Israel United: Can football heal a divided nation?

For the 20 per cent of the Israeli population that is Arab, divided loyalties are a way of life. But what happens when players from both sides of the divide turn out for the national football team, as they will tomorrow in the big match against England? Donald Macintyre reports

Published: 23 March 2007

Even after the floodlights came on during the Israel football squad's practice session at the Ramat Gan Stadium on Wednesday evening, it was all but impossible to pick out Walid Badir and Salim Toamah from the other players. Whether it was Toamah on the left wing making a deft little break with West Ham's Yossi Benayoun (an undoubted star of the Israeli team), or Badir being helped to his feet, again by a friendly Benayoun, after a pause in the training, or in some joshing, mock shirt-pulling with a laughing Shavit Elimelech, his goalkeeper team-mate at Hapoel Tel Aviv, nothing told you that the pair were the only Arabs in the squad. No darker than the Mizrahi Jewish players on the field, and - of course - speaking perfect Hebrew, they were indistinguishable from their fellow hopefuls for tomorrow's Euro 2008 qualifying match here against England.

It's likely that Badir, a Muslim who spent a season playing for Wimbledon seven years ago and who, at 33, is a veteran international, and Toamah, 27, a Christian from Lod who is currently enjoying an excellent season at Hapoel Tel Aviv, will both be in tomorrow's starting line-up. And there will be few Israel fans who will not be hoping that Badir produces some of the magic that two years ago kept alive - for five delirious months - Israel's World Cup qualifying hopes when, at the point that all seemed lost, he headed home an 83rd-minute equaliser against France.

Neither Toamah nor Badir, as is entirely their right, want to talk about what it is like to be the only players selected for the national side this season from the small minority of Israeli Arabs playing top-flight football. Which is a pity because the role of Israeli Arabs in football goes to the heart of many of the issues - including those of national identity - that affect almost all of the 1.4 million Arab citizens of the Jewish state. The case of Badir, whose deep pride in playing for the national team is not for a second in doubt, has particular resonance. For he comes from Kfar Qassem, a border Arab village still scarred by the memory of an incident in 1956 in which 48 residents were killed by Israeli border police after unknowingly breaking a curfew - and for which several police officers were subsequently tried and convicted. But, asked last week whether they would talk about being Arabs in Israeli football, a spokesman for Hapoel Tel Aviv said simply: "They don't want to answer those kind of questions."

To discuss such issues, therefore, you have to turn to the most famous Arab in Israeli football - indeed probably the most famous Israeli Arab in any walk of life - a man whose contribution to that World Cup qualifying effort two years ago was, if anything, even more momentous than Badir's. It was Abbas Suan who electrified an entire nation when, with Israel a goal down and staring elimination in the face, he powered in a 22-yard strike in the 90th minute of the home game against Ireland. With one in three of all Israelis watching the game on television, his team-mates - all but one of whom were Jewish - enveloped him in an ecstatic embrace. In the Arab town of Sakhnin in the Galilee, where Suan was born and raised and still lives (and which had a year earlier joyously celebrated its team's first ever victory in Israel's equivalent of the FA Cup under Suan's captaincy), residents poured into the streets amid a wild honking of car horns and used every firework they could find to mark their local hero's triumph.

Suan won't be playing tomorrow, his international career partly interrupted by a knee injury he suffered last May, though he wishes fervently that he was. Instead, he'll be at Ramat Gan as a spectator. But he is back on form for his new team, Maccabi Haifa, winners of the Israeli championship for the last three years, and was a key figure in a 4-0 victory over Haifa's arch rivals Hapoel Tel Aviv last Sunday night. Not surprisingly, back at home in Sakhnin the following day with his wife Safaa and their young family, Suan was in a happy mood, having helped to compensate the Haifa fans - about 35 per cent of whom are Arabs - for their disappointment at the team's recent 4-0 defeat to Espanyol in the Uefa Cup.

But then Suan, 31, is very comfortable in his skin, and at ease whether speaking unashamedly about how, as a Muslim, he still shares the dream of " every footballer in Israel" to play in the national team, or conversely about the discrimination of which Israel's Arab citizens repeatedly complain. He will be sitting in the stands tomorrow with John Barnes, the former England international and an old friend. Barnes has helped, with assistance from Suan and an Israeli NGO, the New Israel Fund to import the British "Kick It Out" anti-racism campaign to the even tougher environment of Israel's football grounds, where ethnic hatreds have been further contaminated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Suan probably has more experience of the latter than any other footballer, not least at the hands of the supporters of Beitar Jerusalem, which has long been linked to the political right and whose fans have the reputation of being the most racist in Israel. Playing Beitar at Jerusalem's Teddy Kollek Stadium, Suan has been confronted with banners saying "Death to Arabs" and "Abbas Suan: you don't represent us." Even during Israel's ultimately unsuccessful World Cup campaign in 2005, Beitar fans chanted during one of their games with Sakhnin: "No Arabs, no terrorism" - though the Sakhnin fans accurately turned this round to: "No Arabs, no World Cup."

