SOCCER CAN'T FIX SHIT IN ISRAEL OR ANYWHERE ELSE (JMD quoted on Vice)
In the summer of 2004, Bnei Sakhnin became the first
Arab Israeli soccer team to win the State Cup, a knockout
tournament comparable to England's FA Cup. The Israeli
of an Israel-Arab club," including the first UEFA Champions
League spot for an Arab club. The news made
international headlinesand was a source of pride amongst
Arab Israelis.
Bnei Sakhnin's success
further attracted global attention
due to the team's
message of coexistence. Despite playing
in a predominantly Muslim
25,000-person town, Sakhnin
had a Jewish manager,
three Jewish players, and played
the Israeli National
Anthem before matches. Bnei Sakhnin's
captain and star player,
Abbas Suan, became a national hero
amongst Arabs and Jews
alike when he scored a key goal
for Israel's national team
against Ireland.
This wasn't exactly a peaceful time in
the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict (not that there
really is such a thing), but, for once,
the term "soccer
diplomacy" seemed to actually mean
something. In When
Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone,
author James Montague
describes Arab Israelis as "viewed
suspiciously both by their
Jewish countrymen (for being pro-
Palestinian fifth
columnists) and by the wider Arab world (for
being Zionist collaborators)."
Over the phone, Montague
emphasized that there were
very few symbols of Arab equality
within Israel at the time,
giving Bnei Sahknin an important role
for the approximately 1.5
million Arabs within Israel's borders.
"Sakhnin is a symbol
for all the Arab minority inside Israel,"
one fan told the BBC in 2004. "If the team
wins, it's as if all the
Arabs in this country
win."
You
would think a team with 1.5 million supporters wouldn't
have trouble finding
sponsors, yet a reporter for Haaretz told BBC
that "Jewish
companies don't sponsor Sakhnin." Indeed, the club
has had trouble staying
financially afloat, partly because few Israeli
soccer teams are
financially sound. James Dorsey, author of the
prominent blog The Turbulent World of Middle
East Soccer, told me
via email that
"Palestinian clubs in the Israeli Premier League will
find winning sponsorship
more difficult."
Like
in many other leagues, some Israeli clubs stay afloat through
wealthy benefactors
willing to sink significant funds into the team.
Russian-Israeli
billionaire Arcadi Gaydamak donated $400,000 to
Bnei Sakhnin in 2005, and
another $440,000 after Sakhnin's
relegation the following
year. This was a remarkable gesture
considering Gaydamak owned
ultra-right wing club Beitar
Jerusalem, whose
supporters proudly state the club has never
employed an Arab. "I
am donating NIS 2 million toward
coexistence, fraternity
and peace between Arabs and Jews in
Israel," Gaydamak
told Haaretz. "Soccer is important to a
lot of
people in Israel, and I
wish to take advantage of this to bring
the two peoples
closer."
Still, the oddest influx
of cash came from one of the 32 United
Nations member states that
does not recognize Israel. In 2006,
after years of playing its
home matches 50 kilometers away in Haifa due
to the
shabby state of its home
grounds, Bnei Sakhnin received $6
million from Qatar Sports
Investments for its stadium, since
renamed Doha Stadium. In
July, Qatar
announced another round of funding to the
tune of $2.5 million,
or more than half of the
team's annual budget.
According to Montague,
Qatar wants to be a "diplomatic hub,"
acting as a mediator
between the United States, Israel, Hamas,
and the Muslim
Brotherhood, among others. Despite not
officially recognizing
Israel, Qatar is one of the few Muslim nations
that allows Israeli
athletes to compete on their soil. "The
investment in the stadium
in 2006 fit into its foreign policy that
seeks to play a mediator's
role as a way of maintaining good
relations with all parties
and projecting Qatar as a good
international
citizen," Dorsey told me. "The same goes for the
more recent investments in
Israeli Palestinian soccer clubs."
But over the last decade,
Jewish attitudes towards Bnei
Sakhnin and other Arab
Israeli clubs have become more
extreme, reflecting a
general shift across Israeli politics.
According to Foreign
Policy, right wing parties would win
56 seats in the next
election, a 13-seat increase over last
year, while the
center-left would shrink by 11 seats.
As
a result, much of the goodwill from Bnei Sakhnin's success
has been undone. In a
match against Beitar Jerusalem last
December, Al-Monitor
reported that Sakhnin fans waved
Palestinian flags and
Beitar supporters ripped and burned a
Quran. The post-match focus
was not on the burning of holy
texts, but the waving of flags. Miri Regev, a
right-wing
Knesset member, wrote on
her Facebook page,
"The situation
where a [soccer] club
receives support from the State of
Israel as part of its
sports-sponsorship policy, while the club
fans are waving the flags
of Palestine, is unacceptable."
According to Al-Monitor,
she vowed to introduce legislation
to expel Bnei Sakhnin from
the Israeli Premier League.
Beitar
has always abused Arab Israeli clubs—the chants in
2004 were "Death to
the Arabs," although Beitar is similarly
cruel to left-wing Jewish
clubs—but the Gaza War in
2008-09 was a turning
point of sorts as the far-right
expanded to encompass much
of Israeli politics. As usual,
the problems extend far
beyond soccer.
The 2009 election in
Israel saw a shift to the right among
Jewish Israelis. A
conservative coalition led by Benjamin
Netanyahu took power and
enacted a strategy of isolating
Gaza financially,
politically, and militarily with the intent of
neutralizing Hamas.
Qatar's continued financing of Hamas
did not bode well for
popular sentiment of a team that plays
in a building called Doha
Stadium.
Neither have rising
tensions between Israeli Jews and Israeli
Arabs. Palestinian Knesset
member Hanin Zoabi is
serving a six-month ban from Knesset
debates for saying on
a radio interview that the
kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers
wasn't terrorism. She is
now under investigation for "inciting
others to violence and
insulting two police officers" during an
anti-war political rally,
according to The Times of Israel.
Arab-Israelis have always
had to live with tension between
their heritage and their
country of residence—tension that is
only increasing. Montague
pointed out that in the last few years,
the West Bank Premier
League has become an increasingly
attractive destination for
Arab Israeli players who no longer
tolerate the rampant
racism in the Israeli league. (The West
Bank league doesn't allow
foreign players, except for Arab
Israelis, and has
comparable wages to the Israeli league.)
Further, Jewish players
have become more skittish about
joining an Arab Israeli
team. Bnei Sakhnin, once the model
for cooperation, no longer
has any Jewish players. The
problem is not that
Sakhnin is no longer an outlier, but that it
ever had to be one. As a
Sakhnin fan told the
New York Times Magazine in
2011, "for us, soccer is the only
place we're equal in this
stinking country.
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