Extremist soccer fans display Israeli society’s brutalisation

 

By James M. Dorsey

For the past 15 years, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey, formerly The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, has provided independent, hard-hitting reporting and analysis of the politics of the Middle East and the Muslim world.

Newsletters and podcasts like The Turbulent World fill an important gap in an era in which many news organisations have reduced or abandoned coverage of international affairs in a world wracked by brutal wars, unimaginable humanitarian crises, and increasing authoritarianism.

Increased political pressure on reporters and analysts who honour the principles of fairness and accuracy compounds the importance of such newsletters by professional journalists and writers.

Journalists who seek to hold power to account face the weakening of press freedom, authoritarian moves to control the information space, exclusion, censorship, harassment, and acts of physical and verbal violence in attempts to silence them.

Moreover, mis- and disinformation on social media muddles the public discourse on controversial issues like, for example, in the Middle East, the Muslim world, and beyond the Gaza war, Iran, autocracy, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the definition of moderate Islam.

That makes it more crucial than ever to ensure the survival of newsletters such as The Turbulent World, which rely exclusively on the support of their readers.

 If you share these values and can afford it please click here.

To read participate in the poll, listen to the podcast, click here.

Critics have long argued that Israel’s 58-year-long occupation of Palestinian lands conquered in the 1967 Middle East war has brutalised Israeli society.

Israel’s 20-month-old assault on Gaza and the Israeli public’s attitudes towards Gazan Palestinians serve as Exhibit A of the degree of brutalisation.

So does last week’s pummelling of two Palestinian public bus drivers by militantly racist fans of soccer club Beitar Jerusalem, a far-right darling, after a Palestinian soccer player, Zaki Ahmed, secured the 2025 Israel State Cup title for his team, Hapoel Be'er Sheva.

A crowd watched as ultra-nationalist La Familia extremists kicked, beat, threw objects, and butted the drivers after the match outside Jerusalem’s Teddy Kollek Stadium. Some cheered the militants, others stood by idly.

Beitar fans attack Palestinian bus driver. Credit: @eli_zil on X

La Familia also attacked and cursed Palestinians who sought to help the drivers on Jerusalem’s bus route 77, known for the threats posed by Beitar Jerusalem fans after every match.

“They cursed at me, ‘Arabs are sons of whores, dogs, we’ll burn you, get out of here,’” said East Jerusalemite Saj, who got off his bus to assist the drivers.

A Beitar Jerusalem fan group, La Familia, famous for its anti-Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim chants, has a long history of anti-Palestinian violence and prejudice.

The group has ensured that Beitar Jerusalem is the only Israeli club that does not hire Palestinian players, even though Palestinians are among Israel’s top performers.

Israeli officials, including President Isaac Herzog and Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon, condemned the attack, warning that it crossed a red line. It was Mr. Leon’s first condemnation of an incident involving La Familia.

Hardline Transport and Road Safety Minister Miri Regev was conspicuously absent from those condemning the attack, even though assaults on bus drivers increased by 30 per cent in the last year.

Transport and Road Safety Minister Miri Regev joins Beitar Jerusalem fans pledging to burn Palestinian villages

The officials, staunch proponents of Israel’s assault on Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, left it to critics to warn that the soccer incident reflected the way the more than half-a-century-long occupation and the war had undermined the moral fibre of Israeli society.

While widespread criticism of Israel’s war conduct and restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza batters the Jewish state’s international standing, loss of moral fibre may be the highest price Israel is likely to pay.

Prominent Israeli journalist and author Yossi Melman suggests that the society’s brutalisation is not the only fallout of Israeli policies.

Focussed on intelligence, military, and strategic affairs, Mr. Melman attributed the increased number of Israelis willing to spy on behalf of Iran to the “social collapse of Israel in recent years.”

Last December, police arrested some 30 predominantly Jewish Israelis on suspicion of spying for Iran. Since then, authorities detained and/or charged five more.

“The society has lost its sense of solidarity and cohesion. Even the government is only concerned with its own survival,” Mr. Melman said.

Gideon Levy, one of Israel’s harshest critics of the war, argued that “the power dynamics“ of the incident and the war were similar: “dozens of people against one driver, like the best-equipped army in the world against a helpless Gaza population.”

Implicitly referring to Israeli officials’ condemnations and public attitudes toward Gaza, Mr. Levy asked, “If you're shocked by Israelis beating an Arab driver, how are you not stunned by genocide?”

Israeli society’s brutalisation is evident in bloodcurdling statements by Israeli politicians, military personnel, journalists, and pundits since Hamas’ brutal attack that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

Ehud Olmert writing in Haaretz

Some prominent Israelis, including former prime minister Ehud Olmert, a onetime member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and opposition leader Yair Golan, have condemned what Mr. Olmert called “war crimes” and Mr. Golan asserted was killing babies as a “pastime.”

