Previous chapters have emphasized the integrative aspects of soccer and the historical role it played in inhibiting national protest among the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel. Soccer's conservative role has been challenged by the new Arabic press that has been developed in Israel since the mid 1980s. Analyzing Arab soccer in Israel as a “contested terrain” is meaningful mainly because of the vocal and concrete opposition of Arab sports journalists to the hegemonic meanings produced both in the stadiums and in the Hebrew media.

This active and extensive nationalist tone in the Arabic press is relatively new. The effect of the 1948 war on the Arab-Palestinian media was similar to its implications for the Palestinian independent sports infrastructure. Namely, the media elite – most of the publishers, editors, and journalists – were exiled and Palestinian newspapers ceased to exist (Caspi and Kabaha 2001). Under Israeli rule, these newspapers were replaced by official mouthpieces of the Histadrut and the Zionist parties. The only newspaper that survived the war was al-Ittiḥad, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, which had expressed an oppositional line but was subjected to strict censorship. Since the mid 1980s however, the Arabic press in Israel has experienced relative prosperity in the number and diversity of newspapers and has undergone a significant shift in political tone. This shift is described by Caspi and Kabaha (2001) as a “transformation from a [status quo oriented] mobilized press, to a nationally conscious press, self mobilized for the struggle of the Palestinian minority in Israeli society.”

Sample: 174 male residents of Sakhnin aged 16 to 40 years were sampled by proportional geographical sampling (geographic borders in Sakhnin highly overlap with familial, class, and political divisions in the town (Rosenfeld and Al-Haj 1990). Sakhnin was divided into six sub-districts according to the division of statistical districts designed by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics based on the 1995 census. A proportional number of households were sampled in each district according to the absolute number of households within its boundaries. Interviewers were instructed to walk lengthways through the sub-district in pre-defined routes and to enter every 22nd house (Sakhnin had no street names or numbers in 1999). In each household they randomly selected one man in the appropriate age range (16–40). If there were two men within the appropriate age range in one household, interviewers were instructed to interview the elder the first time, the younger the second time, the elder the third time, and so on. In the case of three potential interviewees at a residence, interviewers were instructed likewise to select each time a different person in cyclical order of their age.

Data collection: The survey was conducted in April 1999. A structured face-to-face questionnaire-based interview was held with each one of the interviewees at their home. The two interviewers were male students from Sakhnin and the neighboring village of Deir Hana.

Dependent variables:

(1) Voting intentions in the elections for prime minister planned for May 29, 1999 (open question)

(2) Pride in belonging to eight identities: Sakhnin, the hamula (clan/extended family), the Palestinian people, the Arab people, the State of Israel, the religious group (Muslim or Christian), the Galilee region, and the men.

Although the majority of the Palestinians who lived in the territory which became Israel were uprooted in the war and their return was prevented to ensure a Jewish majority, 156,000 Arab-Palestinians remained in Israel, became Israeli citizens, but lived under the strict Military Government until 1966. The emergence of Arab soccer as an “integrative enclave” has roots in these first two decades of the state's existence. During those years soccer was used by both the state apparatus and by the Palestinian minority for different purposes, and in order to fulfill different needs, but the combined effect of these forces was shaping Arab soccer as a sphere of limited integration.

As Yoav Peled and Gershon Shafir argue, Israeli political culture has been characterized by a continuous tension between three partly contradictory political goals and commitments: the colonial project of settling the country with a specific group of people, the ethno-national project of building a Jewish nation-state, and the liberal project of establishing a democracy. The tension between the first two commitments and the third commitment was partly solved by ensuring that most of the non-Jewish population remained beyond the state boundaries. The existence of the remaining Arabs, however, forced the political leadership to find creative solutions to reconcile between the divergent commitments. Therefore, as Shira Robinson (2005) has demonstrated, from the very first years of the state's existence, its apparatus implemented extensive and diverse practices towards the Arab-Palestinian minority to ensure a limited form of inclusion, one that simultaneously emphasized their liberal inclusion in the project of state-building, excluded them from the project of nation-building, and made them the victims of the colonial project.

Previous chapters focused on the contest over different potential interpretations of Arab success in Israeli soccer. This contest is based on a consensus which legitimizes the participation itself: since the dismantling of the independent Arab soccer teams in the 1960s the integration of Arab teams and players in the Israeli soccer institutions has not been seriously challenged. The exception to this rule is the separate and autonomous Islamic League, established by the Islamic Movement in Israel, which offers a unique strategy for dealing with soccer. This uniqueness is valid both in reference to the treatment of soccer by other Arab political forces in Israel and in reference to the treatment of other “Western” cultural formations by the Islamic Movement. This exceptionality stems from the tension between the suspicion of soccer as a secularizing sphere and recognition of its overwhelming popularity. This tension is solved by containing the game and placing it under the strict supervision of religious leaders.

