Militant Jerusalem fans challenge founding principle of Israeli foreign policy

Beitar fans insist that their club remain racially pure (Source: Reuters)

By James M. Dorsey

When militant supporters of right-wing soccer club Beitar Jerusalem last month vowed to keep their team pure in protest against the hiring of two Chechen Muslim players they went beyond what are usually accepted expressions of racism in Israel to unwittingly challenge a founding principle of Israeli foreign and defense policy coined by the country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion: the need to ally Israel with non-Arab Muslim nations to compensate historically for the lack of and more recently uncertainty of its relations with Arab neighbors.

In doing so, they provoked a rare national outcry against the club’s racist policy – Beitar Jerusalem is the only top league club to have never hired a Palestinian player despite the fact that Palestinians rank among the country’s top performers – that in many ways reflected last month’s outcome of national elections and a growing awareness that Israeli policies are alienating even its closest allies. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party emerged narrowly as the winner from an election that showed Israel deeply divided between the right and the left.

In an illustration of Beitar’s importance to the Israeli right, two right-wing Israeli parliamentarians, Michael Ben-Ari, a former member of assassinated right-wing rabbi Meir Kahana, and Aryeh Eldad of Otzma L’Israel, attended a Beitar match on the eve of the elections in a bid to garner suoppert.

The outcry nevertheless included denunciations by Mr. Netanyahu himself, like many right-wing Israeli leaders, a staunch supporter of Beitar, the storied bad boy of Israeli soccer. It also reflected however unease among significant segments of Israeli public opinion with their country’s increasing isolation sparked by controversy over Israel’s settlement policy; mounting criticism of the treatment of prisoners, including last year’s release of a hunger striking Palestinian national soccer team player as a result of international pressure; and the rupture in relations with Turkey in the wake of the killing of nine Turks aboard the Mavi Marmara as it sought to break Israel’s sea blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The prisoner issue threatened this weekend to explode with thousands of Palestinian prisoners staging a 24-hour hunger strike and hundreds of Palestinians demonstrating in the wake of the death of a 30-year year old Palestinian arrested on charges of stone-throwing while he was in Israeli custody. Palestinian officials warned that the prisoner’s death could be the spark that ignites the powder keg of discontent on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

Conditions in Israeli prisons have further undermined Israel’s relations with its staunch ally Australia, already strained by the use in 2010 of Australian passports by Israeli agents believed to have been responsible for the killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai, after news leaked earlier this month of the death in Israeli custody of an Australian national, Ben Zygier. Mr. Zygier reportedly was an operative of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, who allegedly was on the verge of revealing details of Israel’s use of foreign passports in its covert operations.

Australia, in an unprecedented break with past unrestricted support of Israel, last year joined 26 of the 27 members of the European Union who either voted in favor or abstained from voting for a United Nations General Assembly resolution recognizing Palestinian statehood. “In a world so interconnected and interdependent, Israel cannot afford to lose the international legitimacy that flows from a readiness to make peace. There are myriad obstacles to an agreement with the Palestinians – many of them on the Palestinian side. But Mr. Netanyahu has redefined the issue in international opinion as one essentially of Israeli intransigence,” said columnist Philip Stephens in this weekend’s Financial Times.

The current outcry stems from the fact that a militant segment of Beitar’s supporters rejected the club’s hiring of two non-Arab Muslim players, who moreover hail from a region that Mr. Ben Gurion would have defined as part of the non-Arab Muslim periphery, which Israel has always sought to engage. It comes amid growing concern in Israel about mounting soccer violence that is not always related to Israel’s dispute with the Arab and much of the Muslim world.

The outcry over racism expressed towards the two Chechen players contrasts starkly with the lack of a national response to past outbursts by militant fans, including an attack on Palestinian shoppers and workers in a Jerusalem mall as well as Jewish musician who denounced their attitudes and Beitar’s refusal to hire Palestinian striker Mohammed Ghadir who in late 2011 volunteered to join the club in a challenge to its anti-Palestinian policy.

Despite the fact that the militant fans’ language and symbolism at times is reminiscent of that of the Third Reich – fans unfurled a banner with their demand to keep their club pure that was reminiscent of those employed by the Nazis – Beitar until recently defended rather than condemned its most extreme supporters. The long overdue outcry is moreover itself not free of racial attitudes.

To be sure, President Shimon Peres appealed in a strongly worded letter to Israel Football Association president Avi Luzon “to all football fans to refrain from all expressions and manifestations of racism in football stadiums and outside of them.  Racism has struck the Jewish people harder than any other nation in the world.  The authorities must prevent it before it starts. Today, sport is a universal declaration against racism. It is unacceptable for the opposite to take place in Israel.”

Mr. Peres’ appeal however hit deaf ears within Beitar. While the club’s owner, Russian-born Arkady Gaydamak, echoed the president’s remarks, Beitar coach Eli Cohen drew a distinction between Arabs and Muslim in a perversion of Mr. Ben Gurion’s principle. "I don't understand the fans who don't want to see a Muslim player in Beitar. There are a billion Muslims in the world and we must learn how to live with them. There is a difference between a European Muslim and an Arab Muslim, and the fans here have a problem with Arabs living in the Middle East,” Mr. Cohen.said.

The club’s spokesman, Assaf Shaked, went as far as explicitly defending its anti-Arab policy. “We are against racism and against violence and we pay a price for our fans. But we aren’t going to bring an Arab player just to annoy the fans,” Mr. Shaked said.

The row over Beitar’s racism goes to the heart of Israel’s increasingly troubled international relations, an increasing sense that it bears substantial albeit not sole responsibility for the failure so far of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and its strained formal and informal relations with a majority of the Arab world. Israel’s strength no doubt is its ability to discuss such issues publicly. The question is whether this debate will spark the necessary soul-searching.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.

Israeli measures fuel international anti-Israeli soccer protests

 

Gaza's war-damaged Palestine Stadium

By James M. Dorsey

A series of Israeli measures against Palestinian soccer culminating in an attack on a stadium in Gaza during last month’s confrontation with Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian group that controls the heavily populated strip along the Mediterranean, has fueled growing international soccer opposition to the Jewish state’s policies.

In the latest expression of discomfort, 62 professional players have called for depriving Israel of the right to host European soccer body UEFA’s 2013 Under-21 championship. Israel has already employed the championship to counter the image of being an area dominated by war and conflict that was reinforced by last month’s hostilities with Hamas that killed more than 150 Palestinians and five Israelis.

“In June we have the Under-21 here in Israel. I hope that everything will be quiet until then and we can show the different sides of Israel,” said Maccabi Tel Aviv defender Omer Vered in a BBC interview.