Even so, statements by a broad sweep of Israelis contrast starkly with the hundreds of thousands of protesters who demanded Defence Minister Arik Sharon’s resignation after a Lebanese Christian militia killed at least 800 Palestinians during the 1982 Lebanon war in Israeli-occupied West Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

A government inquiry concluded that Mr. Sharon was personally responsible because he had failed to order Israeli troops stationed on the camps’ perimeters to prevent the massacre.

A recent survey of Israeli Jews commissioned by Pennsylvania State University, in stark contrast to Israeli public opinion more than four decades ago, highlighted an alarming disregard for humanitarian and international legal concerns as well as Palestinian national aspirations.

Credit: Haaretz

Eighty-two per cent of those polled supported the ethnic cleansing of Gaza as opposed to 45 per cent in a 2003 survey. Fifty-six per cent, compared to 31 per cent 22 years ago, favoured expelling Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who account for 20 per cent of the population.

Forty-seven per cent of those surveyed agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants."

Sixty-five per cent said they believed in the existence of a modern-day incarnation of Amalek, the Israelite biblical enemy whom God commanded to wipe out in Deuteronomy 25:19. Among those believers, 93 percent said the commandment to erase Amalek's memory remained relevant today.

“These disturbing trends reflect the radicalisation of religious Zionism…and the failure of secular Israeli Jews to articulate a vision that challenges Jewish supremacy,” said Shay Hazkani and Tamir Sorek, the pollsters who conducted the survey.

The secularists’ failure includes turning a blind eye to government-funded ultra-nationalist, ultra-conservative pre-military religious academies that teach racist, genocidal precepts to youth that go on to join elite commando units, undergo officer training, or fill other high-level roles in the military.

A portrait of Brigadier General Yehuda Vlach published earlier this year illustrates the type of future military leader the academies produce. They adhere to the notion that “there are no innocents in Gaza” and that “only by losing land will the Palestinians learn the necessary lesson.”

A graduate of the Bnei David pre-army preparatory yeshiva or religious seminary that at one point featured a quote on its wall by one of its instructors, Rabbi Joseph Kalner, charging that “all secular Jews are traitors, and the state can do anything to sanction them, including putting a bullet through their head,” Mr. Vlach commands the military’s 252nd division.

To put his principle into practice, Mr. Vlach enlisted his brother, Col. (res.) Golan Vlach, the commander of the military’s Pladot Heavy Engineering Equipment unit, populated by young ultra-nationalist, vigilante West Bank settlers, often described as hilltop youth.

Colonel Vlach’s unit’s sole objective was to demolish Gaza," said an Israeli military officer.

Early this year, General Vlach advised his troops to harass humanitarian aid convoys to ensure that trucks would not enter northern Gaza in support of a population subjected to inhuman conditions.

Last week, Al Jazeera quoted a ‘Palestinian Resistance Security Source’ as accusing Israeli-backed gangs east of Rafah of looting trucks transporting a trickle of humanitarian aid into Gaza after Israel prevented the entry of all assistance for 15 weeks.

Israel said the blockade aimed to prevent Hamas from confiscating the aid, including food, medicine, and fuel.

The Vlach brothers are but one example of the military’s failure to enforce discipline, adhere to international and Israeli military norms, and credibly investigate violations.

Last year, media investigations revealed that the military was using Palestinians as human shields to protect soldiers and inspect suspected booby-trapped tunnels.

Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh

US-born Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, head of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, is widely seen as the godfather of the pre-military academies.

The British government last year sanctioned Mr. Ginsburgh’s religious seminary for encouraging violence against non-Jews.

As Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Mr. Ginsburgh framed religiously inspired Jewish ultra-nationalism in a watershed speech in which he celebrated Jewish supremacism.

To achieve supremacism, Mr Ginsburgh advocated the destruction of government institutions, the judiciary, secular education, and the media.

The rabbi suggested that the military’s abandonment of emasculating “Gentile” rules that prevent from fulfilling the Talmudic commandment, "if someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first" would turn the armed forces into an unconstrained vengeful anti-Arab institution.

“The secular public's widespread adoption of positions in support of ethnic cleansing and genocide is…evidence of the realisation of Ginsburgh's vision,” Messrs. Hazkani and Sorek said.

“It's hard to find any soldier who would refuse illegal orders, such as starving hundreds of thousands of people, creating kill zones, or bombing densely populated residential neighbourhoods,” they said.

Messrs. Hazkani and Sorek noted that only nine per cent of the men under 40 they surveyed disagreed with notions of deportation and extermination of Palestinians.

Rejecting the trauma of Hamas’ October 7 attack as the primary driver of a brutalised society, Messrs. Hazkani and Sorek concluded that the Hamas “massacre only unleashed demons that had been nurtured for decades in (Israel’s) media and legal and educational systems.”

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.