Derek Brown watches the only Arab soccer team playing in Israel’s premier division
BY the side of a sprawling refuse tip, at the end of a twisting dirt track, stands the pride and joy of Tayibeh. A stadium they call it, but they jest.
The real joke is that this patch of weeds, with a single bank of cement terracing, sagging goalposts, and a changing room half the size of a post-war scout hut, just might become a focus of top European football. For Hapoel Tayibeh are in the big time now, rubbish tip and all.
Eight years ago, the team was heading for the fourth division. It was saved by a Roy- of-the-Rovers finish to the season, with five wins out of five. Since then, Tayibeh haven’t looked back: the 1992-93 season brought promotion to the second division, and earlier this year, Tayibeh made it to the National League – the equivalent of the Premier League.
In sporting terms, this news might not pass the so-what test. Promotion and relegation, after all, are the warp and woof of football. But in Israel they are news because they are an Arab team, the first to play at the top level of a game which, with the exception of basketball, is the nation’s sporting obsession.
There is, of course, a third big sport in Israel, much uglier than the others. Some might call it sectarianism. A much better word is racism. Which is why Tayibeh’s baptism in the National League has been attended by lurid accounts of crowds chanting “Death to the Arabs” and – for racism is rarely exclusive – “Death to the Jews”.
It wasn’t like that recently, when Tayibeh travelled a dozen kilometres to play Maccabi Petah Tiqva. A decorous place, Petah Tiqva, with a spruce little ground and a home crowd on its best behaviour. The Tayibeh supporters were on good form too. They greeted the opposing side with lusty cries of “rubbish” and they tossed a few empty bottles on to the pitch at moments – alas, rare – of high excitement. One man shrieked alarmingly at the referee, apparently urging him to commit a liturgically unsound act with his mother, but on the whole it was all good-natured.
To be sure, there was not much happening on the pitch to inflame communal or any other kind of passion. In a tentative, prodding sort of game, Petah Tiqva had three of the four serious scoring chances, and got the only goal with one of them.
At the end, as the equally balanced, strictly segregated crowd of perhaps 3 000 streamed out of the ground, there was no hint of friction, let alone conflict. But the key was segregation.
For Professor Amir Ben Porat, a behavioural scientist from Ben Gurion University, the appearance of an Arab team in the National League has worrying implications.
Not that he is opposed to the idea; rather, he is disturbed by its undercurrent of raw intolerance.
“To have an Arab team in the National League is very good for Israel. But the crowd behaviour is not. It could open up all sorts of divisions,” he said as he made his way to the Tayibeh section of the stand.
“Tayibeh’s first game in Jerusalem was very nasty. The crowd was shouting all sorts of abuse about terrorism and Arafat and killing the Arabs. This can’t be healthy for Israeli society.” With the exception of the good professor and your correspondent, that section was entirely Arab. Most were from Tayibeh, but there were also Arabs from Galilee and a raucous group of Bedouins from the south. And every single one was an Israeli.
It is not widely appreciated outside Israel that the Jewish State has an Arab minority of close to a million, or almost a fifth of the population. That minority is scattered throughout the country, with the principal centres being in Jaffa and Acre on the coast, Nazareth in the north, Beersheba in the south, and central towns such as Tayibeh (population 28 000), not 24km from Tel Aviv.
Most Jewish Israelis refer to their fellow citizens as Israeli Arabs. Many Arabs prefer to be known as Palestinians who happen to be citizens of Israel. But the confusion of identity is lessening, as the Arab population grows in size, confidence and, belatedly, prosperity.
The elevation of Hapoel Tayibeh is part of that process, giving Arabs a distinct presence in an important area of national life. The very name of the club is quintessentially Israeli: “Hapoel” (literally, worker) denotes one of the three big Zionist sporting federations that help fund teams like Tayibeh. To call Tayibeh an Arab team is logical, in so far as they are based in an Arab town. But two players are Jewish, and recent signings include a Pole, a Ukrainian and a Romanian.
Goalkeeper Mu’taz Ashgar, who has been overshadowed in the early part of the season by new (Jewish) signing Mickey Dahan, wears the beard of a devout Muslim. Such distinctions are clearly of no great interest to him, compared with the main business of footballing success.
Still only 22, he was a regular member of the team that triumphed last season. Now he dreams of playing in Europe, maybe even of winning selection to the national side. “I would be proud to represent Israel and the Arabs,” he says. “Israel is our country. There is a national team and of course I would like to play for it.” What about the chants of “death to the Arabs”? The gentle- voiced Ashgar shrugs. “Of course I hear these things, but I try not to. I just concentrate on the game,” he says.
Uda Bahgat, also aged 22, is the team’s star defender, having already played in the National League for Hapoel Petah Tiqva. An intense young man, he too is proud that there is an Arab team at the top, but seems unimpressed by its Arab-ness. “If you know the rules of the game, you know there must be a mixture,” he says. “Look at the Jewish teams: they have Arab players, players from Romania, France and Ghana. You must have a mixture to improve the overall level.” In the hard world of the top flight, Tayibeh are going to need more than ethnic diversity to hold on to their present status, let alone head for the glittering lights of Europe.
Their budget for this year is 5,3-million shekels. That is about a quarter of what the big teams have to spend, and Tayibeh need to spend more than them. There is that ground, for a start. It was built a decade ago when they were in the third division. It is unacceptable for a National League side.
The club plans to start improvements in the only way possible: the pitch will be ploughed up and relaid. There are plans for new terracing and better changing rooms. The crowd capacity will eventually be doubled to 5 000.
But it will take three months to make even marginal improvements and in the meantime the team must play its home matches in the seaside town of Netanya.
THIS is a double bind: Tayibeh supporters, from the town and beyond, cannot, or will not, travel every weekend. And if the club gets its own ground up to scratch, it is doubtful whether any but the most committed Jewish fans will follow their teams to an Arab town. Hostility may soften, but suspicion takes longer to dispel.
But that is defeatist talk and at this early stage of the season (played three, won one, lost two), Tayibeh folk are in no mood for it. There is an air of palpable enthusiasm. The groundsman, Abdul Fatah, explains apologetically that the water supply failed a couple of weeks ago, and the ground is at the highest point in Tayibeh, and soon everything will be better.
The most crucial signing this year turns up. He’s Wojtek Lazarek, the new coach. He has a distinguished record: he played 33 times for Poland and has coached the national side, as well as sides in England, Scotland, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel.
A ball of energy belied by his lugubrious appearance, he talks candidly about his young side, and the mountain they have to climb just to stay where they are. He’s optimistic, he says, and then he jerks his head at the pitch behind him. `Of course, I didn’t see this when I signed the contract in Warsaw. But I like difficult problems. They are for a strong man, yeh?’