The picture on the right was taken from the cover page of the Hebrew Israeli magazine Anashim[1] from April 24, 2000. Although at a first glance it looks like just another tabloid eye catcher, its multilayered subtext touches fundamental issues concerning the interrelated construction of ethno-national and gender identities in Israel. The man leaning on the Israeli national flag is Sami Daniel, an Arab citizen of Israel, and the main title in Hebrew is a rhetorical question: "Do I look like a terrorist?"

Daniel certainly does not look like a terrorist. An Israeli flag is stuck to Daniel's skin and he is smiling. Terrorists, as every child knows, are dark and hairy. Daniel is surrounded by bright colors and is far from hairy. Furthermore, the popular image of contemporary Palestinian terrorists includes conservative religiosity, and they are not expected to expose their naked bodies in public.

The marketing of an Arab man as a sex symbol in a Hebrew magazine is not self-evident and might be considered highly provocative in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hebrew Israeli popular culture includes frequent examples of a latent anxiety toward the sexuality of Arab men, which combines dark magic with moral claims of a nationalist challenge[2]. The disarming of this sexuality was enabled here by the de-orientalization of an Arab man, and the dissolving of the link between sexuality and nationalist aggression. The photo suggests that Daniel is a bright-skinned, sexy Arab man, attractive to Jewish girls. He is an Israeli patriot and has no nationalist aspirations as an Arab.

Obviously, Daniel's Nordic-like coloring makes him an excellent candidate to play this role. I would like to argue, however, that there is another important dimension to his identity that allows him to be the embodiment of an unthreatening masculinity: Daniel is a soccer player, who became a local celebrity by playing in the first Israeli Division in 2000. This picture not only captures the historical attempt of the Jewish Israeli majority to tame the Arab man, but it also represents the importance of sports, specifically soccer, in this "taming process." The subtitle of the magazine explicitly connects Daniel's identity as a soccer player with the conversion of nationalist aspirations into sexual desires: "Sami Daniel, The Arab player of 'Maccabi Petah Tikva' [a Jewish team], speaks on life in the state of the Jews (and Jewish girls)."

This article provides a broader context for understanding this popular visual text and its relevance to women's exclusion from Israeli soccer. Feminist studies have emphasized that the emergence of modern sports in Europe and in the United States was tightly related to the crisis of masculinity and the need to create an exclusive sphere of masculine socialization.[3] Similarly, in Israel, sports in general and soccer in particular have been a sphere where Jewish men from Europe (Ashkenazi men), Arab Palestinian men, and Jewish men from Muslim countries (Mizrahi men), have all attempted to rehabilitate a threatened masculinity, to de-orientalize, and "modernize" their self-image. The triangular struggle between these three different groups of men, has set significant obstacles in the way of the inclusion of women in Israeli sports.

In this regard, soccer is particularly important, as soccer in Israel can be described as hegemonic sports culture. Markovits and Hellerman define "hegemonic sports cultures" as "the sport cultures that dominate a country's emotional attachments."[4] They are "what people breathe, read, discuss, analyze, and historicize." Therefore, the term "hegemonic sport culture" refers to the sport that contains and produces the highest levels of political power. These are the sports that provoke the strongest collective emotions of pride, joy, and frustration in watching other people, whom one has never met personally, winning or losing. Unlike other sports, these sports usually attract fans from diverse social classes, and very frequently they are a focus of national pride, either through international competitions or through a common belief that they represent the nation's character.

A major aspect of hegemonic sports is their exclusion of women as participants, and their construction of dominant images of heterosexual masculinity, which is very frequently identified with toughness, robustness, and roughness. Soccer in Israel is one of two hegemonic sports cultures, the second being basketball; it is the more popular of the two, particularly among the working class. This status of soccer makes it a multi-dimensional contested terrain where gender, class, ethnic, and national identities are in constant struggle and are constantly being negotiated.