This month's game between Maccabi Haifa and Beitar Jerusalem was a case in point. Thousands of fans joined in a newer and ugly chant: "Abbas Suan has cancer." Suan is at pains - for example when he is on his frequent visits to Arab schools - to stress that that "this phenomenon of racism" is confined to only some Jewish fans. He says that supporters of Hapoel Tel Aviv are among the most generous and friendly to Arab players. But he adds: " I feel it at Teddy, I feel it at Bloomfield [the stadium of Maccabi Tel Aviv, where fans are seen as the second most racist after Beitar Jerusalem's]. I feel it at [Bnei] Yehuda. All my life, from when I started to play football, I have dreamed about peace all over the Middle East. So when I read about what the New Israel Fund was doing, I wanted to [help]. I thought they were dealing with it in a good way. It's not something you can do in or two days. It's a process."

You can see why he supports the scheme. The profile of racism has been significantly raised by the NIF, which now deploys observers throughout football crowds and publishes reports every week naming and shaming the worst groups of supporters.

Limor Melamed, 33, is a lifelong Beitar fan who started going to games with her father as a child and - typically of her fellow fans - also happens to be a supporter of the right wing Likud party. Yet she is an unsung heroine of the campaign against racism. Melamed, a payroll officer, takes her own boys, aged 10 and 12, to games, and texts regular reports to the NIF on racist chanting. At this month's heavily policed Haifa-Jerusalem game she reported such items as: "This is the place of the Jews. I hate you Salim Toamah [who wasn't even playing]. I hate all Arabs," and "I hope your villages will burn." Says Melamed: "When I was 18, Beitar took the championship and that year there was a lot of shouting of 'Death to the Arabs' and so on. And I thought, you don't have to be on the left to be against that. You don't even have to particularly like Arabs to think it is wrong. Yet no one in the police, in the club management or in the media was doing or saying anything about it."

Melamed says she doesn't want her two sons - one of whom plays in the Beitar boys' team - to grow up thinking that such chants are acceptable. "I said to them: 'Suppose you were watching Yossi Benayoun playing in a [Premiership] game on television, and you saw the crowd singing "Death to the Jews".'"

While the problem is still menacing and widespread, Melamed believes the NIF campaign is one reason why the number of incidents it classifies as racist dropped by 25 per cent last season - the campaign having helped to secure a law carrying up to two-year prison sentences for racist behaviour, and there have been some arrests. At the very least, she says: "No one used to speak about this. Now everyone is talking about it." But she acknowledges that the Haifa-Jerusalem game was the worst of the season, partly because Abbas Suan is a particular target. Melamed says of the racist fans: "First they hate Maccabi Haifa because it has taken the championship. And second, they hate Abbas Suan because he speaks out. He's the only one [currently playing] who does."

So has Suan ever been tempted to walk off the pitch, as Samuel Eto'o famously threatened to do in response to racist chanting during a Barcelona-Zaragoza game last season? "I've though about it, but I didn't want to leave the players on the field and people would probably say I was just doing it because Eto'o did," he says. He doesn't rule out the possibility of a protest walk-off by the whole team, but adds: " This is against the rules. If you do it you must have the support of the team, your coach and the owner."

Two years ago, Arkady Gaydamak, the quixotic Russian oligarch who owns Beitar Jerusalem, counter-intuitively tried to bring Suan to the club. Suan says: "I told [Gaydamak] I would only put on the Beitar shirt in one situation -if it would help to bring a solution between Arabs and Jews and change the mentality. It wasn't about the money." But Gaydamak then backed down in reponse to vociferous protests from Beitar fans. While Limor Melamed insists that sooner or later Gaydamak will succeed in recruiting a top Arab player, one fan, Roy Rachamen, told the Ynet news service at the time: "I don't care if I have to sit 40 years in jail. There is no way Gaydamak will bring Arab players to Beitar." True to his professed belief that there is good and bad in everybody - including Beitar fans - and that they will respond to active leadership against racism as well to rabble rousers, Suan adds: "I just hope that the good people in Beitar will do the maximum to kick out these people. But it's very hard."

Suan, who speaks fluent English and flawless Hebrew as well his native Arabic, and has nearly completed a B Ed in sports education, knows all too well that there is a much wider context to racism in football. He believes that some of the factors that stopped Gaydamak in his tracks also explain why "you can't find political people" - who even include Beitar's No 1 fan, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - "to speak out against this", adding: "Everyone is afraid of [the racists]." But he sees an especial link between the searing anti-Arab pronouncements of Moldova-born Avigdor Lieberman, a Deputy Prime Minister in Olmert's coalition government, and racism in the football stands.

