Anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia are a normalised part of Israeli football though over the last 16 months of the genocide in Gaza, it has only grown worse and spread to Western capitals, most recently Amsterdam.
Racism in Israeli football, however, is nothing new. “Let the IDF win and f**k the Arabs. Why is school out [in Gaza]? There are no children left there,” goes a popular chant from one of Israel’s biggest football clubs, Maccabi Tel Aviv FC.
Violent songs such as the above gained international attention in November, following clashes in Amsterdam between locals and Maccabi FC away fans, who were in the city for a UEFA Europa League match against Ajax.
Casually exporting their bigoted antics from Israel to the Dutch capital, much as they have to other cities across Europe over the years, Maccabi’s fans were seen tearing down Palestinian flags hung from peoples’ homes the day before the match. That same afternoon, they toured central Amsterdam yelling racist and violent chants, such as “F**k Arabs…Death to Arabs”, and “we will win, let the IDF win” – while several taxi drivers of Moroccan and Arab descent were harassed, threatened and beaten.
Outraged, groups of Dutch locals attacked Maccabi’s fans the following day, leading to scenes that were abruptly called “antisemitic pogroms” by the Israeli government and Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema. As the facts of Maccabi’s aforementioned racist provocations became clear, Helsema soon retracted and apologised for her sweeping characterisation.
In December, four Dutch men were given short jail terms for their leading role in the violence against the Maccabi fans. Addressing instances of antisemitic messages exchanged on WhatsApp by the convicted individuals, on the day of the riot, Amsterdam’s Chief prosecutor René de Beukelaer said: “I can well understand that the Jewish community in Amsterdam was left afraid because of this violence, but that’s different from saying that was the goal of the suspects.”
In the days after the Amsterdam violence, the Palestine Football Association repeated its many calls on football’s governing bodies, FIFA and UEFA, “to address the normalization of genocidal, racist, and Islamophobic rhetoric among Israeli football supporters, and to implement concrete measures to combat this hostility”.
UEFA, which claims to have a zero-tolerance policy towards racism, has not issued any fines since the Maccabi-Ajax match, nor has the Israel Football Association. FairSquare, a prominent non-profit advocating for human rights in sports, has subsequently written to UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin requesting that he investigate the Amsterdam violence.
FairSquare’s letter drew attention to the numerous instances of “well-documented racist chanting from Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in Amsterdam, and places this in the context of supporters of other Israeli football teams’ racial discrimination against Arabs and Palestinians, and Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza.”
Last month saw football fans across the world unfurling “show Israel the red card” banners in solidarity with the Palestinian people, as part of growing calls for a suspension of Israel from international matches.
The protest, which began during a Celtic FC and Bayern Munich Champions League match on 12 February, inspired similar demonstrations in support of Palestinians in Italy, Spain, France, Greece, Ireland, Turkey and Malaysia.
Sports Zionism
There is a long history of racism and violence in Israeli football, “mirroring the country’s politics and society,” says Bassil Mikdadi, creator of Football Palestine and international football pundit.
This is evident across Israel’s three umbrella clubs, to which all of the country’s clubs belong: Beitar, Maccabi and Hapoel.
“Beitar are the descendants of the Jabotinsky school of Zionism and are, in other words, the most fascist and right-wing,” explains Mikdadi. “Netanyahu is their fan, and his politics align very closely with its base.”
Beitar Jerusalem FC, whose supporters primarily consist of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish descendants, is the only Israeli club to have never signed a player from Israel’s Arab population – which makes up 20% of the country. It is, perhaps, best known for its routinely racist chants, such as “Death to Arabs”.
While other clubs have long fielded Jewish and Arab players, Beitar Jerusalem’s Ultras, the so-called ‘La Familia’, have even agitated against non-Arab Muslims who have joined the team. In 2013, for example, when two Muslim players from Chechnya were signed, arsonists torched Beitar’s offices. Meanwhile, both players were verbally abused and spat on, forcing them to travel to and from training under police protection.
When one of the Chechens scored his first goal, hundreds of Beitar fans left the stadium in disgust, as captured in the Netflix documentary “Forever Pure”, named after one of Beitar’s racist slogans. The Chechen players lasted just a handful of games before quitting.
Not just a Beitar problem
Maccabi, meanwhile, is the oldest of the three Israeli umbrella clubs. “It is a descendant of Jewish social clubs that started in Europe in the late 19th century. They are associated with Israel’s early pioneers, the first settlers that came over in the late 19th century to Palestine,” explains Mikdadi.
