There’s No Place Like Home

After a long evening of tired, uninspired soccer there was nothing, really, to say. So they played it again. Thirty years after Freddie Mercury wrote it, and 22 years after he said, “I can’t believe that somebody hasn’t written a new song to overtake it“, the national stadium of Ramat Gan was re-filled with the notes of Queen’s ubiquitous sports anthem, We Are the Champions. Maccabi Haifa were the champions, the new holders of the Toto Cup by virtue of their 2-0 triumph over Bnei Sakhnin, but the second rendition of the song served only to underscore the irrelevance of their title, as if the public address announcer was unsure whether it had been heard the first time. His doubt was rooted in a not unreasonable question: if a team wins the Toto Cup in a stadium empty but for its own fans, does it make a noise? Well, if you listened carefully, you could hear the rustling of a different kind of notes, notes of money exchanging hands, hands thumbing through wads of bills being counted. In the Toto Cup, prize money is all that counts.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, too, is an economic allegory masquerading as a naïve children’s fairytale. Frank Baum, the author, professed to have written it “solely to please children of today”, yet it is fraught with political and social metaphors. Oz, for instance, allegedly stands for ounce, alluding to the battle over bimetallism in late 19^th century America. Similarly, in early 21^st century Israel, dueling national identities charge innocuous soccer games with significance that extends beyond the pale of sports.

“What are you going to do? We live in a Jewish state”, grumbled Sakhnin defender Bassam Ganaim, peeved at having to play the final on the first day of Eid el-Adha, one of two major Muslim holidays. Israel doesn’t suffer from a European winter, but the Israeli Football Association is quite happy to enjoy the European winter break, showing great consideration towards foreign players who want to be home for Christmas – and utter disregard for the Muslim calendar. Four hundred years after the English took to the streets to play soccer during Christmas as an act of rebellion against Puritan rulers, Sakhnin unhappily found itself forced to play on its own holiday, a symbol of ignorant intolerance and insensitivity. Conveniently, though, Ganaim neglected to mention that Sakhnin protested the date of the game only a week ago, months after it was announced. But then, I wouldn’t want to belabor the point I made last week: the people of Sakhnin are loathe to plan ahead.

Last week’s post, in which I bemoaned the difficulty of arranging rides to games in advance, turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so, as promise after promise to help me find a way to the final dissipated into thin air, I found myself at the bus stop, having given up on the famous generosity of the locals, determined to take matters into my own hands. But I would not be sitting in the driver’s seat on this day, and as it turned out – no one else would, either. After an hour-long wait, I was stunned to learn that the local bus company doesn’t work on Muslim holidays.

It was a long, bad day to begin with – although I found it hard to pinpoint when exactly it began. The border separating the day of the final from the one preceding it grew exceedingly blurry as I lay tossing and turning on my cot, in the shadow of the gleaming green mosque from which an inexorable midnight muezzin emanated. The holiday version of the muezzin proved particularly effective, getting Muslims out of bed but also moving this Jew to pray – for its merciful end.

This may be a Jewish state, as Ganaim acknowledged, but I gradually began to realize that Sakhnin is an Arab island unto itself, one on which I was presently marooned. I was on the verge of abandoning hope, when Zbeidi’s car suddenly materialized at my door, having provided no prior warning. I jumped in, instinctively buckling my seat belt, excited to finally be on the way. But Zbeidi wouldn’t start the car, not until I unbuckled the belt. The local rules of disengagement: there’s no need for a belt so long as you’re in the village. They deigned to allow me to finally fasten my belt, and surprised me by securing theirs, only when Sakhnin began to fade into the background, its invisible protective bubble no longer omnipotent.

When venturing out of the cozy confines of Doha Stadium, Bnei Sakhnin seems to lose its aura of invincibility, too. In league games Sakhnin has enjoyed a success rate of 67% at home, and only 52% on the road, where they have scored less than half the goals they’ve recorded at home. All their losses have come far from home, where they’ve found the crowd intimidating, the referees unfavorable and themselves altogether out of their comfort zone. Sakhnin, it seems, would do well to heed the moral of The Wizard of Oz, that they have what it takes, and need only to believe in themselves. As the Wizard of Westwood, John Wooden, advised: “The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.”

It’s just that occasionally one needs to read them upside down. As the first half of a topsy-turvy soccer season came to an end, the roles were fittingly reversed. This time, it was the Toto Cup pointing out, “We’re not in Sakhnin any more”.  

The Eids of December

At all times, even in the stillness of the Sakhnin night, there is an omnipresent scent of slowly smoldering, incessantly burning incense – Sakhnin is an Abu Abdo hookah. What’s on fire? In Bnei Sakhnin’s case, it’s the team’s passion to succeed, coach Elisha Levi explains. Otherwise, it’s usually meat.

 

A girl was fanning the flames of her barbecue with a hairdryer some two months ago, as dusk was settling on a city seemingly abandoned. The streets, usually bustling at quarter to six, were hauntingly empty. Minarets spread a glimmering neon light and emitted a booming muezzin, the perfect soundtrack to a horror film. For the multitudes of slaughtered animals presently being feasted upon, it probably was just that. Especially if the way in which the men of Sakhnin tear into a shared chicken laid in front of them is any indication of the way the butcher treats it.