Lieberman, among other things, has proposed that the boundaries of Israel should be redrawn to transfer the Israeli Arab population in the " triangle" round the Arab town of Umm El-Fahm into Palestinian territory and deprive them of Israeli citizenship. "I was here before him. He came here in 1978 when I was two years old and yet he talks about doing all these things to the Arabs. If people in the government talk like this, what can you say about the fans?"

***

The Lieberman agenda - which includes calls for Israeli Arabs to swear loyalty oaths to the Jewish state and its symbols - raises, in a particularly threatening way, questions of identity that the case of Suan, who is confident of where he stands, exemplifies. Just as the Arab residents of Umm El-Fahm - many of whom would prefer to be designated Palestinians living in Israel - have no wish to lose their Israeli citizenship, so too Suan, who has a cousin in the West Bank city of Jenin - has no wish to play international football for any other country than Israel. "People ask me: 'Would I prefer to play for a Palestinian team?'" he says. "I want there to be two states, a Palestinian one and an Israeli one, living in peace. I want my Palestinian brothers to change their lives for the better, and to have a great national team. But I am here as an Israeli. I want to play for Israel."

This inevitably raises the oft-asked question of whether Suan is prepared to sing along to the words of "Hatikvah" (the Israeli national anthem) when it is played - as it will be tomorrow at Ramat Gan. "No," he says. "I stand and I respect it. I respect everyone who sings it. But I don't sing 'Hatikvah'. The words do not belong to the Arabs."

He is not alone. Raleb Majadele, a moderate Labour politician who has just become the first Israeli Arab to become a Cabinet minister, was criticised when, in a recent radio interview, he said that he, too, stands respectfully when the anthem is played but does not sing the words - which describe how a "Jew's soul yearns and forward to the edges of the East/ his eye looks to the edge of Zion... to be a free people in our own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem." Mr Majadele asked: "Where is it written that a person appointed to be a Cabinet minister in Israel must stop being an Arab and turn into a member of a different religion...?

The exchange prompted a reflective blog this week by the (Jewish) Haaretz website editor Bradley Burston, who confessed his deep love of " Hatikvah " but went on to challenge a taboo by declaring: "It's time the words were changed. It's time it was replaced by an anthem that all Israelis can sing with a good conscience, non Jews as well as Jews." Defending Majadele, who recognises - and indeed keeps in his office - the Israeli flag, alongside Koranic verses, Burston concluded his piece by suggesting that: "Maybe it's time to rethink the idea of democracy and to remember that ill-treatment of Jews as minorities abroad was the reason this country came into being in the first place."

***

As Abbas Suan knows, charges of discrimination against Arabs in Israel go much further than mere questions of national identity. At the beginning of the Intifada in 2000, police shot dead 13 Arab demonstrators in Israel, prompting a wave of soul-searching about the treatment of Arab Israelis and triggering a wide-ranging investigation by a commission of inquiry. Suan remembers the shooting with special clarity because a close friend of his was among the dead. "I think democracy was destroyed in that case," he says. The Or Commission concluded that civil unrest stemmed from deep-rooted causes, and suggested a series of systematic programmes to eliminate discrimination against Israel's Arab citizens.

Yet in a comprehensive report for 2003-4, Sikkuy, a joint Jewish-Arab organisation arguing for greater equality, said that a year after publication of the Or report, the Government had "yet to take any practical or meaningful steps to redress the histrtic injustice wrought on Arab citizens", and went on to detail a series of indices on health, education, employment and poverty in which Arab citizens of Israel fared worse than Jews.

No one who travelled in northern Israel during last summer's Lebanon war can have failed to notice that Arab population centres, whether in cities such as Haifa or in the villages of the Galilee, suffered around a third of the fatalities caused by Katyusha rockets, and had woefully few, if any, public shelters or sirens - things considered normal in Jewish areas. Sikkuy has already had some success in campaigning for this to be improved, but its own figures suggest that the relative lack of protection from the rockets may be a symptom of something more fundamental. While welcoming it as a positive contribution to dialogue on achieving better Arab-Jewish co-existence, Sikkuy does not agree with much of a recent radical report, produced under the auspices of the Committee of Arab Mayors in Israel, that calls on the country to stop defining itself as a Jewish state and become a " consensual democracy for Arabs and Jews". But the report highlighted many examples of the problems that gave rise to such a call: infant mortality at 8.4 deaths per thousand among Arabs, compared with 3.5 per cent among Jews (with "social and economic factors" accounting for the " larger share" of the gap); non-Jewish students forming only 10 per cent of the population studying for a bachelor's degree; one clinic per 11,800 residents in Arab towns, compared with one per 8,600 in Jewish ones; unemployment (in 2002) at 14.1 per cent among Arab men, compared with 9.1 per cent among their Jewish counterparts; 56 per cent of Arab households in the lower one-fifth of the salary scale, compared with 26 per cent of Jewish ones. And so on.