European Jewish and Arab masculinities under threat

Cynthia Enloe argues that "nationalism has typically sprung from masculinised memory, masculinised humiliation, and masculinised hope."[5] Respectively, both Zionism and the Palestinian national movement were partly an attempt to "redeem manhood through nationalism."[6] The particular dynamics of the Arab-Jewish encounter in the realm of sports are highly influenced by the historical crisis of collective images of masculinity and the construction of national identities on both sides of the conflict.

As several scholars of Zionism and sexuality have shown, the way in which early Zionist leaders saw the body of the European Jewish man reflected a remarkable internalization of contemporary anti-Semitic stereotypes and pseudo-scientific literature, which found the Jewish male body inferior and drew similarities between the physiology of Jewish men and female bodies.[7] Therefore, Zionism strove to redeem the Jewish man from his "femininity" by "converting" him into "an Aryan man." The "sportization" of the Jew was seen as a cure to his non-masculine character. In his extensively quoted speech from 1898, Dr. Max Nordau called for the establishment of a "Muscular Jewry" and emphasized the link between national redemption and masculine re-habilitation: "We shall develop a wide chest, strong limbs, a courageous look - we will become a people of valor. Sport is educationally significant to us, the Jews, for not only do we have to recover physically, but also spiritually."[8]

In the decades after Naurdau's speech, Jewish sports clubs were established all over Europe, and several large scale Zionist sports organizations were founded. Although women were included in this movement, its predominantly masculine orientation was evident both in quantitative terms and in the rhetoric surrounding it. The names given to sports clubs, for example, reflected the yearning for mythological muscular warriors found in the Jewish ancient past: for example Maccabi, Shimshon (Samson), Bar-Kokhba, and so on. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, these organizations were well established and active in Palestine, directing competitions on both local and international levels.

The Arab Palestinian sports movement in the 1930s and 1940s was an integral part of this nationalist movement. As in other cases of colonized peoples, Arab-Palestinian men have been emasculated through their subjugation to British rule (since 1917), and their inability to halt Zionist immigration and the settler movement.[9] The emergence of an Arab Palestinian sports movement, which was almost exclusively male, was partly a reaction to this challenge to masculinity.

Like the Zionist sports movement, the nationalist-masculine character of the Palestinian sports movement was particularly exemplified through youth sports teams that were named after historically renowned Muslim and Arab military commanders, such as Khaled Ibn al-Walid and Salah al-Din. The rhetoric of the newly born Arabic-language sports media frequently emphasized the militaristic function of sports, as in the following example taken from the sports column of the newspaper Filastin in 1946: "One is forced to point out here that sports' most important virtue is that it is creating a generation of youths and adults with healthy bodies, free from sickness, who do not complain of feebleness and weakness. There can be no disagreement that such a generation is the standing army of the state, which it will call upon in its hour of need."[10]

Another prominent aspect of the rhetoric of the Arabic sports press in the 1940s was the tendency to present sports as an important element in the modernization of Palestinian society, and "modernization" was frequently equated with adopting European institutions and practices. The European powers were explicitly presented in the sports columns as providing a paradigm of correct sporting activity and as offering a model worthy of replicating. Whether this replication should include limited participation of women in sports was a controversial issue.[11]

Ironically, therefore, before Israel was founded in 1948, sports was assigned the role of redeeming the insecure masculinity of both Jewish European and Arab Palestinian men, and in both cases, the masculinizing sporting movement intended to shape these men in the form of an imagined model of a non-Semitic European man. In both sides of the conflict, the most popular game at this stage was already soccer, a sport codified in nineteenth-century Britain.

In 1947 dozens of Arab Palestinian sports clubs were active, most of them in cities. The large scale destruction arising from the 1948 war and the forced exile of urban elites brought an end to almost all these sports clubs. After the war, 160,000 Palestinians remained under Israeli rule. This small minority was mainly rural and was previously somewhat detached from the Palestinian sporting movement.