 

Encroaching darkness was pushing the setting sun out of sight, a curtain bringing another day of the month-long Ramadan to a close. Rarely is an entire city simultaneously engaged in the same act, and in that regard only the Iftar, the breaking of the fast – and breakfast, too – supersedes game day here. But while a soccer game lasts 90 minutes, their breakfast is as short as their fast is long, no more than eight minutes, to be precise. At 5:53, when I arrived, Hussein and his uncle Gazal’s families were already finishing up. Which left me with the overwhelming task of finishing off what they hadn’t. So there I sat, stuffing myself with soup, meat and pita bread. Rice, too, of course. As Hussein’s brother said a few days later, en route to an Iftar at which food corporation Osem was announced as a sponsor of Sakhnin, “You make rice once a week, we eat it every day – they should be sponsoring us!”

 

I did as they bid me, resenting the unfairness of the onus placed on me. They were demanding more of me than they were of themselves, for it wasn’t because they ate so quickly that they finished so fast, I learned later on, just that they didn’t eat that much.

 

It’s on Eid el-Fitr, the holiday which signifies the end of the Ramadan, that they truly gorge themselves, and since I hadn’t quite recovered yet, I was slightly relieved to unfortunately miss it. But if Eid el-Fitr is only the “lesser Eid”, Eid el-Adha, which began today and is known as the “greater Eid”, sounds truly daunting. When I recently asked Hussein if they do anything special in celebration of the holiday, he answered, “No, we just eat”. (His brother complains of having spent all day in the mall buying his children new clothes).

 

Presumably, they have so few holidays because they literally can’t stomach any more than two. To me, though, it seems tied to their utter lack of appreciation for the concept of rest. There is no set day of rest for the Arabs of Sakhnin, only a muddled arrangement: schools are closed on Fridays and Sundays, creating a cleft weekend shared by the municipality, whilst the rest of the city is on an opposite schedule. And yet, stores are open at all times. Wissam the grocer, for instance, arrives at his store towards noon and doesn’t leave until late at night. He claims that his children fill his place on Friday, but he can frequently be found there by early afternoon, idly smoking his life away. Perhaps being open all the time is the price they pay for stoutly refusing to plan ahead – catching a ride to away games is always a last minute affair, even when I try to arrange it days in advance.

 

Understandably, then, Elisha Levy has disavowed the existence of fatigue – “There is no such thing as fatigue”, he recently exclaimed – although he and others have mentioned it quite often lately in explanation of the team’s performance. Rightly so: they’ve played 6 times over the last 18 days, and because they sorely lack depth, the top 11 players have borne the brunt of the punishment. Like Muslims breathlessly awaiting Eid el-Fitr, Sakhnin’s first team players, already out of breath, are eagerly looking forward to the upcoming winter break. After tying Maccabi Haifa 1-1 at home last weekend, only one game separates them from their much-needed rest – a rematch with Haifa, only this time the stakes are much higher.

 

Muslims honor Eid el-Adha by making pilgrimage to the Black Stone of Mecca, while Sakhninians will be traveling on Wednesday en masse to the awful national stadium in Ramat Gan, which is not as far from the Saudi city as it is from being a Mecca. But it may find itself nominated for the list of holy Muslim cities if Sakhnin beats Haifa there in Wednesday’s Toto Cup final, doubling their celebration and their collection of trophies. The much-maligned Toto Cup is the third most important competition in Israeli soccer, far behind the league championship and the State Cup, which Sakhnin won in 2004 in Ramat Gan. Bestowing nothing in the way of honor or prestige, the Toto Cup’s sole reward is money. No one bothers to put up much of a fight for it, and the unsuspecting victor usually finds himself blissfully surprised to come into such a tidy sum of money, like a Monopoly player landing on Free Parking. Of which there should, consequently, be quite a lot on Wednesday.

 

It seems fitting, then, that Sakhnin laps up the leftovers of Jewish teams so shamelessly. They play in the same league, but reside in different worlds. Never has a team been so determined to win the Toto Cup, willing to go all out from the get-go. Eid el-Adha commemorates the Binding of Ishmael, the Muslim version of the biblical Binding of Isaac, and Sakhnin has had to make a costly sacrifice of its own to get to the finals, offering up their players’ rest, playing them twice a week, wearing them thin. Like the Binding of Ishmael, they have lent their own alternate interpretation to the Toto Cup, seeing it as an opportunity to make easy cash, albeit cash that they desperately need in order to bolster their depth. The Toto Cup has proved valuable in other ways, too. While their opponents couldn’t care less, the early-season wins they accumulated at their expense helped them gain confidence, crucial for any newly-promoted in the early going. Impressively, with a win they would join Haifa and Hapoel Tel Aviv as the only teams to win at least two Israeli soccer titles over the past five years.

 

The pungent aroma of burnt meat has never been fiercer than it is this Tuesday night, as Sakhnin kicks off the “greater Eid”. Come Wednesday, though, the religious celebration may for once be trumped by soccer, if Sakhnin successfully adds a “little brother”, so named by team chairman Mazen Ganaim, to the trophy won three and a half years ago, its “big brother”.

