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