Although the Palestinians who remained in Israel received formal citizenship, until 1966 they were subjected to strict military rule, which severely curtailed their freedom of movement, speech, and livelihood. While both Palestinian women and men suffered from these conditions, they experienced them differently. The humiliation of the Arab men who were defeated in the war was multiplied by the loss of significant tracts of their land, which, before 1948 had been an important element in the masculine self-image of peasant men.[12] Furthermore, by preventing political organization and neutralizing public protest, the military regime eliminated the activity of Arab men in the public sphere and reduced the masculine role to providing for the family.[13]

Those Palestinians who remained in Israel were mainly from the periphery, where before the 1948 war soccer was not institutionally played. Soccer was introduced to Arab towns and villages in a social context where Arab men were extremely vulnerable. Here, under exceptionally imbalanced conditions, the threatened masculinity of European Jewish men met the threatened masculinity of Arab Palestinian men.

A major principle in the policy of state authorities in the 1950s and 1960s was to prevent the emergence of a nationalist consciousness among the Arab Palestinian minority, and to attempt to develop a non-Palestinian local Arab identity for the new, unwanted Israeli citizens. The development of state-dependent sports clubs was one expression of these efforts. Hence, after 1948, sports was assigned not only the role of rehabilitating the image of Jewish men and consolidating a modern Hebrew national identity - but also used as a mechanism to facilitate the control and surveillance of the Arab Palestinian minority.[14]

The State of Israel became the sponsor of soccer, and the game was one element in a set of strategies through which the state presented itself as a facilitator of modernity. The state functionaries, or more precisely, the functionaries of the Histadrut (General Federation of Labor Unions), who were assigned by the government to encourage the establishment of sports clubs in Arab villages, took advantage of the opposition of the elder rural leadership to the game in order emphasize their image as the bearer of modernity. This Arab Palestinian leadership did not welcome the idea of youth playing games like soccer. At best, they considered the sight of barely dressed young men purposelessly running around after a ball a waste of time, and at worst as, a licentious, "unmasculine" activity.

Ironically, for the younger generation, soccer provided an outstanding opportunity to rehabilitate their masculinity. Sports has a wide and flexible range of interpretations, and while for the elders the game was "play" (and therefore associated with childhood and immaturity), for the younger generation it provided an opportunity to test their masculinity in competition, shortly after their people suffered a catastrophic and humiliating defeat in the war.

Hence, the Israeli political establishment and the young men in the Israeli-ruled Palestinian towns and villages shared interests in developing Arab sports. Particularly since the early 1960s, Arab soccer clubs in Israel were spreading. Israeli authorities considered these clubs a useful antidote to nationalist consciousness and deliberately encouraged and supported them, as long as they played under the official umbrella of the Zionist sports organization.

Independent Arab sports organizations were banned and quickly demolished if they appeared. Interestingly enough, the initial tendency of the Israeli government was to encourage sports that required much less physical contact, such as table tennis, basketball, and volleyball, and to discourage contact sports, as in wrestling, boxing, and soccer. However, since they could not compete with the popularity of soccer, this policy was quickly abandoned and soccer games were disrupted only if the Palestinians attempted to establish autonomous sports institutions.

Under these circumstances, soccer became a safe ground for Arab men to display a combative, quasi-nationalist masculinity, which did not involve the risk of confrontation with state authorities. Paradoxically, by muting their expression of nationalist aspirations, or by relegating them to other spheres, Arab male soccer players were able to simulate a war against Jewish men. For Arab soccer fans in the late 1960s, identification with successful Arab soccer players, even if they played for Jewish teams, could reinforce masculinity and national self-respect. These identifications did not risk the potential sanctions involved in identifying with other heroes, such as the Fatah movement, which was beginning to gain momentum at exactly the same time.

Simultaneously, the relative importance of soccer for Ashkenazi Jewish men diminished, as the Zionist ethos promoted the military to the top of a hierarchy of masculinity. Under conditions of violent, tense, and continuous national conflict, the hegemonic ideals of Zionist masculinity were embodied in the combatant soldier, preferably an officer in a special unit.[15] Some scholars have emphasized the similarity of sports institutions and the military as sites of masculine competitiveness, and therefore one can assume that they might provide similar opportunities for men to rehabilitate their masculinity.[16] The growing popularity of soccer among Arab men is partly related to their exemption from Israeli military service and their inability to take the risk of fighting against the state.