For Whom the Cuckoo Clock Tolls

“When you vanquish the cuckoo clock, I’ll be first in line to witness your glory”

- Mikhail Nuaima, The Cuckoo Clock, Once Upon a Time

Mundir, the team spokesperson, got all dressed up for the occasion, wearing a suit and tie in honor of the Channel 10 news crew which descended upon Sakhnin last week. I could barely be bothered to wear jeans, let alone shave. Perhaps I should have known better. A few months ago my relatives advised me that my beard gives off the impression that I’m homeless, and my interviewer intimated as much when he surmised that what I pay for rent here would be procure me no more than a bathroom stall in Tel Aviv. So it should have come as no surprise that their camera spent less time trained on me than it did honing in on the delicate features of the bespectacled Mikhail Nuaima, the great Lebanese writer whose clean-shaven face adorns the cover of Once Upon a Time, the novel of his which they were so delighted to find on my desk. I would have been just as glad to let his masterfully eloquent prose do the talking for me.

The camera man was more impressed with a baseball book he saw lying around, and he tried to strike up a conversation as they left. He struck out: it took me a few seconds to realize that the person whom he was referring to as Stanley Koppett – you know, the guy who sat out the first game of the 1965 World Series on account of Yom Kippur – was Sandy Koufax, the legendary Dodgers pitcher. He then managed to mangle the name of the baseball manager also known as Casey Stengel, while rambling on about Tug McGraw, his reliever on the Amazin’ Mets.

They had come here to unlock the secret behind the story of another amazing team, Bnei Sakhnin, which last weekend beat up Maccabi Tel Aviv 3-2 to wrap up the first third of league play. Sakhnin sits in third place, and the rest of standings don’t make any more sense, as if heeding Stengel’s famous instructions, “All right everyone, line up alphabetically according to your height”.

Channel 10 was not alone among Israeli sports media outlets enamored of Sakhnin’s Cinderella season. They spent last week lavishing praise on the team and heaping individual awards on Elisha Levy, the coach, and Maor Buzaglo, the team star, among others. The hype was not, as it always is, overdone, but rather overdue and even understated.

It’s easy to forget that Sakhnin was only recently promoted to the Premier League, but that’s only because it’s hard to remember the last time a newcomer adjusted to it so seamlessly. Over the past 10 years no newly-promoted team has finished the first round of league play higher than sixth. The last team in recent memory to do so well in its first season back in the Premier League is Beitar Jerusalem circa 1992, when it won the championship just a year after gaining promotion from the second division.

Then as now, the ridiculously rich Beitar is well on its way to another championship. But if they have in the process turned league play into a laugher, Sakhnin has been making a mockery of the financial canyon that separates them. Sakhnin is getting far more bang for its shekel, paying all of 150,000 NIS, on average, for each of the 19 points they’ve earned, while Beitar’s 25 points have cost them over a million and a half NIS each. And so, as the Bank of Israel introduces a new two-shekel coin, everyone has been weighing in with their two cents – which, incidentally, Sakhnin could use – on how it is that Sakhnin is defying history and economy.

The media is inclined to ascribe Sakhnin’s success to their identity as a team representing a city far from the center of the country and the mainstream of society. Elisha Levy explained that “Sakhnin is topographically distant from the center of the country, which creates a hunger and a desire to prove oneself”, in a quote eminently worthy of Stengel. Buzaglo, possibly influenced by his coach’s imagery, confirmed that the practice field at Yarka has an isolated feel to it reminiscent of the Alps. Other players, among them Abas Suan, Sakhnin’s former captain, spoke of the familial bonds shared by the players. “Sakhnin has nothing but soccer”, he said, echoing Stengel’s “I don’t play cards, I don’t play golf, and I don’t go to the picture show. All that’s left is baseball.” Ringed by mountainous ranges, oblivious of any sport save for soccer, lacking anything in the way of cinemas or bars, soccer, quite literally, is all there is for Sakhnin.

Such explanations would hardly satisfy Koufax. “You can talk all you want about intangibles, I just don’t know what that means”, he once said. Obviously, Sakhnin has enjoyed a lot of luck, suffered no injuries, and also benefited from the ineptitude of other teams, particularly the perennial contenders of Tel Aviv and Haifa who have floundered and left a gaping vacuum at the top of the standings. “Nature”, Spinoza wrote, “abhors a vacuum”. And so it seems that Sakhnin’s most unnatural success defies explanation, too, or at the very least begs for a supernatural one, something along the lines of Tug McGraw’s famed rallying cry, “Ya gotta believe”, which the Mets have since trademarked.

Sakhnin’s fans did believe, though, long before anyone else, long before they had reason to. Everyone I spoke to last summer, journalists and members of Sakhnin’s management included, was blithely optimistic regarding Sakhnin’s prospects, and it didn’t bother them a bit that the team was mired in a financial and political mess that jeopardized Sakhnin’s chances of starting the season. Nor did it bother them that they were unable to justify their unfounded confidence. They were bothered only by the by the fact that I was bothered by their blind faith, as if unacquainted with the question why. I gave up around the time that Hassan, who is planning on writing his master’s degree on the lack of critical thinking in Arab education, shrugged, ironically, when I asked him what made him so certain of their success.

