The recent Palestinian initiative to suspend Israel from the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA),is potentially a transformative moment, because it interferes with common alliances and division lines in Jewish-Israeli society.
Soccer is a global culture, and participation in international competitions could potentially provide fans with a sense of legitimacy, especially if legitimacy is questioned. In the hegemonic Israeli culture, a special place is reserved for the longing for international legitimacy - the indulgence in the memory of the 1947 UN vote on the partition plan is a founding element of this longing, but we see its incarnation in the vigorous engagement of Israelis with the Eurovision song competition and especially in the voting patterns for the songs, as well as the fixation of Israelis to the screens during the soccer world championship of 17-year-old boys.
White South Africans during the Apartheid era had similar concerns. In the weeks leading up to the 1992 referendum, in which white voters were called to decide whether to continue the process of ending Apartheid, the National Party used South Africa's gradual return to international competition to persuade voters to support negotiations.
In a crude and necessarily simplistic generalization, the so-called "center-left" Zionist camp strives much more for Israel's integration into the global economy and culture, compared with the Netanyahu coalition. Therefore, the effectiveness of international pressures on the current government is limited and their translation into policy change may be relatively slow. But there in the soccer domain, the dividing lines in the intra-Jewish struggles in Israel deviate from the familiar pattern of electoral politics and from the love/hate for Netanyahu.
While the yearning to integrate into global culture is more characteristic of the secular Ashkenazi public (most of whom despise the current government), it is precisely in the field of soccer that the Netanyahu camp is overrepresented. In a survey I conducted three years ago, I found that the percentage of Mizrahim attending soccer stadium as spectators is seventy percent higher than the percentage of Ashkenazim. Likewise, the proportion of "masortim" (traditionalists) is almost double that of the secular, almost three times the proportion of the religious, and more than six times that of the ultra-Orthodox.
Israel's players celebrate after scoring a goal during their 2014 World Cup qualifying soccer match against Luxembourg at the Josy Barthel stadium in Luxembourg.Credit: REUTERS
While Jewish Israelis of the anti-Netanyahu camp have recently become growingly aware that the war in Gaza is futile, comes with unbearable price in terms of human lives and economic damage, and serves only the personal interest of Netanyahu and the messianic vision of his political partners - they seem to be unable to shake the foundation of the government, and therefore cannot end the war. Therefore, the Palestinian initiative to suspend Israel from FIFA is of particular importance and provide a rare opportunity: it is the soft underbelly of the current coalition and a move that can drive a wedge between its components.
Many Israelis may start to realize the war will not end, the residents of the north will not return to their homes, the abductees will remain in the tunnels of Gaza, and the economy will continue to race into the abyss - without painful and effective international pressure.
Despite the evident power of economic and diplomatic pressures, we should not underestimate the importance of cultural sanctions. The boycott of the Israeli national soccer team sends a message that business is not as usual, that there is a price for Israel's crimes against humanity and that an apartheid regime is illegitimate.
Unlike the growing academic boycott, which mainly worries the upper educational subsect, soccer touches diverse sectors and the suspension of Israel would have unprecedented public reverberations. It might challenge the alliance between the national-ultra-Orthodox and the masortim, and create shared interests between soccer fans from different social classes.
In South Africa, in a 1989 survey held only a year before the end of Apartheid, only four percent of white South African supported ending the apartheid regime. The differences between the cases are enormous, but the crucial role of international pressure is not one of them, and its potential to affect life-loving individuals who are currently reluctant to change the imbalance of power should be underestimated.
The immediate reaction of the media and the majority of the public to the suspension of Israel will be "antisemitism!" and those who believe in sharing the country with the Palestinians will not become a majority overnight. In the long term, though, as in South Africa, we might see an Israeli leader promising to return Israel to the international soccer arena, and by extension - to replace the occupation, messianic visions, and existential anxieties with simple acts like spending fun time among family and friends and the roars of joy over a scored goal.
Tamir Sorek is a Liberal Arts Professor of Middle East History at Penn State University. His biography of Tawfiq Zayyad has been published in English by Stanford University Press (2020), in Arabic by MADAR (2023), and in Hebrew by Pardes.