The number of Arab soccer teams playing in the Israeli Football Association steadily increased until the late 1990s when their percentage peaked at 42 percent of the teams, more than double their relative share of the population (16 percent). Interestingly, another sport in which Arab men have not only been overrepresented but have even dominated is boxing - another sport which was "not recommended" for Arabs by the Israeli government in the early 1960s, and a sport which stretches the fine balance between violence and the regulation of violence in sports.

However, the explanation of soccer as a substitute for war is far from satisfying given the relative scarcity of violent outbreaks in Arab-Jewish encounters compared with other soccer competitions, and the absolute exclusion of Palestinian national symbols from the soccer stadium. While Jewish working-class soccer fans sometimes aspire to intensify the national conflict in soccer stadiums, Arab soccer fans are in a more ambiguous position. Soccer is indeed an opportunity to "beat the Jewish men" in a physical competition. But it is also a unique opportunity for Arab citizens to obtain integration and acceptance by the Jewish majority. It is a sphere that glorifies a meritocratic ethos and therefore offers players some protection from the discriminatory practices they face in many other spheres of Israeli society. Therefore, Arab fans manage their confrontation with Jewish fans with great care.

One consequence of this caution is that sexual and sexist symbolism gains prominence and overshadows nationalist connotations. For example, in one of the games I attended in 1999, the reaction of fans from Sakhnin (an Arab town) to anti-Arab curses by the fans of the Jewish team, Beitar Jerusalem, was the slogan "Sarah on the dick" (in Hebrew), referring to Sarah Netanyahu, the wife of the right-wing Prime Minister at the time, Binyamin Netanyahu, who was admired by Beitar's fans. This cry was a symbolic attempt to sexually subjugate the political identity of Beitar fans, without attacking their ethno-national identity as Jews. In this way, Sakhnin fans did not deviate from the standard repertoire of non-Arab fans in Israel, and their political protest remained sublimated. It represented a wider attempt of the Arab fans to abate national tensions on the soccer field, or at least to leave these tensions unarticulated and inexplicit.

The presence of Arab soccer players in the Israeli soccer sphere provides some ironic anecdotes, such as when Arab soccer players are invited to the Israeli national team, namely, to represent Israel at the international level. Although some Jewish clubs have large circles of Arab fans (especially those teams which have traditionally included Arab players), victories of the Israeli national team are frequently perceived as provocations against the national and masculine pride of Arab men.[17] However, when an Arab player is playing for Israel, aspirations of integration gain prominence and the team is widely supported by Arab men.[18]

Still, this support depends on the self-confidence of each man in his masculine identity. In a survey I conducted in 2000, I found that Arab men who described themselves as proud of their masculine identity had a higher tendency to oppose the Israeli national team, compared with other fans. The negative association between support for the national team and pride in male identity suggests that fans concerned about their masculinity do indeed consider the international encounter in sport an opportunity for degrading the masculinity of the Jewish male. The threat to masculine identity is tied to a great degree to the sense of degradation on the national level, and the two dimensions, gender and nation, mutually shape each other.

Mizrahi masculinity under threat

Following the wave of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s, Israel emerged as an ethnically stratified society, in which Palestinian citizens were relegated to the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy, with the population of the middle and upper classes largely comprised of Jews from European origin (Ashkenazim); Jews from Arab and Muslim countries (Mizrahim) are an intermediate group between the Ashkenazim and the Arab citizens.[19] Although the boundaries between Ashkenzim and Mizrahim are much more diffused and blurred than the boundaries between Arabs and Jews, division within the Jewish population is a crucial factor in Israeli political dynamics.