But it doesn’t matter. Barring a cataclysmic collapse, Sakhnin’s spot in the Premier League is safe for at least another season. It seems too good to be true for Sakhnin, which was bracing for a battle against relegation and now seems reluctant to adjust its goals. Stengel faced quite the opposite problem with his Amazin’ Mets: “If we’re going to win the pennant, we’ve got to start thinking we’re not as good as we think we are“. But by the time they were rechristened the Miracle Mets and had won the 1969 pennant, Stengel was four years into retirement. The Mets proceeded to take advantage of their World Series stage to send a more powerful social message halfway across the world, as Tom Seaver appeared in a commercial proclaiming, “If the Mets can win the World Series, America can get out of Vietnam”. If Sakhnin can achieve equality on the soccer pitch, perhaps…

But Sakhnin may not have a miracle in them. With the rest of the league on alert as the second round of league play commences, the clock may very well be approaching midnight for this Cinderella. In Once Upon a Time, Nuaima issues a challenge, “I have yet to hear of he who has vanquished the cuckoo clock”.

Yet he starts the book stating, “the most precious present is that which knows not who gave it.” And as long as this gift keeps on giving, Sakhnin couldn’t care less.

A Just Like That Story

The Kolokolo Bird said, with a mournful cry,

“Go to the banks of the great grey-green,

greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees,

and find out.”

 - Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories: The Elephant’s Child

Just like that, Shlomo warned me ominously, an Intifada – an uprising – could erupt. Which is why he is making phone calls to neighboring Bedouins to rally them in favor of Tali Omer, who is running in the upcoming elections for the regional council of Misgav, which abuts Sakhnin. She believes in the importance of cultivating good relations with Sakhnin and Arabs in general, which is not to be taken for granted considering that Zvika Gringold is also in the running. Thirty fours years after battling Syrians to keep them from taking hold of the Golan Heights, Gringold is still fighting to keep the area free – free of Arabs, that is. These days his enemies are Ahmed and Fitna Zbidat, a couple who would like to move from Sakhnin to the neighboring communal settlement of Rakefet. To do so they have to first be accepted by the members of Rakefet, though, and they haven’t fared any better than the previous 50 Arab families who over the past 25 years have sought to move to Jewish communal settlements and have all been rejected on the nebulous grounds of “social incompatibility”. Gringold perceives them as a provocative threat to the Zionist enterprise up north, and he had no qualms over using those exact words on national television a few months ago.

While Gringold is building fences to keep Arabs out – the kind of fences that do not make good neighbors – Shlomo is arranging to visit with Bedouins in their own homes. It seems only fitting that Shlomo builds doors for a living. If only his car had more than two, it would be easier for Waleed and Hassan to get in and out, but they’re happy – as am I – just to get a ride to Sakhnin’s game against Maccabi Petach Tikva. Shlomo, for his part, is happy to have a chance to drill into two of Sakhnin’s youngest and most ardent fans the importance of behaving well in the stands and refraining from violence. For the past three years Shlomo has been a fixture at Sakhnin’s games, home and away, doing his best to stem the tidal wave of violence, preaching to fans who sing in chorus but are no choir. Still, Shlomo takes great pride in having succeeded at removing the profane growths from the vocabulary of the dimpled Luai, who is a leader among Sakhnin’s fans and also something of a mentor to Waleed and Hassan. This is his holy grail, and he’s in it for the long haul. Long, too, is the way to Petach Tikva on a Saturday night, and so Waleed and Hassan’s slow education begins.

 

***

 

You may recall that a few weeks ago Sakhnin traveled to Shkhunat Hatikva, the Neighborhood of Hope, where their fans were abused by the local supporters and their players were treated no better, suffering their only loss this year, 0-3 to Bnei Yehuda. The Neighborhood of Hope was built over a century ago by Christian American settlers who built a farm there, while the Stable is the soccer stadium of Petach Tikva, which was the first Jewish settlement, its name denoting a Doorway to Hope. It appears that where Jews (and Christians) are inspired to hope, Sakhnin tends not to do very well.

 

But that’s not why they arrived at the Stable already agitated. They felt slighted because theirs was the only league game not broadcast on television, even though they were ranked second in the league. And they were angry because the police had offered to help Netanya defray the costs of securing its game against Beitar Jerusalem, only two months after refusing to similarly reach out to Sakhnin. Fuming, Sakhnin chairman Mazen Ganaim vowed to demand answers – and justice – from the chairman of the Israeli Soccer Federation, Avi Luzon.

 

And so it didn’t help matters that Maccabi Petach Tikva is run by Amos Luzon, Avi’s brother and another member of Israeli soccer’s first family. Nor did it make Ganaim feel any better when the referee, just coming off a lengthy suspension for incompetence, allowed two controversial Petach Tikva goals scored near the end of a tense game. All it takes is one idiot to burn down a forest, national park signs warn, and apparently it takes all of two blown calls to set the Stable ablaze. For the intensely sensitive Sakhnin, it’s an exceedingly fine line; once crossed, all hell breaks loose.

 

Ganaim uncharacteristically lost his temper, accusing Luzon of intimidating the referee at halftime, claiming that the whole situation was taken straight out of the Middle Ages, which was surprisingly accurate - in medieval soccer, entire towns would play against each other with the bloated bladder of a pig. The scene unfolding at Petach Tikva’s Stable was no less chaotic. The referee sent off Sakhnin’s American, Leo Krupnik, for suggesting that he might as well have worn Petach Tikva’s shirt to the game, which was more subtle than what Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of parliament and Sakhnin fan, said to him. Meanwhile, a Petach Tikva player spit at a Sakhninian and incited a brawl among the players. When they weren’t breaking it up, members of the Ganaim and Luzon clans engaged in their own brouhaha. Matters got so far out of hand that the assistant referee had to call a policeman over to rescue him from the wrath of Sakhnin’s… security officer. Presumably, the assistant referee was not afraid, unlike the elephant’s child, of being spanked.