Among Maccabi’s teams, Maccabi Tel Aviv FC is Israel’s most racist club, after Beitar Jerusalem. “One of their most prominent songs is both homophobic and racist towards Arabs, and usually directed at Hapoel Tel Aviv FC, who are marginally more left and more likely to have Arab players in their ranks,” says Mikdadi.
Hapoel has Leftist roots, born out of Israel’s organised labour Histadrut movement, hence the hammer and sickle on the insignia of Hapoel Be’er Sheva FC and Hapoel Tel Aviv FC, adds Mikdadi.
“Just because Hapoel is slightly more left-wing than other Israeli teams, does not make it more open minded,” says Mikdadi, who points to a now-infamous instance of violence this summer that saw Hapoel Be’er Sheva fans interrupt a football game to beat up supporters of Bnei Sakhnin FC – one of the few Arab clubs in the top Israeli league – after the latter turned their backs during the Israeli national anthem.
Yet anti-Arab and anti-Muslim chants, such as “May your village burn”, “Mohammed is dead” and “The Temple Mount is ours” are heard across the spectrum of Israeli clubs – but are not necessarily sung or approved of by every fan.
Mikdadi says Arab-Israeli football fans are usually safe from racist abuse during their home games at, for example, Bnei Sakhnin FC (the Arab club). “Away days are where things can get testy, but the average Arab-Israeli supporter contends with racism on a daily basis, so they’re just used to it. I know this from my [lived experience].”
Although Arab-Israeli fans make up an outsized proportion of the football ecosystem within Israel, as well as 1 in 5 people in Israel, they are underrepresented on the pitch. In fact, it was not until the mid-1970s that the Israeli national team first allowed an Arab-Israeli player to represent the country.
Since October 7, 2023, the atmosphere in Israeli football become one of: “if there’s an Arab on the team, he better shut up and not say anything that diverges from the national narrative, which is that Israel actions in Gaza are 100% justifiable and there is only one set of victims, the Israeli-Jews killed by Hamas,” says Mikdadi. Over the last 16 months, much of the football chants have been focused on commemorating the Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza, he adds.
No red cards, only a carte blanche
While racism in football is a global problem, the magnitude and normalisation of the problem in Israel has few present day comparisons in Europe, raising questions about the country’s membership in FIFA and UEFA.
The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) has asked FIFA for more than a decade to take action against the Israeli Football Association for its incorporation of teams from West Bank settlements in its leagues, as well as its failure to protect Arab players and fans from discrimination.
The PFA have also recently accused the Israel Football Association of what it said was complicity in international law violations by the Israeli government, calling on FIFA to suspend Israel’s membership. PFA says that some 350 football players have been killed in Gaza since October, including almost 100 under-18 players, while its football infrastructure has been destroyed, its leagues suspended and its national team required to play World Cup qualifiers abroad.
In October, FIFA deferred the suspension decision until next year. “Israel hasn’t been banned from international sports despite the ICC arrest warrant against Netanyahu. Meanwhile, Russia was banned across the board before any ICC warrants were ever issued,” writes prominent football journalist, Nima Tavallaey Roodsari.
Meanwhile in Israel, the courts have not addressed football’s racism and violence with “sufficient rigor,” says Matan Segal, director of Kick It Out Israel, an Israeli charity that has spent 21 years tackling racism and violence in Israeli football as part of the New Israel Fund (which finances numerous Israeli advocacy groups for Palestinian rights, such as B’Tselem).
“While there have been isolated cases where fans were penalised for inciting hatred or engaging in violence, the judicial and disciplinary systems surrounding football are often viewed as inadequate,” adds Segal.
Kick It Out’s report on the 2022-2023 football season concluded that fans were not deterred from violating Israel’s laws against racist chanting, largely because these laws were not enforced. During the season, there were only eight occasions in which clubs faced formal disciplinary proceedings from the Israel Football Association due to racist chanting, and no action was taken by the police, despite some 200 instances of “rampant chanting” being recorded by Kick It Out that season.
“Every Israeli feels the tension and violence in Israeli society. As we know, football reflects the face of society and the events taking place in Israel’s stadiums have taught us how worrying the situation is. This is the most racist and violent season that we have ever experienced in the stadiums and the challenge to the law by fans has crossed a line,” wrote Segal in the aforementioned report, which came out before October 7, 2023.
Since then, the number of racist chants against Arabs has risen even further, according to preliminary reporting from Kick It Out, with the most common racist chant from Israeli fans being: “Let the IDF win and f**k the Arabs”.
It remains to be seen how FIFA will deal with this ongoing and much neglected, issue.
Sebastian Shehadi is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer at the New Statesman.
Followhim on X: @seblebanon