Like Palestinian citizens (although to a lesser extent), Mizrahi men have suffered from a high rate of unemployment and occupy the least prestigious and lowest-paid occupations. A combination of structural discrimination and perceptions of cultural inferiority have pushed many Mizrahim into dependency on the state institutions. These developments were especially detrimental to Mizrahi fatherhood and were expressed in yearning for an image of a powerful Mizrahi masculinity.[20] In addition, the Israeli army, where hegemonic ideals of Zionist masculinities were displayed, reproduced the ethnic stratification in civil life, with the Mizrahim underrepresented in higher ranks (although to a lesser extent in the last two decades) and in the more prestigious units and positions, such as the infantry "special" units and combat pilots.[21]

The 1970s, a decade of turbulent Mizrahi activism, was accompanied by the success of soccer teams that were followed mainly by Mizrahi fans and by the growing visibility of Mizrahi soccer stars. As members of the working class of emerging Israeli society, Mizrahi men gradually became the dominant group among Israeli soccer players. Many of them saw it as an "education by-passing" channel for mobility, though a systematic examination of this assertion has proven that it was mainly an illusion.[22] The two championships won by Ha-Po'el Be'er Sheva (a team which represented Be'er Sheva, a southern city populated by a Mizrahi majority) in 1974 and 1975 and Beitar Jerusalem's win of the state cup in 1976 and 1979 were seen by many of their fans as a successful Mizrahi protest and were compatible with the emergence of the image of a strong Mizrahimi man. Soccer stars like Gideon Damti, Shalom Avitan, and Eli Ohana provided a successful model of Mizrahi masculinity.

Soccer stadiums in Jewish localities thus gradually became spaces dominated by the Mizrahi working class. The particular class and ethnic character of Israeli soccer is evident in municipal authorities' support for the sport. In an analysis of support for these clubs in Israel in 1998, I found a positive and statistically significant correlation (0.58) between financial support for soccer clubs and the relative share of inhabitants whose continent of origin is Asia or Africa. Similarly, there was a negative and statistically significant correlation (-0.65) between the municipal support for soccer clubs and the relative share of inhabitants whose continent of origin is Asia or Afirca. Namely, soccer has had great importance in predominantly Mizrahi towns.[23]

Mizrahi men have found themselves, however, in a sensitive position. Since Arabs were the ultimate enemies of Zionism, a powerful hegemonic ideology, many of the Mizrahim have made extra efforts to efface any traces of their Arab cultural identity and appearance. Obtaining privileges and acceptance as legitimate Israelis has been conditioned on their ability to make clear distinction between themselves and the Arabs. Additionally, during the first decades of the state's existence, Arab Palestinian and Mizrahi Jews competed for the same low-paid jobs, a competition which was much less familiar to Ashkenazi middle class men. These two factors have created a particularly tense relationship between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians, despite their relative cultural proximity.

Learning that they share a major pastime in the soccer stadium with Arab men was an unpleasant discovery for Mizrahi fans, especially given the growing success and visibility of Arab soccer. Hence, the most charged encounters of Arab and Jewish fans in the soccer stadium have happened when Arab teams have met teams with a strong Mizrahi identity, like Beitar Jerusalem, Bnei Yehuda, Sport Club Ashdod, and Ha-Poel Be'er Sheva. Beitar, incidentally, is the only team in the Israeli first division that has never included an Arab player on its roster, and a non-Arab Muslim player from Nigeria who joined the team in 2004 left it the middle of the season under pressure from fans.

After Beitar was defeated 4 to 1 by Sakhnin in Jerusalem on October 4, 2004, Beitar fans published a video clip on the web which included the goals from the game and was preceded by the words: "Yesterday was the most painful, humiliating and embarrassing day in the history of our club since it was founded in 1936 . . . This day was inscribed in the history books as a day of mourning". Being defeated by Arab men was understood as an extreme form of humiliation. The tight link between the need to reaffirm their Jewishness, to de-orientalize their image, and to fortify their normative sense of masculinity is reflected by the frequent combinations of ethno-religious insults and the questioning of the heterosexuality of their opponents. "Muhammad is gay!" for example, is a popular cry used by Beitar fans against Sakhnin.