 

It seemed that the two horses, one white and one chestnut, were the best behaved spectators at the Stable. With players’ and management’s admonitions regarding violence ringing particularly hollow, Sakhnin’s furious fans were more than happy to join the fray. An avalanche of humanity descended upon the fences – the fences that do make good neighbors – as their former belongings rained down on the field. Just like that, Shlomo was off to the races, hot in pursuit, anxious to make peace.

 

And so I was left alone, brandishing pen and paper, which one suspicious fan perceived as particularly threatening. “What are you writing?” he demanded of me. I explained, introduced myself and extended a friendly hand. It remained suspended in mid-air. It’s a good thing he didn’t bite.

 

The fans now began to spill out onto the unsuspecting streets, their anger in tow. I bumped into Shula, another one of Sakhnin’s Jewish fans, an elderly lady from the center of the country who rarely misses a game and was anointed by Ganaim the team’s number one fan. She was shaking, not from the cold – as I was, and she later called to remind me to bring a coat next time – but rather with fury. Accosted by Arabs who couldn’t imagine she was on their side, this grandmother with a torn ligament in her leg was ready to throw a haymaker of her own.

 

I managed to catch up to Shlomo, too. He had just caught up to his glasses, which he lost when he was thrown to the ground. He had no more success straightening them out than he did making peace. But while his sight may have been temporarily impaired, his foresight proved chilling. Just like that, he had said. Or was it Just So?

 

Highlights – or, rather, lowlights – of the game: http://www.sport5.co.il/articles.aspx?folderid=912&docid=28508&lang=HE

The National Team of Sakhnin

“It seems to me a very old quarrel; I suppose it’s in the blood, and perhaps will only end with it”

– Franz Kafka, Jackals and Arabs

When Bilal awoke one morning from delirious dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a… fan of the Israeli national team, draped in a flag blue and white. “What has happened to him?” his wife thought, aghast. For Bilal, it was a dream. He had spent the previous night, March 26^th, 2005, at the cavernous National Stadium in Ramat Gan, watching Israel’s national team play Ireland’s alone among 40,000 Jews. Ireland scored early on, but the slightly drunk Bilal vainly proclaimed that Abas Suan, an Arab who at the time was Sakhnin’s captain as well as a national team substitute, would even the score. When he improbably did just that in the waning minutes of the game, the euphoric fans hoisted Bilal aloft in celebration, carrying him out of the stadium and into the night. Hours later, Bilal went to sleep with a new blanket and newfound hope for Israeli society.

He may have been less sanguine had he been watching the game along with soldiers of the Golani unit. Their celebration was short-lived, for when they realized who it was who saved their day, happiness soon turned to anguish and finally gave way to vehement cursing. The equalizer was no longer a source of pride, but rather an insult to their ethnic ego.

Bilal’s hangover lasted but a week. As with all dreams, his too was doomed to end. Only a week later he found himself sitting in Ramat Gan again, watching Sakhnin take on Beitar Jerusalem when the Jewish fans unfurled a banner that read, “Abas Suan, you do not represent us”. Ever since, national team games have been “just another game” to Bilal.

 

Looking back today on that week of wishful thinking, Bilal is mildly amused at his own naiveté. He smiles bitterly and says he owes a debt of gratitude to Beitar’s fans for waking him up. An Arab seeking to fit in to Israeli society, he explains, needs to do better than 100%. But in a moment of considerable honesty, Bilal also admits that if finding a job in Israel is not easy for an Israeli Arab, it’s not exactly Kafkaesque, either, and if Arabs are unable to find jobs other than teaching it’s partly because they don’t bother looking.

 

***

 

Actually, perhaps ironically, it was a job teaching that I was looking for in Sakhnin. It hasn’t worked out yet, and it probably won’t, not least because hardly anyone is doing any teaching at all in Israel these days. Middle and high-school teachers have been striking for nearly a month and a half now, and on the Saturday before last a huge demonstration was held in Tel Aviv in support of them. Not far away, in Ramat Gan, another sizable crowd was congregating in order to watch Israel face off against Russia in a qualifying game which held very little significance for Israel.

 

Demonstrations such as the one held in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv are usually held on Saturday nights, often clashing with coinciding soccer games and thus providing a compelling study in contrasts in Israeli society. One such conflict of interests took place slightly over twelve years ago, when Beitar Jerusalem and Maccabi Haifa scored two apiece while a peace rally took place in a square which in the aftermath of that night’s tragic turn of events would be renamed Rabin Square. Twelve years to the day, Beitar Jerusalem and Maccabi Haifa were back on the same pitch, playing to a scoreless tie in a game overshadowed by the overture of boos of Beitar fans observing a moment of silence in honor of the late Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin. Twelve years had passed, twelve years during which the violence had been transported into the stadium. The barbarian booing showed just how far Israeli society hadn’t come.

 

It was interesting, then, that Sakhninians turned out in droves to watch the game at Abu Abdo’s café. But then, in Sakhnin education often takes a back seat to soccer. Schools are quite willing to interrupt classes and bus students to the team’s games. Long before the current strike began, in only one city in Israel was the first day of school was canceled. The parents here were protesting the dire dearth of classrooms, though nobody seemed to notice the irony of the local soccer team playing its home opener on that same day in a stadium funded by tax-payers’ shekels.