The statement by the players follows protests earlier this year by world soccer body FIFA, UEFA and players’ group FIFPro against Israel’s handling of a hunger strike of an imprisoned Palestinian player, Mahmoud Sarsak, accused of being a member of militant group Islamic Jihad, and the arrest of two other players suspected in involvement in violent anti-Israeli actions.

“We are informed that on 10 November 2012 the Israeli army bombed a sports stadium in Gaza, resulting in the death of four young people playing football, Mohamed Harara and Ahmed Harara, 16 and 17 years old; Matar Rahman and Ahmed Al Dirdissawi, 18 years old. We are also informed that since February 2012 two footballers with the club Al Amari, Omar Rowis, 23, and Mohammed Nemer, 22, have been detained in Israel without charge or trial.

“It is unacceptable that children are killed while they play football. Israel hosting the 2013 UEFA Under-21 European Championship, in these circumstances, will be seen as a reward for actions that are contrary to sporting values,” the 62 players of predominantly Arab and African origin, some of whom rank among the world’s most prominent, said in their statement. Signatories of the statement that ran on the website of player Frederic Kanoute included Didier Drogba and Eden Hazard.

Israel has asserted that the Palestine Stadium, which it also attacked in 2006, was being used as a missile Launchpad and rocket storage place. Like in 2006, FIFA said it would fund repairs.

Asked if he had sympathy with the Palestinians in Gaza in the wake of the stadium bombing, Mr. Vered said: “I’ll tell you the truth, I also want peace. I don’t like to hear when innocent people are dying during violence. But, you know, after the bombing of the stadium of Gaza they issues a footage that was clearly that there was clearly keeping of missiles under the field and it was also where they shoot the rockets into Israel. So, I think Israel has the right to defend itself.”

The players’ statement is the second time that there is pressure on UEFA to take the hosting of the U-21 championship away from Israel, which plays in European competition after it was Middle Eastern soccer associations forced the Jewish state out of the Asian Football Confederation in the 1990s.

Palestinian Football Association head General Jibril Rajoub called in a letter on June 12 to UEFA president Michel Platini for stripping Israel of the right to host the championship. The effort to achieve a solution for Mr. Sarsak involved various segments of the international soccer community.

In a June 12 letter to Israel Football Association (IFA) president Avi Luzon, FIFA president Sepp Blatter expressed concern that Mr. Sarsak and the two other Palestinian players, Olympic soccer team goalkeeper Omar Abu Rwayyes and Ahmad Khalil Ali Abu El-Asal, who plays for the Aqabat Jaber Palestinian refugee camp soccer team, were being “illegally” detained “in apparent violation of their integrity and human rights and without the apparent right of due process (trial).”

Mr. Blatter called on the IFA “to act with the utmost urgency” given “the graveness of the … situation” to “draw the attention of the competent Israeli authorities to the present matter with the aim of ensuring the physical integrity of the concerned players as well as their right for due process.”

This week’s players’ statement dashed Israeli hopes that the pressure exerted by FIFA, UEFA and FIFpro in the Sarsak case would prove to be an isolated incident. “It is important that elected football officials be true to the issues that affect the game. No doubt, the Sarsak case is only one such issue and most likely there are others not only in our part of the world,” said one soccer official at the time.

FIFpro asserted in its statement at the time that that players in Palestine often do not have full freedom of movement. “The freedom of movement is a fundamental right of every citizen. It is also written down in the FIFA Regulations that players must be allowed to play for the national team of their country. But actually for some footballers it is impossible to defend the colours of their country. They cannot cross the border. They cannot visit their family. They are locked up. This is an injustice,” the statement quoted says Philippe Piat, FIFPro’s vice-president and president of FIFPro Division Europe, as saying.

To be fair, the IFA, the only Middle Eastern soccer association to have launched an anti-racism campaign, has sought to work with its Palestinian counterpart in reducing the obstacles Palestinian soccer encounters as a result of Israeli security measures. The two associations discovered, however, that their influence was limited when deal with security issues beyond the realm of their responsibilities.

Ironically, one of the sanest voices calling for constructive engagement rather than polarizing hostility is that of a Kuwaiti-born, American-raised Palestine national team player. Asked in a BBC whether his perspective differed from his fellow team members given his background, Omar Jarun said:

“They have a lot of hatred towards a lot of Jewish people and a lot of Jewish people have hatred towards a lot of Muslim people. Once again, it comes to not being educated around the issue of there has got to be a solution and not go right away beserk and start with violence. You need to talk out some situations, they don’t do that. But me being in America where there are tons of races, I've had tons of Jewish friends, there's a Jewish guy on the team. I get along with everybody cause, that’s kinda of who I am and I realize that violence isn’t the answer for anything,” Mr. Jarun said.

Asked whether he would want Palestine to play Israel, Mr. Jarun answered: “I hope so, I always bring that up with the guys. Is say: why don’t we play againt Israel. They kind of laugh about it, but I think it should be a game, I don’t know, I would hope it would be a normal match, it would be tense but its gotta happen. It needs to break down the barrier between us. We need to play against each other, we need to be more communicating with each other. We can’t just have this hate from both sides, Its unbelievable. I want to break that down and I don’t know what else to do. We play a match and then we go from there,” Mr. Jarun said.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.

 

The issue of Arab Jews: Manipulating a Justified Cause

RSIS presents the following commentary The issue of Arab Jews: Manipulating a Justified Cause by James M. Dorsey. It is also available online at this link. (To print it, click on this link.). Kindly forward any comments or feedback to the Editor RSIS Commentaries, at  RSISPublication@ntu.edu.sg

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No. 202/2012 dated 31 October 2012

The issue of Arab Jews:

Manipulating a Justified Cause

By James M. Dorsey

     

Synopsis

A recent United Nations conference on the rights of Jews forced to flee Arab countries in the wake of the establishment of the State of Israel focuses attention on a long overlooked consequence of the Middle East conflict. It also complicates the revival of Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations.

Commentary

THE PLIGHT of Palestinians uprooted and driven out of large chunks of historic Palestine to make way for a Jewish state lies at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That epochal dispute dominated policies towards and perceptions of the Middle East for much of post-World War Two history.

Efforts to achieve a definite resolution have foundered, but have produced a de facto status quo that serves the interests of two key parties to the conflict: Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip. Neither truly wants the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, preferring instead a long-term ceasefire that would allow for economic growth in the hope that time will gain them a strengthened negotiating position.

Battle of narratives

This month’s brief flare up of Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel and Israeli counterstrikes hardly detracted from this understanding. On the contrary the attacks enabled Hamas to burnish its credentials as a resistance movement and fend off criticism from more militant Palestinian factions that accuse it of having gone soft and allowed Israel to project it as a continued terrorist threat, maintain its refusal to formally do business with Hamas and ensure that the peace process remains in a deep coma.