The homophobic discourse is especially relevant to this discussion as it is an important indicator of the level of threat to the fans' masculinity. Homophobia can be interpreted as an expression of the fear of men that other men would detect their insufficient masculinity.[24] A recent experiment in social psychology confirmed that men who receive messages which threaten their masculinity express a greater level of homophobia compared with other men.[25] The frequent homophobic remarks of sport fans should be understood in this context. As Raz Yosef argues, the Mizrahi protest in Israel since the 1970s has been highly influenced by the humiliation of the Mizrahi father, which has frequently included the imagining of Mizrahi men as sexually subjugated to Ashkenazi men.[26] Therefore, while this protest strove to undermine Ashkenazi hegemony, it attempted to reestablish the patriarchal status of Mizrahi men and included elements that were oppressive toward women and homosexuals.

While teasing the opponent team by ascribing homosexuality is very common among soccer fans, in Israel this "accusation" is most frequently directed toward the soccer team of Ha-Po'el Tel Aviv by other Jewish teams. In the website forum of Beitar Jerusalem's fans, for example, whenever Ha-Po'el Tel Aviv is mentioned, its name immediately evokes the adjectives "Arab," "Ashkenazi," "non-Jew," and "gay."

Not only does Ha-Po'el Tel Aviv have a long tradition of including Arab players but it was also the flagship of the old Mapai Ashkenazi establishment, who ruled the country until 1977 and whose policies significantly contributed to the inferior positioning of Mizrahim within the socio-economic hierarchy. Therefore, the team has an Ashkenazi and establishment-oriented image in the eyes of other teams' fans.

The picture on the left reflects the connection between threatened masculinities and the construction of ethnicity within the Israeli soccer sphere. It appeared on the website of Ha-Po'el Be'er Sheva, a team with a firm Mizrahi majority among its fans. It embodies an attempt to humiliate Ha-Po'el Tel Aviv's fans by superimposing two flags on their club's emblem: the flag of the Palestinian Authority and the flag of the gay community (which considers Tel Aviv to be its "capital").

The combination of a questioning of the national loyalty of opponents and a questioning of their masculinity (homosexuality as evidence of impaired masculinity) is related to the anxiety of Mizrahi soccer fans about their masculinity, as well as their public (mis)identification as Arabs. As a matter of fact, Ha-Po'el Tel Aviv fans are ethnically and politically heterogeneous, and obviously there is no evidence that their sexual orientation is different from fans of other teams. However, soccer cultures tend to easily construct a series of dichotomous contrasts.

For example, after violent clashes between fans of Ha-Po'el Tel Aviv and Bnei Yehuda, a team that represents a poor Mizrahi neighborhood in Tel Aviv, a fan of Bnei Yehuda told the local newspaper: "Ha-Po'el fans are unbearable. They have always been the elites, dandies, as if they are Europeans. They have this patronizing shape. They would always tell you in the face that their way is the right way, that white is the nice color. They are left wing and we are right wing, they are rich and we are poor, they are the successful and we are the loser, they are the beautiful and we are the ugly." The dandyism of Ha-Poel Tel Aviv is presented by the fan as one element in a whole set of ethnic-class-political identity, which is implicitly opposed to the rough masculinity of Mizrahi working class men. As if to emphasize the ethnic basis of the animosity to the "dandies," when the same fan was asked if he would have thrown stones on Beitar Jerusalem's fans he said: "Are you out of your mind? Beitar is our big sister - you don't hit family members."[27]

How can women get in?

The painful question of women's inclusion in Israeli soccer is tightly related to the character of the game as a major battlefield between several types of collective injured masculinities. Israel is not unique in the masculine character of its soccer. Except in countries where soccer is not a hegemonic sport, as in the United States and New Zealand, the sport is still considered to be male. Nevertheless, during the past two decades there has been dramatic change: women's soccer leagues have been established in many European countries. Echoes of this phenomenon have reached Israel, but just barely.

An Israeli "Title IX" has never been legislated, and only recently has the Israeli Supreme Court rendered some important decisions in its spirit, but only time will tell if this legislation will change anything. As a result, women's sports suffer from consistent discrimination in the allocation of public funds, and women's soccer is in an especially poor situation.[28] In 1998, in order to comply with European regulations, the Israeli Football Association hastily established a women's league. Until 2005, however, lack of even minimal funds impaired the league's regular activity, and both Jewish and Arab teams must struggle every year for their mere survival.

