DANYEL REICHE TAMIR SOREK (eds) Sport, Politics, and Society in the Middle East HURST & COMPANY, LONDON 3 HAPOEL TEL AVIV AND ISRAELI LIBERAL SECULARISM Tamir Sorek Introduction The cheering repertoire of Hapoel Tel Aviv’s fans in football and basketball includes a puzzling paradox. On the one hand, the banners on the bleachers, such as ‘Workers of the World Unite’, reflect a well-articulated universalist ideology stemming from the meaning of Hapoel, ‘worker’ in Hebrew. ‘Anti- racism’ is part of the collective self-image of the fans, and they frequently express an explicit inclusive orientation toward the Arab citizens of Israel. In contemporary Israel, which since the turn of the century has witnessed a dras- tic deterioration in Arab–Jewish relations,1 this attitude is not self-evident. On the other hand, the fans’ repertoire is far from being ‘politically correct’ in any other dimension. The cheering songs include violent, sexist, classist, and Germanophobic content, and the fans do not refrain from frequent mocking of the personal tragedies of the rival team’s players and managers. Even by the rough standards of Israeli culture, Hapoel’s fans are notorious for their lack of self-censorship. 55 SPORT, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY IN THE MIDDLE EAST To complicate the matter even more, a non-negligible number of fans do not hesitate to challenge some well-established sacred Israeli taboos, including explicit anti-patriotic slogans and frequent use of Holocaust terminology for expressing their hatred of their ultimate urban rival, Maccabi Tel Aviv. While accusations of being Nazi-like are far from being new to the Israeli public sphere, Hapoel’s fans are the only group who frequently use this analogy in the sporting sphere. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning see the evolution of modern sports as a major element in the ‘civilizing process’ of British society, a process that is characterized by decreasing tolerance for sights of violence in the public sphere. As a result, the need emerged for a social sphere where regulated forms of violence were permitted.2 One of the spheres in which this feature of mod- ern sport is the most evident in contemporary sport is the fans’ discourse, where they practice forms of verbal aggression that they would not dare to display in other contexts. In the same vein, the Israeli sociologist Amir Ben Porat called the football bleachers a ‘permission zone.’3 The permission zone, which can be found in other sports as well, is not a zone where everything is permitted. Rather, it is a zone where the boundaries of the legitimate and the illegitimate are constantly negotiated. The ‘fanatic’ sports fans are those who consistently flirt with the boundaries of legitimacy in their societies, challeng- ing the most sacred taboos and bringing to the surface unarticulated emotions and opinions, which are usually covered by layers of a common aspiration for social equilibrium or political correctness. This is what makes the rhetoric of these fans so valuable for sociological inquiry. It turns out that the fans of different teams use the permission zone for displaying different sets of ideas and for challenging different sacred taboos. These differences tell us much about internal tensions and contradic- tions in a given society. In this chapter, I analyze the rhetoric of Hapoel Tel Aviv’s hardcore fans and the demography of the wider circle of sympathizers. This bifocal examination reveals that the stadium rhetoric is actually an expression of fundamental struggles between competing definitions of Israeliness. The transgressive rhetoric of Hapoel fans, I argue, is partly related to the decline in the political power of the secular elite in Israel. The insights are based on: 1) A 2012 online survey of 500 respondents who constitute a representative sample of the adult Hebrew-speaking population in Israel;4 2) a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) in 2009, including 2,803 respondents who constitute a representative sample of the adult Jewish population in Israel;5 3) analysis of Hapoel Tel Aviv fans’ website; 4) collecting 56 HAPOEL TEL AVIV AND ISRAELI LIBERAL SECULARISM and examining fans’ songs available on YouTube; and 5) semi-structured inter- views with six hardcore fans of Hapoel Tel Aviv conducted between November 2012 and January 2013. Hapoel Tel Aviv, Betar Jerusalem, and the Boundaries of Citizenship Social scientists Gershon Shafir and Yuval Peled identified a continuous ten- sion between three partly contradictory political goals and commitments characterizing Israeli political culture: the colonial project of settling the country with a specific group of people; the ethnonational project of building a Jewish nation-state; and the liberal project of establishing a democracy.6 In the case of Socialist Zionists, another goal complicates the picture—the cos- mopolitan vision of ‘brotherhood of people’, which only partially overlaps with the liberal discourse of citizenship. Therefore, from its very first steps in the early twentieth