To further undermine the centrality of the Palestinian issue that has been significantly diminished  by the wave of popular revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa as well as the split between Hamas and the Al Fatah-led Palestine Authority on the West Bank, Israel supported by Jewish leaders is equating Palestinian rights with those of Arab Jews who once lived in the Arab world but were forced to leave their homelands. It is a move perceived by Palestinians and even a minority of Jews as a cynical manipulation of a justified cause.

The Israeli move adds one more dimension to the Palestinian-Israeli battle of narratives that has served to camouflage the real intentions of Israel and Palestinian leaders since the inception of an Palestinian-Israeli peace process. It is part of a larger campaign that aims to reduce, if not delegitimise Palestinian rights by opposing Palestinian efforts to upgrade their status at the United Nations and calling for the dismantling of UNWRA, the UN agency responsible for the welfare of Palestinian refugees. The move further seeks to mend chinks in the armour of US public support for Israel.

At the core of the battle of narratives lies a definition of rights that has allowed both parties to ensure that peace negotiations do not produce the kind of painful compromises on both sides needed to achieve a definitive resolution of their deep-seated conflict.

Like everything else that is on the negotiation table, the solution to the plight of Palestinian refugees as well as that of Arab Jews is evident to all. Palestinians would get an independent state of their own alongside Israel and be compensated for losses suffered in territories that are part of the Jewish state. Similarly, Arab Jews would be compensated for their losses. Few, if any, Palestinians are likely to want to physically return to Israeli rule and even fewer Arab Jews would opt for a return to their ancestral homelands.

Devil in the details

Nevertheless, the devil is in the details. Palestinians would settle for compensation and a state of their own but     insist on doing so on the basis of an Israeli recognition of their right to return to their ancestral homes. Such recognition would amount to Israeli acknowledgement of Palestinians being the original owners of historic Palestine. In effect, it would deny Israel’s narrative that it represents the resurrection of the Jewish state in lands that always belonged to the Jews.

To reinforce that narrative and reject the Palestinian right of return, before raising the rights of Arab Jews Israel has insisted in recent years that Palestinians upgrade their recognition of Israel’s right to exist by acknowledging its right to exist as a Jewish state – a demand that transcends accepted diplomatic protocols. In doing so, it prepared the ground to use Arab Jewish rights as a tool to further undermine Palestinian demands for recognition of their right to return, by rejecting Palestinian suggestions that Arab Jews too should have the right to return to their Arab countries of origin rather than Israel.

The Israeli effort to portray the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as one of competing refugee claims also serves to counter Palestinian efforts to upgrade their United Nations observer status to that of a non-member state as well as a rupture in crucial American Christian support for Israel. Palestine Authority officials are confident that the UN General Assembly will next month vote in favour of the upgrade. Israel is likely to argue that Palestinian rights cannot be viewed independently of those of Arab Jews.

As Palestine pushes for recognition, leaders of the Presbyterian Church this month urged US Congressional leaders to reconsider aid to Israel because of its alleged violations of human rights. In seeking to shift the conflict’s paradigm, the Israeli focus on Arab Jewish rights calls into question the emphasis on the Palestinians of one important faction of the bedrock of US support for Israel.

Palestinian issue at stake

The campaign for recognition of the rights of Arab Jewry could not come at a more politically opportune moment for Israel. It reinforces pro-Israeli support in Congress to limit the definition of a Palestinian refugee to those who were physically displaced when the Jewish state was created in 1948. The definition would deprive a majority of Palestinians born after the founding of Israel of any possibility to put forward a claim. It coalesces with proposals in Congress to equate Arab Jewish rights to those of Palestinians.

At the bottom line, the absence of a credible peace process has created a vacuum in which the very definition and importance of the Palestinian issue is at stake. It is a process in which Israel is benefitting from an Arab world that increasingly is preoccupied with either regime survival or post-revolt transition, a deeply divided Palestinian polity, and an international community that mistakenly believes that Palestine has taken a permanent backseat to more pressing issues such as Iran and the calls for political change.

Palestine may well for now be on the backburner; it is however unlikely to remain there.

James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.

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Palestinian striker accuses Israel of torture

More than just a striker? Palestinian soccer players display a poster in support of Mahmoud al-Sarsak during his hunger strike in Israeli prison

By Andrea Luchetta

Mahmoud al-Sarsak’s promising soccer career in the Palestinian national team was interrupted when he was detained at an Israeli military checkpoint three years ago and held indefinitely as an unlawful combatant without ever being charged or knowing the precise reasons for his incarceration.

Mr. Al-Sarsak was released in July after a 92-day hunger strike under pressure from world soccer body FIFA and Europe’s governing football group, UEFA. Israeli officials said he was suspected of being a member of the militant Gaza-based Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad, an allegation he denies.

Mr. Al-Sarsak rejected an invitation earlier this month to watch the Spanish derby between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid in Barcelona’s Camp Nuo stadium because he did not want to be in the same venue with Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, who was held for five years by Hamas, the Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip. Mr. Shalit was released last year in a prisoner exchange with Israel.

In an interview with Extra Time, the weekly international soccer supplement of Italy’s La Gazzetta deelo Sport, Mr. Al-Sarsak said that he had suffered physical and psychological torture – allegations Israel has denied.

In a statement after visiting Mr. Al-Sarsak during his hunger strike in prison, the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights said that “despite the urgency of his condition, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) has denied Mahmoud access to independent doctors from PHR-Israel until today. (…) Mahmoud has experienced extreme loss of muscle tissue and drastic weight loss. He has lost 33 percent of his body weight (…) He also suffers from frequent incidents of fainting and loss of consciousness (…) The doctor further reported that Mahmoud is in danger of pulse disruptions (arrhythmias) that are endangering his life”.

One of 12 brothers, Mr. Al-Sarsak grew up in a refugee camp in Gaza where he started playing soccer at an early age.” I am a striker and, yes, I’m good. When I was 14, I was called in the national team for a tournament in Teheran, where I scored six goals,” he says.

When were you arrested?

“On Wednesday, July 22th, 2009. I was travelling to sign a contract for a Nablus team. I had a permission from the Israeli authorities to go from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. I arrived at the check-point, the soldiers searched me and then said that there was an arrest warrant against me, but they never showed it to me”.

Did you put up resistance?

“I didn't. They stripped me naked, then they tied me hand and foot. I was blindfolded and put on a car. It probably lasted for three hours, during which they beat me up with sticks and their rifle butts. Then they drove me to the Ashkelon interrogation centre”.

Were you assisted by a lawyer?

“I was allowed to contact one only after 36 days”.

Were you beaten in Ashkelon?