The particular predicament of women's soccer has much to do with its importance for working-class men. Israeli middle- and upper-class men have developed alternative images of successful men - previously the combat soldier and the "pioneer," and more recently the high-tech entrepreneur or business man. Within the Israeli sports world, playing basketball has become an element in the construction of class and ethnic identity for the upper-middle class (similar to American soccer), which in Israel is mostly Ashkenazi. Frequently, choice in sport is used as a signifier to differentiate the middle and upper classes from the "lowbrow soccer lovers" in the lower classes. Basketball represents another "hegemonic sports culture" in Israel, and it is the sport in which Israel has been the most successful internationally. The victories of the men's team of Maccabi Tel Aviv in Europe[29] are celebrated by the Jewish public from all social classes. However, since most of the Israeli basketball stars are Ashkenazi (not including the significant number of foreign players), it is not uncommon to hear comments about basketball as "an Ashkenazi sport."

Globally, when women are accepted as legitimate participants in institutionalized sports, it is frequently in those sports associated with the middle and upper classes.[30] Therefore, the level of women's inclusion in soccer highly depends on which class is associated with the game in each country.[31] As in the case of soccer in the United States, the middle-class character of the sport is accompanied by greater tolerance of women's inclusion. One possible reason is that middle-class masculinity faces fewer threats in economic and political spheres and, therefore, is less in need of sport to reassure masculinity. Therefore, unlike the crippled and barely surviving Israeli women soccer league, women's basketball in Israel has a stable semiprofessional league, and during the last decade it has been successful in an international level.

Shafir and Peled argue that different discourses of citizenship are implemented differently towards various segments of Israeli society.[32] An ethnic discourse has been used to legitimize the privileges of Jews over non-Jews; a republican discourse, which emphasizes the contribution to the declared aims of Zionism, has been used to legitimize the privileges enjoyed by the Ashkenzim and men, especially through valorizing their contribution to the settling project and to the military. Finally, an inclusive liberal discourse of citizenship has been used to legitimize rights for all Israeli citizens. The meritocratic sporting ideology, and especially the accelerated commercialization of Israeli soccer since the 1980s,[33] have been a fertile ground for nurturing the liberal discourse of citizenship.[34] Therefore, the most common tendency of liberals in Israel is to embrace Arab teams and players and celebrate their success. In their eyes, soccer seems to be a glimpse of light in the darkness of discrimination, oppression, and growing intercommunal suspicion and hostility.

However, since at the same time soccer has remained crucial for fortifying masculine identities, this liberal discourse has been relevant only to the ethno-national dimension. In its patriarchal organizational structure, its complete exclusion of women, and in the sexist discourse it produces, soccer in Israel can compete only with the army in the reproduction of the gender order, or for the title of most unfriendly institution for women.

The status of soccer is directly related to the ethnically stratified structure of Israeli society, and to the sport's role in protecting the masculinity of men from diverse social classes. The higher the threat to the masculinity of men, the higher their need to exclude women from the sphere of sports. The political implication of this statement is that women's inclusion in sports depends to a great extent on the level of socioeconomic inequality, and the degree of ethnic stratification of a given society. The struggle for women's inclusion in sport, therefore, is an integral part of the struggles against other dimensions of inequality between citizens.

Endnotes

1. An Israeli imitation of the American magazine People. [Return to text]

2. Raz Yosef, "Homoland: Interracial Sex and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Israeli Cinema." A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no. 4 (2002): 553-579. [Return to text]

3. Messner, Michael, Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 9-13. [Return to text]

4. Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism in Sport (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 10. [Return to text]

5. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California, 1989), 44. [Return to text]

6. Sheila Hannah Katz, "Adam and Adama, 'Ird and Ard: Engendering Political Conflict and Identity in Early Jewish and Palestinian Nationalisms," in Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996). [Return to text]

7. David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Daniel Boyarin, "Outing Freud's Zionism, or, the Bitextuality of the Diaspora Jew," in Queer Diasporas, ed. Cindy Patton and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). [Return to text]

