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.1 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 Europe2 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.3 Therefore, the level of women’s inclusion in soccer highly depends on which class is associated with the game in each country.4 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.5 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,6 have been a fertile ground for nurturing the liberal discourse of citizenship.7 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.
- 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. [↩]
- Maccabi Tel Aviv won the European championship in 1977, 1981, 2001, 2004, and 2005. [↩]
- Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the Sociology and History of Women’s Sports (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). [↩]
- 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). [↩]
- Shafir and Peled, “Citizenship and Stratification.” [↩]
- Amir Ben Porat, “The Commodification of Football in Israel,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 3, no. 33 (1998): 269-276. [↩]
- Tamir Sorek, “Arab Football in Israel as an ‘Integrative Enclave,'” Ethnic and Racial Studies 26, no. 3 (2003): 422-50. [↩]
