Israel Studies Review

Israel, where it has been played every weekend all over the country since before the establishment of the state. Football is not just a game that children and adults love to play and watch; it also involves individual, group, and collective identities, and local and national identification. Football reflects, and often accentuates, political and social conflicts that highlight ethno-national, class, political, and gender hierarchies and tensions in society. The game is largely dependent on the surrounding context(s) that determines its “relative autonomy,” which shapes its distinguished fandom culture(s) and practices (Rapoport 2016).

This article reviews the history of Israeli football from 1948 to the present and argues that Israeli football is ‘made in Israel’ according to the particular historical opportunities that determine the ‘relative autonomy’ of the game in a given period. The first part deals with a period (the 1950s) in which football was subject to politics, the dominant force in Israeli society at the time. During that period, Israeli football was organized by three sports federations, each affiliated with a different political camp. The second part deals with the period from 1990 to the present, in which football clubs were privatized and players became commodities. The contrast between these two periods highlights how the political-economic milieu set effective limits on the structure and practice of Israeli football.

This study traces, conceptually and historically, how the relationship between Israeli soccer, its fans, and the varied means of communications has evolved over the last century. We contend that these symbiotic relations, including their effects on soccer devotees, can be divided into four sub-epochs, each having a tremendous effect, not only on the development of soccer and media, but on other interrelated processes. Consequently, we argue that the development of soccer (association football), can be adequately understood only by presenting it in its historical context. The processes of state formation, population growth, urbanization, commercialization and, most germane for present purposes, the development of soccer-media-fan relations, are not isolated but rather interdependent, and therefore of significant importance when discussing soccer and media in the Israel context.

This article discusses the transformations in Israeli football over the last two decades, exploring the top-down and bottom-up motivations present in local football and characterizing foreign practices as more Western, or even more ‘civilized’, as Norbert Elias would describe it. Yet, the transformations of English and European football over the last three decades suggest that ‘Western’ is not so much a geographic term as it is a political, moral, and social status, one requiring English, European, and Israeli football to make dedicated political and cultural investments in numerous arenas.

This article advocates autoethnography as a critical feminist methodology for using personal testimony to investigate women's experience and performance of fandom The article's centerpiece is an analysis of the personal testimonies of three women—researcher-fans of different ages—of a fan-owned club Hapoel Katamon Jerusalem. In addition to revealing women's gendered-based experiences and the different ways in which women acquire and perform fandom, their personal stories prove valuable for exposing the gendered regime of the football field. Moreover, they reveal how women who are not fluent in the hegemonic language of fandom make their way in the fandom field as they seek their own voice and position in it. The analysis suggests that women's participation can disrupt the hegemonic masculinity of fandom and challenge its established boundaries, thereby problematizing accepted definitions of the authentic fan.

This article explores the opposition expressed by fans of the Beitar Jerusalem football club to the presence of Arab players on their team. I suggest that instead of suspecting that fans’ behavior originates in false consciousness, we suspend suspicion and reconstruct the meanings they bring to their actions. Narrative analysis of fan interviews reveals the communitarian logic underlying their points of view. By appropriating sacred spheres in Judaism that demarcate the boundaries of the Jewish community, and identifying them with Beitar as opposed to signifying Arab players as defiling Beitar, fans delineate boundaries between Jews and Arabs. Through the sanctification of Beitar, the fans define Jewish collective boundaries and thereby preserve their worldview and identity while maintaining a hierarchy that grants Jews advantages in Israel.

This article reexamines my argument published in 2007 regarding the apolitical character of Arab soccer fans in Israel. Until recently, explicit political protest and expressions of Palestinian national identity have remained outside the stadium. For most Arab fans, soccer was an opportunity to display common ground with Jewish citizens. Displaying Palestinian nationalism was considered to be endangering the potential for rapprochement. However, over the past decade the barriers that blocked political protest from entering the stadium have been ruptured. Several interrelated factors are suggested as explanations for this shift: multiple cycles of escalated violence in the region, a wave of anti-Arab legislation, the globalization of fan culture, the model of a politicized soccer fan provided during the Arab Spring, and the emergence of social media.

Neil Caplan and Yaakov Sharett, eds., My Struggle for Peace: The Diary of Moshe Sharett, 1953–1956 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 3 vols. 1,950 pp. Hardback, $125.00.

Adia Mendelson-Maoz, Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2018), 252 pp. Paperback, $30.00. Kindle, $26.00.

Alejandro Paz, Latinos in Israel: Language and Unexpected Citizenship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 327 pp. Hardback, $75.00. Paperback, $32.00. Kindle, $20.00.

Neta Oren, Israel's National Identity: The Changing Ethos of Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2019), 291 pp. Hardback, $65.00.