 

Still, soccer is uncommonly important to Arabs, more so than to Jews, and is all the more important when it’s the national team playing. In their own way, they were showing solidarity with Israeli society, or at least expressing their desire to fit in to it. In a world in which nationality, as Tamir Sorek points out in his book Playing with Identities, is as much an integral component of one’s identity as gender, sports – what with all the striking similarities between nationalism and fandom – come closest to filling that need for those who have no nationality. When Suan scored his momentous equalizer against Ireland and Walid Bdeir tallied the tying score four days later against France, it served as proof that in soccer, if nothing else in Israeli society, Arabs are on a level playing field. As a national symbol uniquely devoid of religious symbolism, it is the rare symbol around which Arabs can rally alongside Jews, a symbol which in their eyes represents the hope of fitting in. And so it’s been with great consternation that they’ve watched Suan and Bdeir grow old and grow out of their national team uniform. When Israel played Croatia last month it was the first time in a long time that there was no Arab on the field, or even the bench. The national team loses 20% of its Arab fans when none of their own take the pitch, Sorek’s studies show.

 

But while Jews view the national team in the context of international competition, the Arabs’ perspective is focused inward, on the national team as an image of Israeli society. That difference was borne out in the complaint voiced by Abd Rabah, Sakhnin’s defenseman, who recently said, “It’s impossible that they couldn’t find in all the league one Arab player to represent us.” Competition, clearly, is secondary to him, and the incidental lack of Arabs worthy at the present time to be considered among Israel’s best irrelevant – respect and recognition were foremost in his mind. Wissam the grocer was similarly distraught, and he asked me to sit down beside him so he could provide me with a “parable”. The roster of the national team, he argued, should be assembled like Bnei Sakhnin’s – a blend of Arabs and Jews. I’m not sure that constitutes a parable, but it was indicative of how he sees the national team – and of how he feels wronged.

 

Judging by the reactions of patrons of Abu Abdo who came out to watch the national team play, they seem similarly conflicted. Against England, the café seemed oddly sterile and there was an awkward uneasiness in the air, only two weeks after I saw tempers flaring and hookahs flying during a Beitar game. Against Russia, fans to my right cheered Israel, while those on my left jeered. “Good for them” one man said as he got up to go, impressed with Israel’s sensational 2-1 victory over Russia.

 

But then, if Sakhnin seems less inclined than Arabs in other parts of the country to embrace the national team, it is quite understandable. They don’t need a national team with a Zionist anthem that alienates them, or with Jewish fans who shun them. After all, they have their own national team – they have Bnei Sakhnin.

Through the Looking Glass: Morning at the Museum

“Pardon my ignorance”, the inevitable question always begins, when people first hear where I live, “but is Sakhnin safe?” The tone they employ would seem to imply that Sakhnin is in Iraq or Afghanistan. Which, incidentally, is understandable, given that there are signs here pointing the way to Kabul, a nearby village. Seriously though, the apologetic question is easily understood – at least by me, since it was my first inquiry, too. The answer was affirmative – Sakhnin is safe, I was told, its people are warm and friendly and not at all dangerous. Just be prepared, I was forewarned, to deal with the prevailing suspicion that accompanies every Jew who seeks out Arabs, namely that he is either from the Mossad or the IRS.

 

I am neither, of course: after three years in the army, I haven’t the slightest interest in any topic remotely related to national security; and, likewise, the IRS hasn’t the slightest interest in me or in the meager income on which I subsist, which is not nearly substantial enough to be taxed. Yet while I pose no threat to them, living here is not an experience entirely bereft of hazards. The Israeli army never planted any mines in Sakhnin, but walking its streets can be no less dangerous than taking a stroll through the many mine-infested areas in the north of Israel – you can never be too careful. The locals are dangerous, in a way, too, though not for the reason you might expect. I’ve found that they’re less likely to hurt me as to be hurt by me, which has turned out to be a much stickier predicament. I always thought of myself as quite polite, but as with the traffic here – one must be on guard at all times.

 

I would expound on these dangers and others, and I will, but it seems hypocritical to debate the question of Sakhnin’s safety at a time when sports fans could only wish sports events were as secure. Israeli sports are a beach with no breakers, and waves of violence have come crashing down on them mercilessly over the past few weeks. First, fascist factions took hostage the fans of Beitar Jerusalem, Israel’s most popular team, making the most of a national television audience as a stage for broadcasting their reprehensible propaganda en masse. Next, a grenade was hurled onto a basketball court in Jerusalem, blowing up a guard’s hand. Finally, a handball game was cut short because of fans storming the court.

 

Which raised the question – who knew anybody cared about handball, let alone that much? The answer, of course, is that no one does. Certainly not Beitar’s fascists or the grenade-hurling petty criminal or the handball mob; they’re sports fans only to the extent that sports events are a convenient outlet for their violence. The violence running rampant through Israeli sports is merely an outgrowth of the violence that plagues Israeli society. There’s something ironic, then, in that the most popular profession of choice – or lack thereof – of down-and-out young Arabs is working as guards at sports events. To paraphrase the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Jews attack Jews and Arabs save them from each other.