“They wanted to avoid any fracture, thus they hit me on my feet, on my bottom, where they knew they wouldn’t leave any trace. But the psychological pressure was stronger. For the first 18 days, they didn’t let me sleep more than one hour or two per night. The other 18 I managed to sleep for four hours. They often tied me to a chair, or to a wall with my hands up”.

What were you accused of?

 “Of nothing. They wanted to know whether I was affiliated to any political organisations”.

According to an Israeli government spokesperson, you belonged to the “Islamic Jihad” group.

That’s false. I have never been enrolled in any movements. In any case, I was questioned about any kind of formations, the religious as well as the secular ones”.

Had you participated in any violent actions before your arrest?

Never, nor had I taken part in political manifestations. Look: I played football, I worked with my father and I was in my third year at university. I had no girlfriend, let’s say I was looking for one.

After the days in Ashkelon?

I was deported to a jail in the Negev desert. They said I was an unlawful fighter and that I had to spend six months in prison. Six months later, the same story. And so six months after six months, for seven times”.

How was life in the Negev jail?

We slept in 20-people tents. The day was extremely hot, the night was deadly cold. Privacy was non-existent: the toilets and the showers were in common containers. I spent one year and half there.  No way we could play football, at best we could play chess. Every six months the Red Cross came to visit us”.

Were you physically attacked?

“They didn’t touch me, yet the psychological violence was present. I wasn’t allowed to communicate with my family, not even by phone. During my detention, I had the right to a letter per month. You can fancy my parents’ worry, as well as what I felt when I imagined their anguish”.

When did you decide to start your hunger strike?

“When, for the seventh time, they extended my detention without any explanations. I did feel the injustice and took the decision. As soon as I refused to eat, they locked me up in solitary confinement. They put a huge pressure on me in order to stop my fasting. They provoked me, by bringing food in my cell. They led me to a hospital where some patients were undergoing dialysis and said that my kidneys would know the same fate. Sometimes they threatened to put a tube in my mouth to make me gulp down some milk”.

Was it a total strike?

“I drank water and took some minerals, but no sugars. At the end of the fast, I weighed 46 kg, from the 76 of March. I often fainted, I was exhausted. I didn’t manage to sleep, sometimes my vision was blurred. For three days I was completely blind. After 30 days I didn’t manage to stand up. But most of all, I remember the huge sadness of those months”.

Did you have access to independent doctors?

No. I was assisted by a medical official, who put pressure in order to convince me to desist. I’ve always stayed isolated, I knew nothing about the solidarity outside the jail. I managed just to catch a glimpse of some other prisoners when I was transferred on a wheel-chair to meet the doctor”.

How did the negotiations proceed?

“It lasted for 40 days. Once they proposed me to go to France, Denmark or Norway to have treatment and then to release me in Gaza. But to me it was a threat: I didn’t want to get even farther from my family”.

How do you explain your release?

“They wanted to avoid any embarrassment: they had no credible charge, if I had died it would have been even more resounding. And then I believe that God’s will was fulfilled”.

For what reason do you think you were arrested?

“I don’t know. I can just think that I was ambitious and may be they didn’t want a Palestinian footballer to become famous”.

The day of your release?

They drove me to Gaza in an ambulance. I saw my folks again, a joy I couldn’t describe. And then I felt victorious. I got out of there, I broke that nightmare. I won. Yet, I can’t help thinking of the many that are still in those jails. I am troubled and I feel sadness, anxiety for them. Because I am like them.

We asked the Israeli Embassy in Rome a reply to Mr. Sarsak’s interview. Here we publish their whole answer:

“Mahmoud al-Sarsak was arrested while trying to illegally enter the Israeli territory. He is not just a football player, but also a member of the “Islamic Jihad”, a group included in the terror list by the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan and the European Union. As a further proof of this, we must remember that, after his liberation, Mahmoud al-Sarsak was described by Nafez Azzam - leader of the “Islamic Jihad” – as “one of the noble members” of the terroristic organisation, what is tantamount to the umpteenth proof of the charges that Israel moved against him.

After his arrest, Israel applied to Mahmoud al-Sarsak the rules of the so-called 'administrative detention,', an internationally acknowledged individual freedom-limiting measure. Such a measure is provided also by the Codes of Countries like the Great Britain, Australia and the United States. Throughout his detention, included the period during which Mahmoud al-Sarsak declared the hunger strike, he enjoyed a full acknowledgment of all of the due rights: he had the possibility to choose a lawyer, to meet him freely and he received the visits of the International Red Cross. In this sense, any mistreatment accusation has to be intended as simply false and propagandistic”.

A version of this story appeared on Extra Time, the weekly international soccer supplement of Italy’s La Gazzetta dello Sport

Clash of Spanish soccer giants produces Palestinian victory

A Palestinian youth touts a Barcelona shirt (Source: Getty Images)

By James M. Dorsey

When Spanish giants Real Madrid and FC Barcelona clashed this weekend, two matches separated by thousands of kilometers were played, one on and one off the pitch. The Spanish clash ended in a draw in Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium; a rare show of public defiance to Gaza’s Hamas rulers ended with a victory for what amounted to Palestinians rejecting the Islamists’ call for a boycott of the popular Catalan champion.

The Spanish derby turned into an inter-Palestinian clash of wills as well as a rejection of the Palestinian struggle for statehood against Israel becoming the determining factor of their daily lives when Barcelona extended an invitation to Israeli soldier Gilat Shalit to attend the match.

Mr. Shalit was exchanged last year after five years in Hamas captivity in a prisoner exchange swap in which Israel’s released more than a 1,000 Palestinians to Hamas in a deal that boosted the Islamists’ fortunes at the expense of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s authority on the West Bank.

That victory has now turned into an own goal with Palestinian soccer officials rejecting a call by Hamas to boycott the match and scores of Palestinians in Gaza publicly defying a Hamas order not to watch the match on television.

Hamas’s setback comes as the group, which wrenched control of the Gaza Strip from Mr. Abbas’s Al Fatah movement in 2007 and split the Palestinian national movement, is on the defensive. A Hamas decision to boycott this month’s municipal elections on the West Bank, has all but paved the way for a Fatah victory. A Human Rights Watch report last week accused Hamas of subjecting Palestinians to serious abuses of justice, including torture, arbitrary arrest and unfair trials. Hamas has denied the allegations.

Hamas is also facing increased charges of widespread corruption, fraud and extortion, making it difficult for the movement to capitalize on protests in the West Bank against and discontent with the economic policies of Mr. Abbas’s government.

Hamas’s boycott of Barcelona targeted what is perhaps the most popular European club in Gaza as well as the West Bank, boosted by recent reports that Catalonia may seek independence from crisis-ridden Spain. 

"We can identify with the Catalans and their struggle against the great power of Madrid, like the way we struggle against Israel," the BBC quoted a Palestinian soccer fan as saying.