This week, too, the Knesset voted to extend until 2008 its "Citizenship Law", which stops Arabs living in Israel being joined by Palestinian husbands aged between 18 and 35, or wives aged between 18 and 25, if they are from the West Bank or Gaza. The stipulation has been justified on security grounds, with Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency, claiming that spouses are recruited in the occupied territories by militants. Yet the agency also acknowledged last year that only about 25 of around 200,000 Palestinians living in Israel had been involved in suicide or other attacks in recent years. Some Kadima politicians have been open about saying that the law - which is strongly contested by several human rights groups - is motivated by a desire to maintain the Jewish demographic majority inside Israel. Ophir Pines-Paz, a former Labour minister, was among those who voted against the extension this week on the grounds that it was " discriminatory and unconstitutional".

Back in Sakhnin, Abbas Suan points to the lack of facilities and decent roads in many Arab towns and villages, saying that in his home town, as many as 20 per cent of households are not directly connected to mains sewage - something unthinkable in a Jewish town. "There are no parks for me to take the children to play in, and only this year are we getting a playing field," he says.

Suan, though, has no desire to be a politician when his playing days are over. Instead, he sees a future in coaching, while continuing, no doubt, to use his status as a role model to visit schools and preach messages ranging from not smoking to - as he puts it - "studies first and football afterwards", and the virtues of co-existence between Arabs and Jews. And he intends to remain involved with the NIF.

For all his outspokenness, there is something irrepressibly positive about Suan. Whatever problems he has with fans, he has almost never had a problem with a Jewish player. It happened, he says, just once, with a player he prefers not to name from Bnei Yehuda. "I went straight to the dressing room at half time to find him. Their coach, who is a great guy, said: 'Leave it to me, I'll take care of it.' And the player came to me and apologised." As anywhere else: "Someone may call you a son of a bitch on the field, but I have never had problems with people talking about my religion or me being an Arab." Which is part of the reason behind his passionate belief in the power of sport to encourage mutual respect. And why, as a proud Muslim who is unhesitating in expressing his deeply-held belief in the justice of the Palestinian - and Israeli Arab - cause, he will be cheering Israel on from the stands tomorrow. "Sport is one of the best ways, maybe the best way, to bring people together," he says.

Arab Israelis: the facts

* In 2006, the number of Arabs in Israel was calculated at around 1.4 million people, or 19.8 per cent of the population.

* Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, 156,000 Arabs remained within the state of Israel. Much of Israel's present-day Arab population is descended from these people, and a number have been able to gain Israeli citizenship because of family ties.

* Following the Six-Day War in 1967 and the annexation of Eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, Arabs living in these areas were offered Israeli citizenship, but many refused. Despite this, they are classed as Israeli citizens in most demographic analyses.

* 80 per cent of the Arab population of Israel is Muslim (of which a substantial number are of Bedouin descent), with 9 per cent Christian and 9 per cent Druze. The city of Nazareth has the largest Christian Arab population in the country.

* With a birth rate of 4.0, population forecasters predict that Muslim Arabs will make up 25 per cent of Israel's population within the next 15 years.

* As many as a quarter of Israel's Arab citizens are regarded as an " internally displaced persons".

* Arabs make up 30 per cent of Jerusalem's population, and are also the largest ethnic group in Israel's Northern District, with big population centres in Umm El-Fahm (43,000) and Nazareth (65,000).

* In theory, Arab citizens of Israel enjoy the same civil rights under law as other citizens, although reports of discrimination of varying degrees are relatively commonplace.

* Arab citizens (with the exception of Druze and Circassians) are exempt from military service, something that is compulsory for Jewish citizens.

* Arabic is one of Israel's official languages.

* There are currently 12 Israeli Arabs sitting as members of the 120-seat Knesset [the legislative branch of the Israeli government]. There has been at least one Arab in every Knesset to date.

* The first Israeli Arab to be appointed an overseas ambassador was Ali Yahya, who in 1995 became Israeli ambassador to Finland.

* In 1999, Knesset member Azmi Bishara became the first Israeli Arab to run for the post of Prime Minister.

* Famous Israeli Arabs include Emile Habibi, who served in the Knesset between 1953 and 1972 before earning international acclaim as a writer. His work has been recognised by both Israeli and Palestinian critics.

* In 1999 Rana Raslan became the first Arab Miss Israel. A non-practising Muslim, she said of her identity: "I am totally Israeli, and do not think about whether I am an Arab or a Jew."

Magnus Slingsby