 

And so it was similarly fitting that it was Bnei Sakhnin, Israel’s lone premier Arab team, that came to Jerusalem this past Wednesday, along with their northerly neighbors, Hapoel Kiryat Shmona, to visit the Holocaust Museum and save face for the embattled world of Israeli sports. It was the brainchild of Kiryat Shmona’s admirably socially-aware owner, Izzy Sheratsky, who earlier this year arranged that both teams would visit different prisons in the area and play exhibition matches against their denizens. The purpose of this visit, he explained to the players assembled before him, was to witness firsthand the tragic repercussions of racism. Meanwhile, Sakhnin was setting a wonderful example not only for its fans, but also for the rest of a country torn between sects which are each caught up in their own suffering, showing how to show empathy for another people’s suffering.

 

Never mind that a museum is not a professional athlete’s home field. Some of them were clearly disoriented, perhaps under the impression that they were in Pamplona, Spain. That, in any case, was the impression some left – that of bulls rampaging through a china shop. But Spain is not only the site of the gory running of the bulls, but also of the glory of a Jewish golden age in the Middle Ages which was facilitated by Muslim rulers. (“How Islam Saved the Jews” is the title of an article penned by a prominent academic – well, my uncle). In that same vein, the tour of the museum wrapped up with a special exhibition of Albanian Muslims who, compelled by their code of honor of Besa, endangered themselves in order to save Jews during the Holocaust.

 

Still, while some struggled to maintain their composure, others showed respect and interest. The guide, for one, was not only pleased at the end of the tour – but impressed. “They soaked up everything I said”, she gushed, adding that she was surprised that there was no antagonism on their part. On the contrary, she was touched by the team’s sensitivity.

 

It’s a sensitivity rooted in their diverse makeup. As Sheratsky proudly put it while speaking to the players, a mishmash of Israeli Jews, Arabs and Druze as well as foreigners from Congo, Colombia, Poland, Armenia and the US – both teams are families. Never was that more poignant than on a bus ride to a game against Bnei Yehudah just over a month ago. Rumbling down the highway as the setting sun was swallowed up by a purple haze, preparations for breaking the Ramadan fast were in high gear. Armenian striker Yavorian was handing out spaghetti, and Sa’id the journalist was passing around dates. If everyone would play, everyone could eat, regardless of whether they were fasting or not. The different smells and diverse tongues and distinct looks and disparate backgrounds all blurred and dissolved into one for fifty-some players and coaches and other hangers-on, united only by soccer and food.

 

And then they got off the bus and entered a stadium set in the middle of the cruelly-misnamed Neighborhood of Hope. In the Neighborhood of Hope there is no hope, only shameless racism, which on this day was directed at a smattering of Sakhnin fans. Bnei Yehudah’s fans hardly corner the market on racism, though. Just a few weeks later it was fans of Sakhnin who were spewing their own indistinguishable brand of brazen racism in the direction of a minority of Jewish fans in Herzliya, a city named after the man who foresaw the State of Israel. Curiously, no one is willing to speak about the reactionary Arab racism, but of course Sakhnin’s fans play a part in the problem of violence in Israeli sports.

 

Nonetheless, far from being dangerous, Sakhnin is of great significance and importance to Israeli soccer, and, by extension, Israeli society, too. If violence and racism in sports mirror Israeli society on the whole, Sakhnin is the one holding up the mirror.

An Introduction: Anything Averroes Can’t Do – I Can’t Either

I’ve been living in Sakhnin for three months now, and for the past month and a half I’ve been recording my experiences here in a Hebrew blog. Upon reading it, one subscriber promised me that I would be famous if I translated it into English, while another assured me that an international version would draw a far greater audience. So I took a few shots at translation, and I missed them all.

Which should have come as no surprise, considering that I just spent three and a half years translating in the army. Which isn’t to say that I defrauded the Israeli Defense Forces – just that translation, as one of my teachers in the military would exuberantly exclaim, is itself a form of fraud, or at least an exercise in futility, as Borges showed in his famous Averroes’s Search. Besides, the army did much worse unto me. But anyway, the conclusion I came to was that if it is a future in writing that I aspire to, it is my past in translating that I must leave behind. And so it is from scratch that I begin.

Or rather, a clarification: it’s not fame that I’m after, nor an expanded readership – although the latter would be nice, and I’ll take this opportunity to cordially invite you to send this to anyone who may find it readable, especially anybody who could help me achieve the former. Rather, it’s Sakhnin’s soccer team that I’m following: Abna Sakhnin in Arabic, Bnei Sakhnin in Hebrew, or the Sons of Sakhnin in English. I do so while living in this Arab city in the north of Israel which has a population of approximately 30,000, comprised of a Muslim majority, a Christian minority, and one Jew, more or a less. Me, that is.

I moved here from Jerusalem three months ago today, with the intent of spending a year here. Why on earth would I do that while nearly every other Israeli Jew my age, recently discharged from the army and imbued with a drive to rediscover his freedom, sets out to find himself or herself – or, at the very least, drugs – in India or South America? I had three main goals in mind, none so delusional as the idea of finding myself, or as the drugs that so often accompany such a quest. Not that some people don’t think that I’m deluded for doing this. Some don’t even believe me, which is how I won a free meal off a friend who is still reluctant to accept that I do indeed call Sakhnin home.