Writing on the BBC’s website, Gaza correspondent Jon Donnison said that “Barcelona Football Club arguably brings more joy to Palestinians than any other institution in the world. That's certainly my impression after almost three years in Gaza and the West Bank. Every time the Catalans take to the field you can guarantee you'll struggle to get a table in the bars of Ramallah and the shisha-infused coffee shops of Gaza City. On match day tradesmen touting maroon and gold Barca jerseys set up shop at Qalandia, the traffic-infested Israeli military checkpoint that separates Ramallah from East Jerusalem.”

The Hamas boycott was sparked, according to Barcelona, when it acceded to an Israeli request to allow Mr. Shalit, an avid soccer fan, to attend this weekend’s derby. The club soon realized that nothing in the Middle East is shielded from politics.

To squash protests at an early stage, Barcelona quickly extended invitations to three Palestinians: Palestinian Football Association president and Al Fatah member Jibril Rajoub, Mr. Abbas’s ambassador to Spain, Musa Amer Odeh, and popular national team soccer player Mahmoud Sarsak who was released from three years in Israeli prison earlier this year under pressure from world soccer body FIFA and Europe’s governing football group UEFA after he went on a three-month hunger strike. Mr. Sarsak was never charged with an offense but was suspected to be a member of the militant, Gaza-based group, Islamic Jihad.

Messrs Rajoub and Abu Odeh appear despite mounting disillusion with Al Fatah to have been more in tune with the popular mood when they announced that they would accept Barcelona’s invitation and not join the Hamas boycott. Mr. Sarsak by contrast said that he would "refuse to sit in the same place with a killer who came on a military tank. I respect Barcelona's invitation, but I have to avoid angering the Palestinian people and their supporters as well as all those who supported me during my hunger strike." Mr. Sarsak acknowledged however that many Palestinians felt he should have accepted the Barcelona invitation to highlight Palestinian suffering and turn the clash between the Spanish giants into an Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.

To be sure, Mr. Sarsak may have been in a no-win situation. His attendance of the Spanish derby alongside Mr. Shalit could well have sparked Palestinian criticism. By the same token, his boycott in line with Hamas and Islamic Jihad policy certainly failed to strike a popular cord with Palestinians.

A small group of former prisoners wearing Barcelona and Real Madrid shirts kicked a soccer ball around on a forlorn Gaza field in protest against Mr. Shalit’s attendance of the derby. "Soccer is a sport that carries the message of freedom and love but we are against it when a soldier is invited, because it equates between the victim and the aggressor," said Yasser Saleh, who spent 17 years in Israeli jails.

Nonetheless, Hamas’s boycott call offered Palestinians a rare opportunity to vote with their feet against continued entrenched, feuding Palestinian groups that have proven unable to further national aspirations or improve economic conditions. The Palestinian show of defiance came against the backdrop of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process virtually that is dead, the faltering of revived Palestinian efforts to gain some form of recognition of statehood at last month’s United Nations general assembly in New York, and widespread economic discontent in both the West Bank and Gaza.

"I watch football and support Barcelona, because I see only sports, I don't see politics - I won't allow for Israel to deny us from this fun time,” said defiant Palestinian Barcelona fan Nasser Ziad.

In a strip where children wear imitation Barcelona blue-and-red jerseys and Barcelona victories spark wild cheering and car honking, coffee shops were filled on Sunday to the rim as Palestinians ignored the Hamas boycott and gathered to watch their favorite team play on large television screens. “We shouldn’t stay at home. We should be out their cheering our team and waving the Palestinian flag for all to see,” said one defiant Barcelona fan.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Mounting Israeli soccer violence reflects fading hope in Palestinian peace

Israeli soccer violence spiralling out of control

By James M. Dorsey

A stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, a dwindling number of Palestinians participating in non-governmental reconciliation efforts and increased racism in Israeli soccer constitute two sides of the same coin: fading hope and interest in peace, hardening battle lines and a resurgence of racism on both sides of the divide.

Yet, the measures being discussed to curb mounting violence on and off the pitch threaten to reduce political and social issues to a problem of law enforcement as the heads of Israel’s 16 premier league club meet to debate how to cope with a situation that is spiralling out of control. The solution to Israel’s soccer violence no doubt involves law enforcement, but a crackdown and harsher penalties are unlikely to restore faith in future Israeli-Palestinian coexistence or mitigate the brutalizing effect on Israeli society of 45 years of occupation of Palestinian land.

Granted, the heads of Israel’s top soccer clubs lack the power to address the larger political and social issues. Their inability to influence political and security decisions has become evident over the past year in what Palestinian soccer officials say is the inability of Israeli sports officials to even ease the restrictions on travel imposed on Palestinian athletes in the West Bank and Gaza. A hotline established last year between the Israeli and Palestinian Olympic committees to tackle such issues has so far produced little results.

"The problem is the Israeli committee is not the relevant authority for the movement of people and equipment. We are trying, but I don't want to embarrass anyone," said Jibril Rajoub, who heads both the Palestinian Football Association and Olympic Committee, in an interview last year.

Nonetheless, there are things the Israeli soccer federation can do to counter an environment of increased polarisation and racially motivated violence in the absence of political will among both Israeli and Palestinian political elites to definitively tackle big ticket issues involved in peace such as settlements, refugees, borders and the future of Jerusalem.

The Israeli Football Association (IFA) and the heads of soccer clubs need to come to grips with two types of albeit inter-related violence: racially-motivated aggression against Palestinians and those that empathise with their cause and violence involving only Jewish players and fans. Their response to inter-Jewish violence is clear.

"The first thing to do is significantly increase the punishments. I have been talking about this for more than 20 years, and that was a time football was much more violent," the Associated Press quoted Maccabi Haifa Chairman Jacob Shahar as saying.

Less clear is their response to mounting Israeli-Palestinian soccer tension. " The field has become a battleground, involving not only fans but also players, coaches, officials ... it is impossible to stay silent," Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat told a recent press conference after being instructed by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to put an end to the violence.

Messrs. Livnat and Shahar were speaking after a series of incidents in which players and fans clashed on the pitch and notoriously racist supporters of Beitar Jerusalem, a club historically linked to Israel’s right-wing attacked Palestinian shoppers and workers in a mall as well as later a Jewish woman who protest against their racist attitudes. Beitar Jerusalem is the only Israeli club that has never hired a Palestinian player, who are among Israel’s highest scorers.  In response to Beitar Jerusalem chants of ‘Death to the Arabs,’ Palestinian supporters of Israeli Palestinian clubs like Bnei Sakhnin have begun singing ‘Death to the Jews.’