8. Steve Israel and Seth Forman, Great Jewish Speeches throughout History (Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994). [Return to text]

9. Katz, "Adam and Adama." [Return to text]

10. Filastin, February 7, 1946. [Return to text]

11. Tamir Sorek, Arab Soccer in a Jewish State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2007). [Return to text]

12. Katz, "Adam ad Adama." [Return to text]

13. Areen Hawari, "Men Under the Military Regime," Adalah's Review, 4 (2004): 33-45. [Return to text]

14. Tamir Sorek, "Palestinian Nationalism has Left the Field: A Shortened History of Arab Soccer in Israel," International Journal of Middle East Studies, 35, no. 3 (2003): 417-437. [Return to text]

15. Edna Lomsky-Feder and Eyal Ben Ari, "From 'The People in Uniform' to 'Different Uniforms for the People': Professionalism, Diversity and the Israeli Defense Forces," in Managing Diversity in the Armed Forces: Experiences from Nine Countries, ed. Joseph Soeters and Jan Van der Meulen (Tiburg: Tiburg University Press, 1999). [Return to text]

16. Eduardo P. Archetti, "Masculinity and Football: the Formation of National Identity in Argentina," in Game Without Frontiers: Football, Identity, and Modernity, ed. Richard Giulianotti and John Williams (Aldershot: Arena, 1994); Varda Burstyn, The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). [Return to text]

17. Muhammed Amara and Sufian Kabaha, A Split IdentityÑPolitical Division and Social Reflections in a Divided Village [in Hebrew] (Giv'at Haviva: The Institute for Peace Research, 1996). [Return to text]

18. Tamir Sorek, Arab Soccer in a Jewish State [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Eshkolot, 2005). [Return to text]

19. Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, "Citizenship and Stratification in an Ethnic Democracy," Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 3 (1998): 408-27. [Return to text]

20. Yosef, "Homoland." [Return to text]

21. Orna, Sasson-Levy, "Military, Masculinity, and Citizenship: Tensions and Contradictions in the Experience of Blue-Collar Soldiers," Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10, no. 3 (2003): 319-345. [Return to text]

22. Moshe Semyonov, "Occupational Mobility through Sport: The Case of Israeli Soccer," International Review for the Sociology of Sport 21, no. 1 (1986): 23-33. [Return to text]

23. For details about the data and calculations, see my forthcoming book, Arab soccer in a Jewish State, Cambridge University Press, 2007, Appendix 5. [Return to text]

24. Gendered Society Reader, ed. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). [Return to text]

25. Robb Willer, "Overdoing Gender" (lecture, annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, PA, 2005). [Return to text]

26. Yosef, "Homoland." [Return to text]

27. Iton Tel Aviv, October 25, 2002. [Return to text]

28. In 2004, the Israeli Gambling Authority, the main provider of public money for sports, allocated 100 million NIS for men soccer teams and only 470 thousand for women soccer teams. The Supreme Court ordered to correct this imbalance in the 2005 budget. [Return to text]

29. Maccabi Tel Aviv won the European championship in 1977, 1981, 2001, 2004, and 2005. [Return to text]

30. Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the Sociology and History of Women's Sports (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). [Return to text]

31. Annelies Knoppers and Anton Anthonissen, "Women's Soccer in the United States and the Netherlands: Differences and Similarities in Regimes of Inequalities," Sociology of Sport Journal 20, no. 4 (2003): 351-370; John Sugden, "USA and the World Cup: American Nativism and the Rejection of the People's Game," in Hosts and Champion: Soccer Cultures, National Identities and the USA World Cup, ed. John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson (Hants, UK: Ashgate, 1994). [Return to text]

32. Shafir and Peled, "Citizenship and Stratification." [Return to text]

33. Amir Ben Porat, "The Commodification of Football in Israel," International Review for the Sociology of Sport 3, no. 33 (1998): 269-276. [Return to text]

34. Tamir Sorek, "Arab Football in Israel as an 'Integrative Enclave,'" Ethnic and Racial Studies 26, no. 3 (2003): 422-50. [Return to text]