If it’s proof that you want, well, you’ll just have to take my word for it – though you’re welcome to visit. As for an explanation – here it is. And here’s to hoping that after this I don’t get any emails asking what brought me to move to Sakhnin, because the corresponding Hebrew explanation apparently didn’t do the trick…

First of all, I wanted to get to know Arabs and their culture. When a friend, unabashedly liberal in his views, came to visit me here a couple of months ago he was struck by the stark differences between the Jewish Israel he knew and the Arab Israel which he did not. While he did his very best, he couldn’t help but begin every comparison between these vastly differing realities by saying, “In Israel…”. Nor could a Dutch girl volunteering in Sakhnin restrain herself, try as she might, when speaking of the relations between Arabs and Isra…er, Jews. The great Welsh striker Ian Rush is said to have said of his time in Italy that it was “like being in a foreign country”. (For his part, he denies saying that – but it’s a wonderful quote nonetheless). If being in Sakhnin does not feel exactly like being abroad, it also does not feel exactly like being in Israel. Not the Israel, at least, that I know. So while the experience of traversing India can be eye-opening and mind-blowing and valuable in many ways, I felt that spending time among Arabs is all that and more – it’s significant, and perhaps even critical, if at some point Jews and Arabs are to carve out a peaceful coexistence here.

Second, I wished to learn to speak Arabic, and make peaceful use of skills that I acquired for purposes which were less than peaceful. I’d gladly go vindictively on about the essential evil of the military, but at least for one thing the Israeli army deserves credit – for teaching soldiers Arabic. Regrettably, it does so far better than the schools. Six years of studying Arabic in school, which is all you can get, enable one to make out a few headlines in the newspaper, provided the syntax isn’t overly complex. Not many get even that far. My high school offered the choice of French as an alternative to studying Arabic, as if its relevance or importance were even remotely comparable. All of which adds up to a widespread Jewish ignorance of Arabic which is quite embarrassing, if not downright disrespectful. If not for its exquisite syntax, it seems to me that the next best reason to learn Arabic would be that in a country where one out of every five is Arab, having a passing knowledge of thy neighbor’s tongue is no more than common courtesy.

 

Finally, while all that sounds grand indeed, though not pompous or self-righteous, I hope – that’s not the real reason I moved to Sakhnin. That would be to follow the local team for a season and write about it. Sports literature has no existence as a genre in Israel. The few books written about sports in Hebrew are academic, bogged down by jargon that renders it all but unreadable. But while I struggle to explain to Israelis what it is that I’m trying to do, there should be no such problem with an English-reading audience. David Halberstam and David Maraniss, among many others, have provided eloquent examples of how sports writing can be not only eminently enjoyable – but also transcend the scoreboard. As the sublime Steve Rushin wrote: “Any dink can give you the score, but only a man of books… can reduce you to tears. Or laughter. Or both.” Or something to that effect – which is precisely the effect I’d like to have. I’ll do my best.

 

Pulitzer Prize-winning H.G. Bissinger’s name belongs in any discussion of great sports writers. It was his Friday Night Lights that first planted the seed of the Sakhnin idea in my mind some three years ago. In the late ‘80’s Bissinger moved to god-forsaken Odessa, Texas, for a year, where he documented the perverted, convoluted culture which enveloped the local high school football team and consumed it. Bnei Sakhnin struck me as something of an Israeli version of the story, with the Jewish-Arab conflict to boot. Were Sakhnin situated in the States, it would have long ago been overrun by authors eager to seize on this perfect storm of a story. As it is, Bnei Sakhnin has been the subject of two movies, two sociological books and countless articles, including one in Sports Illustrated.

 

For good reason. While Arabs constitute one-fifth of Israel’s population, two-fifths of its soccer clubs are Arab. Yet Sakhnin is the lone Arab club in the twelve-team top Israeli soccer division, just the third in nearly sixty years to make it to the top and the only one to survive for more than one season. They lasted three, during which they shocked the world by improbably winning the State Cup, and subsequently representing Israel in European competition, which was a sight not devoid of bitter irony. Now, after a painful relegation and a swift return, they’re back! Fittingly, they ensured their return to the top division on the same sunny spring day last April that Major League Baseball celebrated the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s barrier-breaking debut. But Sakhnin is fighting not only racism. The economic forces of Israeli soccer are arrayed against it, too, for Sakhnin is not merely the league’s poorest outfit, they are an economic anomaly. The rest of the league’s teams have long been privately owned, but Sakhnin alone remains a relic of days past when teams were run by political organizations. While the Israeli championship has for over 20 years been the exclusive property of teams hailing from one of the big three cities, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, Sakhnin is 178^th(!) among 210 municipalities ranked socio-economically. The defending champion and current frontrunner, Beitar Jerusalem, boasts a payroll 13 times Sakhnin’s, a figure which would make even George Steinbrenner blush. And yet, eight games into a 33-game season, Sakhnin impossibly sits atop the league standings, second only to their racist archrival, Beitar.

 

But their astounding success on the field is easily explained in comparison with the complex questions they pose off of it. It is those questions that I’ll attempt to tackle, while trying to paint the picture of a city and a culture far removed from anything I’ve known. I’m not sure yet of the format or the frequency of the posts, but I’ll go with the flow. Hope you do too. In any case, I’d be happy to hear what you have to say. I can only hope that you’ll do it while laughing or crying. There is enough in Sakhnin to warrant either - and both.