Bnei Sakhnin supports chant 'Death to the Jews'

Writing in Soccer & Society, Israeli sports scholar Amir Ben-Porat warned already four years ago that “the football stadium has become an arena for protest: political, ethnic, nationalism, etc… ‘Death to the Arabs’ has thus become common chant in football stadiums… Many Israelis consider the Israeli Arabs (Palestinians) to be ‘Conditional Strangers,’ that is temporary citizens… Contrary to conventional expectations, these fans are not unsophisticated rowdies, but middle-class political-ideological right-wingers, whose rejection of Arab football players on their team is based on a definite conception of Israel as a Jewish (Zionist) state,” Mr. Ben-Porat wrote.

The IFA, despite being the only soccer body in the Middle East to have launched a campaign against racism, has allowed what Mr. Ben-Porat describes as ‘permissive territory’ that in which “some deviant behaviours are tolerated (such as using profanities) as long as definite rules are followed (that is, no racist chants)” to get out of hand.

The IFA has signalled a lack of sincerity by failing to impose its anti-racism rule by cracking down as hard on racism as it intends to do on what amounts to hooliganism. Forcing Beitar Jerusalem to drop its ban on Palestinian players, a violation of Israeli equal opportunity laws, and severely penalizing it for its fan behaviour rather than simply giving the club a slap on its knuckles while also taking Bnei Sakhnin to task for the behaviour of its fans would go a long way to tackling the issue of mounting racism on the pitch.

It would also send a signal to Israelis and Palestinians at a time that Palestinians are increasingly less inclined to engage with Israelis in the belief that reconciliation efforts are senseless as long as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is stalemated. An IFA crackdown on racism would to some degree counter Palestinian claims that there is no partner in Israel amidst the violence employed by Israeli security forces against protesters on the West Bank and anti-Palestinian statements by Israel’s ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Israeli peace activists warn that waning Palestinian interest in people-to-people encounters with Israelis threaten to undermine what is left of Israel’s already weakened peace movement. While peace may be beyond the IFA’s purview, a serious crackdown on racism would not only serve to counter what is an increasingly ugly trend in Israeli society but like the hotline signal that there are Israeli institutions that are willing to play their part.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Soccer fan attack on Palestinians sparks Israeli debate

By James M. Dorsey

An initially under-reported attack by militant supporters of controversial Beitar Jerusalem Football Club known for their anti-Palestinian, anti-Ashkenazi Jewish attitudes on Palestinian shoppers and workers in a Jerusalem shopping mall and the Israeli police’s failure to intervene and arrest any the attackers has outraged many Israelis and is raising questions about the moral fiber of a society that tolerates such incidents as well as a soccer club that is unashamedly racist.

Police launched an investigation into the incident that was caught on security camera video only after the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the assault and asked how Israel would have reacted if France had responded similarly to last week’s attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in which four people, including three children, were killed. The alleged killer died in a shootout with police after an intense manhunt and a more than 30-hour siege.

“Those who fail to raise their voice now over Malha will get Toulouse in Jerusalem. Sticks today, guns tomorrow,” warned Haaretz commentator Gideon Levy.

“It's not hard to imagine what would have happened had hundreds of people burst into a mall in Toulouse and beat up Jews who worked there. Israel and the Jewish community would have set up a hue and cry. The president of the republic would have rushed to Toulouse, met with representatives of the Jewish community and expressed his shock and regret. Our prime minister and foreign minister would have competed with each other in expressing shock, and columnists would be fulminating about anti-Semitism raising its ugly head in Europe. Everyone would agree: Jews were beat up (again) simply for being Jewish.

It's also not hard to imagine what would have happened had hundreds of Arabs stormed the Jerusalem mall, beating up Jewish workers. Dozens of rioters would have been arrested and tried. But when it comes to Beitar fans, all is forgiven, all is overlooked. No one was arrested, almost no one said anything, and even after it was made public the mall's manager was the only one to apologize to the workers, who were beaten up simply for being Arab,” Mr. Levy said.

Journalist Uzi Dann noted in a separate commentary that when Paris Saint-Germain fans attacked Jews in 2006 after their team lost to Hapoel Tel Aviv French police intervened immediately and shot one of the attackers.

“In properly run countries like England and Germany there is surveillance of hooligans, who are quite often extreme right-wingers, and harsh penalties are meted out for violence, including imprisonment. And of course, there is massive police presence during games,” Mr. Dann wrote.

He said the mounting Beitar violence stemmed from the growing influence among the clubs fans of a group known as La Familia that is dominated by supporters of Kach, the outlawed violent and racist party that was headed by assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane. Beitar’s management has so far failed to stymie the group’s influence.

Messrs Levy and Dann’s comments followed Haaretz’s breaking of the story that some 300 Beitar Jerusalem fans had attacked Palestinians at Jerusalem’s Malha shopping mall as part of a celebration of their team’s defeat of rival Bnei Yehuda.

The attack, one of the worst Israeli-Palestinian clashes in Jerusalem in recent years, came two years after the Israel Football Association replaced police in Israeli stadium with ushers in a bid to reduce potential provocations of soccer violence. The shifting of responsibility for law and order away from the stadiums did not relieve the police of its responsibilities in other public places, Haaretz noted.

The incident occurred in what City University of New York scholar Dov Waxman described in an article in The Middle East Journal as an atmosphere of escalating tension between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. “Attitudes on both sides have hardened, mutual distrust has intensified, fear has increased, and political opinion has become more militant and uncompromising….Jews and Palestinians are currently on a collision course, with potentially severe consequences for their continued peaceful co-existence, as well as for stability and democracy in Israel,” Mr. Waxman wrote.

The incident further highlights the failure of the Israeli Football Association (IFA), the only soccer body in the Middle East and North Africa to have launched a campaign against racism and discrimination, to rein in the Beitar fans and curb the club’s submission to its supporter’s racist attitudes. With  the worst disciplinary record in Israel’s Premier League, Beitar has faced since 2005 more than 20 hearings and has received various punishments, including point deductions, fines and matches behind closed doors because of its fans’ racist behavior.

Beitar’s matches often resemble a Middle Eastern battlefield. It’s mostly Sephardic fans of Middle Eastern and North African origin, revel in their status as the bad boys of Israeli soccer. Their dislike of Ashkenazi Jews of East European extraction rivals their disdain for Palestinians.

Supported by Israeli right wing leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Beitar traces its roots to a revanchist Zionist youth movement. Its founding players actively resisted the pre-state British mandate authorities.

Beitar is Israel’s only leading club never to have signed an Israeli Palestinian player because of fan pressure despite the fact that Palestinians are among the country’s top players. Maccabi striker Mohammed Ghadir recently put Beitar on the spot when he challenged the club to hire him despite its discriminatory hiring policies.

