May there
was jubilation amongst the Israeli Arabs, and Palestinian Cabinet
minister Saeb Erekat said the achievement brought "honour
to the Palestinian people".
At the same time
the Palestinian national football team has been doing well in the
qualifying rounds for the 2006 Word Cup. In the first qualifiers, they
beat Taipei 8-0 in February and more remarkably, they tied 1-1 with the
much more experienced Iraqi team which finished fourth in the recent
Athens Olympics. This is despite considerable obstacles. Not only do
they have no home stadium to play in, but players from Gaza were
prevented by the Israelis from going to Ismailia in Egypt where the team
had a summer training camp to prepare for the qualifiers. The team was
also unable to travel to Hungary for a two week training camp despite a
FIFA intervention that belatedly released the Gaza players.
The
prestige of their national team (only recognized by FIFA in 1998 and
funded by private businessmen), is important to Palestinians. Faris Abu
Shawish chairman of the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) is
reported in Al
Ahram: "Not
long ago, we were used to seeing the team lose. They would go to Egypt
and lose 5-0, 6-0 or go to Qatar and lose, or go to Saudi Arabia and
lose. Then we went for the first time to the Pan-Arab Games in Jordan
in 1999 and won the bronze medal. Nobody expected such a success. When
the team returned, tens of thousands of people were waiting at the
airport, shouting and singing. Since then, everybody has been following
the national team. Even women, who usually don't care about football,
watch our games on TV."
Bader
Mekki, general-secretary of the PFA in Ramallah is also quoted by
Al Ahram:
"It is amazing to see the
colours [of our flag] outside our land... It is also a great challenge
for the Israelis and their checkpoints. We are saying, 'We are here, we
can reach Spain, Chile, the whole world.'"
The political
symbolism of the Palestinians competing in international sport is echoed
by the significance of an Arab team representing Israel. Bnei Sakhnin's
qualification for the UEFA cup was officially welcomed by Israeli
Football Association chairman Itche Menachem who said the victory was a
"bridge
for peace and co-existence between our peoples... and a great
celebration for Israeli soccer",
however as the Israeli newspaper
Maariv
reported: "When
Sakhnin arrives to most of their away games they hear chants like 'death
to Arabs' and so on. Not in all of them, but in some. ... It's very,
very far-fetched to say that it will make a real difference in the lives
of Arab people in Israel."
The BBC quotes
Sharon Mashdi who monitors racism in Israeli football for the New Israel
Fund. "After
the cup final the Betar Jerusalem fans put an advert on the Internet
about the death of Israeli football," he says. "I think it's like what's
happened in Israeli society - some percentage of the Jews don't like
Arabs at all and don't want them here in this country".
Yoav Goren,
of the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz reports
that the Arab team's success has been met with indifference and
hostility among Israel's Jewish majority. "Jewish
companies don't sponsor Sakhnin. No-one from the Jewish business
community said: 'Let's take Sakhnin and make it a symbol for peace, for
living together'. ... Sakhnin has succeeded in a professional way, but
in a social way it's been a failure."
This
is not at all surprising given the degree of cultural paranoia in
Israel. Not only is Israeli society founded upon religious
discrimination, but also racism from the Western Ashkenazi Zionists
against the Sephardic Jews of Arab origin. As the Israeli peace activist
Yehudith Harel writes: "Since
the foundation of the State of Israel there has existed long-standing
and clearly institutionalised discrimination against oriental Arab Jews
and Israeli Palestinians in the allocation of funds for education, job
opportunities, land ownership, etc. It's true that Israeli Palestinians
are more severely discriminated against, are even lower down the ladder,
but the roots of this discrimination and its socio-economic outcomes are
pretty much the same,.... The outcome of the Ashkenazi attitude towards
oriental Jews, their Arab culture and traditions, including their
specific stream of Judaism and Jewish identity, has had a strong
negative political significance."
In
particular, the Zionist left and
Peace Now!
activists are predominately Ashkenazis, derided as WASPs (White
Ashkenazi Sons of Pioneers). Noam Chomsky has also pointed out that
economic power in Israel is tightly controlled by Ashkenazis, often
associated with liberal politics. This has led to the ironic situation
described by Yehudith Harel: "The
above process lead to antagonising the majority of Arab Jews against the
predominantly Ashkenazi left and equally so against Palestinians and
Arabs and their just cause, in support of which the left is united. It
gradually pushed them into the arms of the political right and to
"Arab-hating" positions. One can easily see that their hatred of the
"Ashkenazi" left, conceived by many oriental Arab Jews as "Arab-lover",
is a direct result of the above-described attitude of the Ashkenazi
elites towards them."
So
underneath the Apartheid discrimination between Jew and Palestinian, the
class divisions in Israel also split Jews on ethnic lines. Sephardic
Jews desperately cling to the difference in status they have over
Israeli Arabs, with whom they share every aspect of their culture except
religion. Israel is a state based upon hatred, suspicion and
discrimination where the Jewish working class side strongly with the
oppressor. In the same way, the two million strong French population in
pre-independence Algeria included many workers: indeed
according to Tony Cliff
one million supported the
communists in 1945, but almost all of them supported the continuation of
colonial rule and the terror against the Algerian independence movement.
So
the hope represented by a team of Jews and Arabs playing together to
represent Israel against Newcastle United was a false hope. Israel has
no appetite for reform. Jews and Arabs cannot live together in harmony
while the Israeli flag is flying above them. There is only one hope, a
secular Palestine including all the land
from
the banks of the river Jordan right to the shores of the Mediterranean
Sea. That can, in turn, only be achieved by a socialist solution across
the Middle East with full rights for Jews, Kurds and all national
minorities.
September 2004