"“People in Israel
usually try to locate Beitar Jerusalem as some kind of the more extreme
fringe; this is a way to overcome the embarrassment,” said Moshe
Zimmermann, a historian at Hebrew University who specializes in sports.
“The fact is that the Israeli society on the whole is getting more
racist, or at least more ethnocentric, and this is an expression.”
Reaction to the purity banner, perhaps the most controversial in a
series of Beitar outbursts, was swift. One of the fans who made the sign
was arrested and banned from games for the season. Fifty more were
barred from Tuesday’s match, along with banners of all kinds, and the
team was fined about $13,500, amid concerns that the episode could
threaten Israel’s scheduled hosting of a European Under 21 soccer
tournament in June.
President Shimon Peres sent the soccer association a sharply worded
letter, and Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister who has been one of
Beitar’s biggest financial boosters, wrote a much-discussed opinion article in the newspaper Yediot Aharanot declaring he would no longer be seen in the stands.
“The competition has long since stopped being of a sportsmanship
nature,” Mr. Olmert wrote. “Either we remove this group of racists from
our field and cut it off from the team, or we are all like them.”
Beitar, which was founded in 1936 and is the only one of Israel’s 30
professional soccer teams never to have had a single Arab player, has a
long history of ugly fan behavior. Last March, hundreds stormed a mall near the stadium and beat up several Arab workers. A Nigerian Muslim who joined the team in 2004 quit after a year of harassment.
But such conflagrations are not limited to soccer. Last summer, a mob of Jewish teenagers pummeled a Palestinian youth nearly to death in what was widely condemned as an attempted lynching.
While last week’s election results were widely seen as slowing Israel’s
slide to the right, Yair Lapid, whose centrist party came in a strong
second, was criticized for saying afterward that he would not form a
coalition with “Zoabis,” a reference to an Arab-Israeli lawmaker.
Nor are the tensions only between Israel’s 1.5 million Arab citizens and
its six million Jews. A left-leaning lawmaker filed a complaint with
the elections commission this month asserting that a campaign advertisement
depicting a blond Russian woman getting a conversion certificate faxed
to her under the wedding canopy — as opposed to going through a
substantive religious process as now required — was “racist and presents
the immigrant population in a ridiculous light.” Last spring, Israeli
lawmakers used racial slurs during protests against the influx of
migrant workers from Africa, with one eventually apologizing for calling them “a cancer in our body.”
Adalah, a legal center for Arabs in Israel, counted 20 discriminatory laws passed by the current Parliament, including one restricting residency in certain communities. Nidal Othman, director of the Coalition Against Racism in Israel, said there had been a 20 percent to 30 percent increase in “racist incidents” in the past two years.
“When talking about Beitar, it’s actually showing a mirror for the Israeli society,” said Mr. Othman, a lawyer with the Mossawa Center,
which advocates for civil and human rights. “The political leaders and
the religious leaders of the community are feeding the society with
different racist incitements — against Arabs at all, against Muslims at
all and against different groups in Israel.”..
“Arabs are impure people,” said Shlomo Buchbut, a 17-year-old student. “We don’t like Muslims.”
Lindy Mizrahi, one of the few women in the young, testosterone-filled
stands, said she did not agree with the purity banner but nonetheless
wanted only Jews to wear her team’s trademark yellow and black. “Beitar
is a group of very Zionist Jews who believes that Jerusalem belongs to
the Jews,” she explained. “We are for peace — but not inside Beitar.”