Beitar fans shocked Israelis several years ago when they refused to observe a moment of silence for assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who initiated the first peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Referring to the latest incident, Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the law enforcement agency had not launched an earlier investigation into the shopping mall attack because no one involved in the incident had sought medical assistance or filed a complaint about the incident in which mostly young Beitar fans unfurled a Kach flag.  Beitar fans often fly the flag during soccer matches.

"How can we arrest someone when there have been no complaints made? There have been no reports of injuries or that anyone was spoken to in [a racist] way. Normally, members of the public would have come forward within hours to make an official complaint. Until now, none has been made", Mr. Rosenfeld said.

Witnesses said the soccer fans flooded into the shopping center, hurled racial abuse at Palestinians workers and shoppers and chanted anti-Palestinian slogans.

Haaretz quoted Mohammed Yusuf, a cleaner in the mall, as describing the attack as “a mass lynching attempt."

An unidentified shop owner told the paper that the soccer fans “stood on chairs and tables (in the mall’s food court) and what have you. They made a terrible noise, screamed 'death to the Arabs,' waved their scarves and sang songs at the top of their voices."

A brawl erupted fans started verbally abusing and spitting at three Palestinian women, who were sitting in the food hall with their children, according to CCTV footage. Palestinian cleaners intervened in a bid to help the women, chasing fans with their broomsticks. After initially succeeding in chasing them away, the fans return to attack the cleaners.

"They caught some of them and beat the hell out of them. They hurled people into shops, and smashed them against shop windows. I don't understand how none shattered into pieces. One cleaner was attacked by some 20 people, poor guy, and then they had a go at his brother who works in a nearby pizza shop and came to his rescue," bakery owner Yair told Haaretz.

Jewish shop owners refused demands by the fans that they give them knives and sticks with which they could attack the Palestinians. By the same token, no one in the mall intervened to stop the attack. The mall’s security chief, whose men were outnumbered by the fans, called police who arrived only 40 minutes after the attack started. Police evacuated the mall but did not intervene further or arrest any of the culprits. Malha executive director Gideon Avrahami was the only senior official or executive to apologize to the workers.

In a statement, Beitar Jerusalem said that the club "firmly condemns violence and leaves it to the treatment of the authorities." Beitar went however on to say that “the incident at the mall has nothing to do with Beitar Jerusalem... Apparently the fistfight started because of an argument between a fan and a worker. This is not about racist violence."

Commentator Levy warned that the problem was one of Beitar’s attitude and mentality. 

“This was not a rare, one-off event, of course. The Beitar entourage strikes again. It starts with their racist and ultranationalist chants and songs, continues to hitting and will end in murders. One of the young rioters boasted the following day (to my informant's daughter) about what he and his friends had done the previous evening. Apparently anti-Arab violence is a source of cheer: Beitar finally won a game, you have to celebrate somehow. It's easy to imagine what would have happened had they lost,” he said.

An Israeli member of parliament called on the eve of the latest Beitar incident Israeli soccer fan for putting violent soccer fans under administrative detention, the legal holdover from British rule largely employed to detain Palestinians for reasons of security for indefinite periods of time without being charged.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Israeli MK calls for treating soccer hooligans like alleged Palestinian terrorists

Tel Aviv derby: 2 red cards, 10 yellow cards and 20 hooligans arrested (Source: Jerusalem Post/Adi Avishai)

By James M. Dorsey

Israeli soccer fan violence has sparked a proposal in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to put violent football supporters under administrative detention, the legal holdover from British rule largely employed to detain Palestinians for reasons of security for indefinite periods of time without being charged.

Knesset Education, Culture and Sports Committee chairman Alex Miller of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far right coalition partner Israel Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) tabled the proposal in the wake of a bout of fan and player violence during this week's Tel  Aviv derby between  Hapoel Tel Aviv and Macabbi Tel Aviv, It also was sparked by earlier incidents involving predominantly militant Sephardic Jewish fans of Beitar Jerusalem notorious for their anti-Palestinian and anti-Ashkenazi Jewish attitudes.

Mr.  Miller’s proposal was expected to be discussed at a meeting of his committee in the presence of Israel's Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch and Israel Football Association chairman Aviv Luzon.

"In order to prevent a national tragedy like there was in Egypt [last month], and because violence is on the rise on Israeli soccer fields, we must take very extreme steps against hooligans," Ha’aretz newspaper quoted Mr. Miller as saying.

The committee chairman was somewhat opportunistically referring to last month's incident in Port Said in which 74 soccer fans were killed during a clash after a match between crowned Cairo club Al Ahly SC and the Egyptian Suez Canal city's Al Masri SC.

Recent Israeli soccer violence has none of the political connotations of that in Egypt where soccer fans are among the most militant opponents of a military government. Few doubt that the Port Said incident unlike the violence in Tel Aviv was planned and designed to teach the football supporters a lesson.

Echoing misplaced advice offered last week at an international sports security conference in Qatar to Egyptian Footballers' Association president Magdy Abdel Ghani by former English Football Association vice chairman David Dein and International Conference on Sport Security executive director and head of security for the 2006 World Cup in Germany Helmut Spahn, Mr. Miller asserted that the police needed to be given “significant tools” to deter soccer violence.

Israel inherited administrative detention from the British mandate in Palestine and uses it to detain Palestinians on security and political grounds. The measure, viewed by human rights organization as a violation of civil and political rights, is designed to be preventive rather than punitive and therefore need not involve alleged commitment of a crime.

Ironically, extreme nationalist Knesset member Michael Ben Ari, no stranger to proposing far out sports-related legislation, denounced Mr. Miller’s plan as a “bizarre proposal taken from dark regimes.” Mr. Ben-Ari argued that Israel was a country that adhered to the rule of law and could not grant law enforcement the right to send people to jail without proof – a principle he does not apply to the 300 Palestinians being detained under administrative detention, according to statistics supplied by Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

Mr. Ben-Ari, a member of the far-right National Union, who is widely seen as having inherited the mantle of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the assassinated racist leader of the outlawed Jewish Defense League,  late last year proposed legislation that would have required members of Israeli national sport teams to sing the national anthem and recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

If passed that legislation would have threatened to significantly weaken Israel’s national soccer team, which like most Israeli clubs with the exception of Beitar Jerusalem counts Palestinians among their most starred players.

A battle between the Israeli and Palestinian soccer leagues over superstar Ali Khatib highlights the importance of Palestinian players in Israeli soccer.

A 22-year old Palestinian midfielder with Israeli citizenship who until recently was the star of Palestinian soccer, Mr. Khatib enraged his fans by leaving his East Jerusalem team to join Hapoel Haifa. By scoring in each of his first four games for Hapoel, he ensured that the Israeli team was no longer threatened with relegation.