century, socialist Zionism in Palestine contained a tension between the aspiration for universal justice and the nationalist-colonialist particularistic agenda that aspired to settle the country with Jews and to build up autonomous Jewish political and economic power. Ze’ev Sternhall argues that the internal division among Zionist socialists between ‘nationalists’ and ‘Marxists’ was quickly decided in favor of the faction that represented the former, and consequently the universalist elements were subordinated to the national agenda.7 Since the late 1970s, however, the republican discourse has been weakened, while both the liberal and the ethnic discourses have gained power. The com- petitions between these discourses highly overlap with self-definitions of religiosity, where secular Jewish Israelis tend more to support the liberal dis- course, and religious Israeli Jews tend to promote the ethnic discourse.8 The realm of sport fandom, as a ‘permission zone’, allows extreme articulations of this competition to be displayed. It seems that the most dramatic expression can be found in the cheering rhetoric of Hapoel Tel Aviv and its political rival, Betar Jerusalem. In 2014, the journalist Motti De Picciotto conducted an online survey with 1,646 Israeli football fans, and found that when asked to describe their team, Hapoel Tel Aviv fans tend, much more than fans of any other team, to use emotional vocabulary, relying on terms such ‘us’, ‘love,’ ‘soul,’ ‘heart,’ and ‘exciting.’ Second to them in using emotional vocabulary were the fans of Betar Jerusalem.9 Interestingly, these two teams have the most distinct political orientation among Jewish Israeli football teams. I argue that this association between sports, emotion, and politics is not incidental and reflects deep sociopolitical currents in Israeli society. 57 SPORT, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY IN THE MIDDLE EAST At their establishment in the first half of the twentieth century, Zionist sports federations were organized along political lines. Historically, Hapoel was associated with the trade union congress (Histadrut) and the socialist wing of Zionism that dominated it until 1977. Maccabi was affiliated with the General Zionists, a bourgeois party;10 and Betar was the outgrowth of the militant revisionist Zionist youth movement founded in 1923, later linked to the Herut (and afterwards, the Likud) party. Each federation established local branches throughout the country. Hapoel Tel Aviv The Hapoel Tel Aviv football team was established in the 1920s, and the club’s basketball team was founded in 1935. Until the mid-1990s, both Hapoel Tel Aviv teams were considered the flagship teams of the veteran socialist, mostly Ashkenazi (Jews of European origin) establishment. Then, following the dras- tic decline in the status and power of the Histadrut in Israeli society—which was a major reflection and materialization of the decline in the relative power of the republican discourse of citizenship—both Hapoel Tel Aviv teams were sold to private owners. This was part of a general process of privatization and commodification of Israeli sport.11 The process has loosened the political identities of most professional clubs, while Hapoel Tel Aviv and Betar Jerusalem remained prominent exceptions. Even though most of the tradi- tional demographic base of support of Hapoel has experienced upward mobil- ity, the rhetoric and symbols remained connected to a globalized cosmopolitan working-class language. Red is the team’s color, the hammer and sickle icon is still part of the logo, and even the face of Che Guevara can be spotted periodically on banners. These symbols have become more visible since the end of the 1990s as part of a broader ‘professionalization’ of fan culture in Israel. Fans have become more organized and coordinated, and official fan organizations have been established, some of which are verging on illegality, or even crossing it, in terms of their aggressiveness. In 1999, the Hapoel Tel Aviv Ultras was estab- lished. The organization was inspired by Italian fan organizations,12 and this inspiration is reflected in its name, its antiestablishment orientation, its maca- bre logos, its transgressive tendencies, and its flirting with violence. The hard- core of this organization—whose boundaries are blurred since there is no formal membership—includes no more than several dozens of activists, but their agenda and cheering style dominate the bleachers. 58 HAPOEL TEL AVIV AND ISRAELI LIBERAL SECULARISM Demographically, most of the Hapoel Ultras are men in their 20s and 30s. In terms of class and origin they are diverse, but almost all of them are secular in their lifestyle. Some leaders of the group were raised in families with a clear socialist consciousness, while some adopted the ideology later in their lives, but the ideological orientation of the group is socialist with a clear inclination toward an inclusive discourse of citizenship. As Bar (pseudonym), an Ultra activist, told me: ‘Most of us are left wing but this is not a requirement.