Sports and religious fundamentalism

The Islamic Movement in Israel is part of a wider regional and global phenomenon which is referred to in the academic literature as “Islamism,” “political Islam,” “reformist movements,” “Islamic revivalism,” “integrisme” or “Islamic fundamentalism.” The long and tedious terminological debate cannot be discussed here. It is noteworthy, however, that whenever a comparative argument is required in this chapter I will use the term “fundamentalism,” since, although it is imperfect and problematic (Benin and Stork 1996), most of the comparative studies of Islamist movements and similar movements in other religions have used this term.

On the databases for chapter 4

The calculation is based upon figures relating to the support of sports organizations by the municipalities, from publicly available information obtained from the Sports Authority (SA) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports. In order to establish standards for support of sports organizations based on the financial resources of the respective councils, I calculated the proportion of investment in sports clubs estimated from the overall general budget of each municipal council. Figures for the regular budgets were taken from the Report of Inspected Financial Figures of the Center for Local Government (FFCLG) for 1998. The Sports Authority provides figures only for plans, not for actual execution, and therefore in both instances the figures relate to the planned budget. My calculations are based exclusively upon the figures of municipalities which met two conditions: they were required to have a population of between 5,000 and 35,000 in 1998 (the logic behind the range: 5,000 is the minimal number for which the Central Bureau of Statistics has agreed-upon figures, while the Arab localities, Nazareth excepted, have no more than 35,000 residents); and relevant figures must have been available from both the SA and the FFCLG. The databases included, therefore, 72 Jewish municipalities and 65 Arab municipalities that met these conditions. Figures for the age pyramid, the Gini index, and the average wage are taken from the figures of the National Insurance Institute for 1997.

On a summery May evening in 1999, it seemed for a moment that the city of Nazareth had shunted aside the bitter conflict between Muslims and Christians that had embittered the life of its residents for two years. At the epicenter of the quarrel was a disputed area adjacent to the Church of the Annunciation, where the municipality wanted to prepare a square for the anticipated thousands making the pilgrimage in the year 2000, and upon which the Islamic Movement demanded to build a mosque because of its proximity to the grave of Muslim holy man Shihab al-Din. For a long time, this conflict nearly paralyzed the municipality's activities, leaving deep fissures in the city's social tissue. But on that evening, thousands of people flowed into the streets to welcome the heroes of the Maccabi al-Aakha al-Naṣira soccer team who were returning from Ramat Gan after winning a last-second victory that secured its place in the second division. A long caravan of buses had brought about 3,000 supporters to the game. The returning fans had alighted from the buses at the southern entrance to the city, and began to march – singing, dancing, and drumming. The mayor of Nazareth, Ramez Jeraisy, usually a well-dressed, necktied gentleman, had himself traveled to Ramat Gan and had delivered a pep talk to the players at half-time; now he was carried on the shoulders of the singing fans.

On the evening of May 18, 2004, while Israeli troops stormed Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip in another attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising against the occupation, both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat found time for phone calls concerning seemingly trivial issues. Sharon phoned the manager of an Israeli soccer team to congratulate him on winning the Israeli State Cup, which made it eligible to represent Israel in the EUFA cup. Prime Minister Sharon emphasized his confidence that the team would represent Israel in an honorable manner in Europe. That same evening, President Arafat called the director of an Arab soccer team to congratulate him on his team's victory, telling him that the team brought pride to the Arab nation.

What makes the co-occurrence of these two events remarkable is the fact that Sharon and Arafat had called the same director, Mazen Ghnayem, and referred to the same team – Ittiḥad Abnaa Sakhnin – after the team became the first Arab team to win the Israeli State Cup. This dual congratulation, while apparently paradoxical, was possible due to the peculiar and multifaceted image of Sakhnin among both Jewish Israeli and Arab Palestinian publics.

Since 1976 Sakhnin has gradually emerged as a visible juncture of two separate significant processes with far-reaching implications on the collective identity of the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel and on local identity in Sakhnin.

As a child in a Kibbutz in the western Galilee, and a mediocre player on our very mediocre soccer team, I sometimes participated in regional soccer competitions against teams which represented Arab towns and villages. These competitions were among the rare opportunities for us, the Jewish youth from the Kibbutz, to meet Arab youth, who despite their numerical predominance in the Galilee, were almost invisible for us. My memories from these encounters include sentiments of alert and worry; I always felt that for our Arab rivals, it was much more than a game, as if they were trying by any means to prove something to us, or to themselves.

Holding a very superficial and selective knowledge about the social history of the landscape of my childhood, as well as about the political dynamics of Arab–Jewish relations in Israel, I did not yet have the tools to decipher the political complexity of these encounters. Years later, as a graduate student at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University, equipped with much more historical and political knowledge, as well as theoretical perspectives and methodological tools, I had the opportunity to investigate in a scholarly way Arab–Jewish soccer encounters and study the tension I felt as a teenager. Between 1998 and 2001, I conducted a doctoral study on Arab soccer in Israel, which constitutes the core of this book.