Mr. Khatib’s former Palestinian team Jabel Mukkaber charges that he is still under contract for another 3.5 years and that Hapoel Haifa illegally poached him.

Jabal Mukkaber coach Samir Issa asserted that Mr. Khatib “is a very talented player, but when he joined our team, nobody had heard of him and nobody really wanted him … Khatib owes a lot to Palestinian soccer and to the club where he earned a living for three whole years. Unfortunately, he is displaying a lot of ingratitude. He left us like a thief in the night, although he had a signed contract with a Palestinian soccer club. This is highly unacceptable behavior."

Jabel Mukkaber spokesman Mohammed Zahaika accusing Mr. Khatib of treason and said the club would take the case to world soccer body FIFA

Hapoel Haifa spokesman Noam Regev denied the allegation, noting that a Tel Aviv court had ruled the transfer as legitimate. “They can go to FIFA if they want to, but Hapoel Haifa did everything legally,” Mr. Regev said.

Hapoel coach Tal Banin, widely viewed as one of Israel’s best ever soccer players said that he had “asked around about any players who had been released from their contracts. Someone told me about Khatib. After making a few inquiries, I decided to give him a tryout. Within 10 - no, five - minutes, I knew he was just what our team needed."

Mr. Khatib’s ambition to play for the Israeli national team has further fuelled the fire given that he scored six goals for the Palestinian national squad in 29 international matches, including qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup. His transfer has kicked up a storm on the West Bank where it is a prime topic of discussion.

Mr. Khatib, a graduate of Hapoel Haifa’s youth soccer, has denied that he is still under contract to the Palestinian team. He argues that he has moved to a professionally better league that offers him more money and the potential to eventually be recruited by a European club.

“My ambition is to achieve a good reputation in the Israeli league and play in the Israeli national team. My future here in Israel is more promising. Every Arab player who lives in Israel dreams of this chance,” the Associated Press quoted Mr. Khatib as saying in an interview in his home in the northern Israeli town of Shfaram, where a framed picture of him shaking the hand of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas hangs on the wall.

Mr. Khatib displays a tattoo on his forearm in response to Palestinian denunciations of his transfer that reads: "Only God Can Judge Me."

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Beitar Jerusalem appeals punishment for its fans’ racism

 Beitar fans display logo of assassinated extreme right wing Rabbi Meir Kahana

By James M. Dorsey

Beitar Jerusalem, the bad boy of Israeli soccer, has appealed an Israeli Football Association (IFA) decision to dock it two points after fans shouted racist slurs against a Nigerian-born international striker Toto Tamez during a match against Hapoel Tel Aviv.

Beitar is likely in its appeal to argue that it is seeking to rein in its Sephardic Middle Eastern and North African Jewish fans, known for their dislike of Arabs Ashkenazi Jews of East European origin. The club is looking to hire a private security company to restrain its rowdy supporters.

The IFA's decision to activate a suspended two-point punishment of Beitar meted out last year because of its fan behaviour could prove disastrous as the club seeks to evade relegation because of poor performance.

Beitar this weekend scored much needed points with its defeat of Maccabi Netanya in a home match in Jerusalem's Teddy Kollek Stadium which it had earlier been ordered by the IFA to play behind closed doors because of racist chanting by its fans.

Israeli news reports quoted Beitar coach Yuval Naim as saying the IFA ruling was a disgrace. "They're killing us and demoting us a league. It's a death sentence for Beitar," Mr.Naim reportedly shouted.

Beitar was Israel's richest club until its owner, Russian-born billionaire Arkady Gaydamak, cut funding and failed to sell the club to two American Jewish investors who are widely viewed as critical of Israeli policies and doves when it comes to achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace

The IFA said it was to penalising the club because "the Beitar management had not made an honest effort to combat the fans' chants."

That judgement was reinforced when Maccabi Haifa striker Mohammed Ghadir recently put Beitar on the spot by insisting that he wanted to join the club, which prides itself to be the only Israeli Premier League to have never hired a Palestinian player in a country whose population is for 20 per cent Palestinian and in which Palestinians play important roles in most other top league teams.

"Our team and our fans are still not ready for an Arab soccer player," Israel's liberal daily, Ha’aretz, recently quoted Beitar’s management as saying in response to Mr. Ghadir’s challenge.

Beitar's notorious racism prompted the IFA to become the only Middle Eastern soccer body to launch a campaign against.

Established in 1936 and supported by Israeli right wing leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Beitar traces its roots to a revanchist Zionist youth movement. Its founding players actively resisted the pre-state British mandate authorities. Its fans shocked Israelis when they refused to observe a national moment of silence for assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who initiated the first peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Beitar has the worst disciplinary record in Israel’s top league. Since 2005 it has faced more than 20 hearings and has received various punishments, including points deductions, fines and matches behind closed doors because of its fans’ racist behaviour. The IFA recently ordered Beitar to play two home games behind closed doors and pay a $16,000 fine for fan rioting during a match against Bnei Yehuda.

Beitar’s matches often resemble a Middle Eastern battlefield. It’s fans revel in their status as the bad boys of Israeli soccer. Their dislike of Ashkenazi Jews rivals their disdain for Palestinians.

Despite the IFA's efforts, militant soccer fan racism is encouraged by far-right wing politicians such as National Union deputy Michael Ben-Ari, a proponent of expelling all Palestinians from Israel, who last year proposed legislation that would require members of Israeli national sport teams to sing the national anthem and recognise Israel as a Jewish state. The latter demand is rooted in an Israeli desire backed by Mr. Netanyahu to impose recognition of the Jews’ historic right to settle Palestine and block recognition of Palestinian rights to return to lands within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

Similarly, Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat, who cultivates an image as a tolerant, modern public servant, has largely remained silent about the racism of home soccer team. Ha'aretz recntly pointed out that approximately one third of Mr. Barkat's constituents are Jerusalem's 280,000 tax-paying Palestinians.

The importance of Palestinian players to Israeli soccer was driven home to Israelis in 2005 when Abbas Suan, a devout Muslim who refused to sing the Hatikva before a game, achieved for a brief moment what politicians in more than a half-century had not: he united Israeli Jews and Arabs by securing with a last minute equalizer against Ireland Israel’s first chance in 35 years to qualify for a world cup. The game earned him the nickname The Equalizer and made him an Israeli hero; his cheery face and toothy smile featured in ads for the state lottery.

That sense of unity was short-lived. When Suan set foot on the pitch in Israel a week later as captain of Bnei Sakhnin, an Israeli Palestinian team, Jewish fans of Beitar Jerusalem, Israel’s most nationalistic club, booed him every time he touched the ball. “Suan, You Don’t Represent US,” blared a giant banner in the stadium. Fans shouted, “We hate all Arabs.”

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.