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If he is an everyman, he certainly has the right name—Guy Israeli. By day, our man in Jerusalem is a tax consultant, but by night he is the "godfather" of La Familia, the football ultras who support the Israeli champions, Beitar Jerusalem. Tonight's game is an Israeli Cup tie, away to second division Ahi Nazareth, an Arab club in the lower Galilee.
We pull off the sharply lit trunk road into darkness. In the car's beams we pick out the broken street lamps, the pitted road and accumulated rubbish that announce our arrival in Arab Israel. Ahi Nazareth's ground sits on a high spike of a hill on the city's outskirts. On the summit, the floodlights of the citadel-stadium send a flare of light into the sky.
From the gloom below come the relentless spinning blue lights of police cars, vans and armoured trucks, criss-crossed by thin yellow beams from the helicopters circling above us. Denoted by his car number plate, the seventh-ranking police chief in the country is here, along with at least 600 police as well as border guards; one armed man for every six or seven fans, and they are nervous.
Like so much in Israel, the tension of this moment can be traced back to 1948—Israel's foundation year—and before. No Arab, Muslim or Christian has ever played for Beitar, though they are common in every other Israeli squad. Beitar fans have always booed Arab players and fans for not singing the Hatikva (Israel's national anthem) before games, but in the last decade or so the chants have become more viciously anti-Arab.
The most recent escalation in tensions began last November, on the 12th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by the ultra-nationalist Yigal Amir. A minute's silence was held by every Israel football crowd but for Beitar, where La Familia sang songs in praise of Amir and the West Bank settlers. The following month they joined settler groups in a flag-planting ceremony on an occupied East Jerusalem hilltop earmarked for settlement. The next few games heard the usual but now louder refrains of "Muhammad is dead," and "Death to the Arabs." After the Amir incident, the Israeli FA ordered Beitar to play their next match, against Arab club Bnei Sakhnin, behind closed doors.
The game was duly played in front of a one-man crowd, the man being Arcadi Gaydamak, a Russian-Israeli billionaire and owner of Beitar since 2005. Gaydamak spent the whole game screaming and running through the stands with a large Beitar flag, until Sakhnin scored a 90th-minute winner. The next day, the Israeli FA's offices in Tel Aviv were subject to an arson attack, and death threats against Avi Luzon, the FA's president, were sprayed on the walls. Beitar's condemnation of what were assumed to be the actions of La Familia were muted.
Back in the real war, early 2008 saw Qassam rockets fired from Gaza raining down on the Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon, killing two people. In response, the IDF wreaked havoc across eastern Gaza, leaving over 100 Palestinians dead. Then, in early March, Alaa Abu Dhaim, an Arab from East Jerusalem, returned to his former employers at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in West Jerusalem, killing eight before being shot himself. The Israeli FA organised a minute's silence for the victims, this time broken by chanting at both Ahi Nazareth and Bnei Sakhnin. So the cycle continues.
***
The tone is no more friendly for Raleb Majadele, the Arab Labour minister of sport, who does a peacemaking show on the halfway line with the coaches of the two teams. Nazareth officials come to the chain fence that separates the Beitar stands from the pitch and hand over two boxes of baklava. Initially fans grab for the sticky cakes, but then angry debate breaks out over whether the gift should be accepted. In the end the box is dashed against the concrete terraces, and one guy stands up to declare that no one is to eat any cakes "from the trash people." They remain scattered on the floor for the rest of the game, steadily spattered by sunflower seed husks and cigarette butts.
La Familia arrive ten minutes into the game, and around a hundred of them storm the lower decks of the stand and, with megaphones and venom, start an unbroken half of chanting, switching between songs of praise and damnation. At half time, the score is 0-0, and while most fans take a break, around 30 make their way to the back wall of the terraces. Some put on a yarmulke, others cover their heads with Beitar scarves, and all start to pray and sway as if we were at the Western wall. I climb up to find Guy Israeli in the midst of the devotional. He is a normal-looking fan: black sweat pants, a yellow Beitar hoodie, cropped hair, an open, oval face, almost boyish in its absorption and excitement. As the whistle goes for the second half and the crowd roars, he clasps my hands and shouts: "Five hundred years my family has been in Jerusalem. We come to pray not because we are religious men, but because we are Jewish. We must show them that we are Jewish." Then Beitar score. The crowd are dancing, and Guy bounds off into the embrace of the others. "Yes, yes… I'll see you in Jerusalem."
1-0, 2-0—Beitar take control and never look like giving it up. The Nazareth crowd is barely murmuring and Beitar respond with contempt: "The muezzin has gone home." And then it's 3-0 and the crowd sing for eight—one for every yeshiva student. With ten minutes to go, cars start to stream out of the car park as the Nazareth crowd slips away.
***
Football came late to the holy city. European Jews were playing on the coastal plain before 1917, but neither the small Jewish communities of west Jerusalem nor their Arab neighbours in Al-Quds took to the ball. The game arrived with the British army and soon became embroiled in the city's bitter conflicts. In 1929, a Jewish boy kicked a ball into an Arab garden. In the ensuing row, the boy was killed and his funeral became the catalyst for widespread communal riots. Apparently unperturbed by the game's capacity for generating conflict, Jewish Jerusalem took up organised football in the early 1930s, and the city's teams aligned themselves along the same politicised lines that characterised every other aspect of the Zionist movement: Hapoel on the left, Maccabi in the centre, Beitar on the right.
Beitar Jerusalem were founded in 1936 as the sporting wing of the Beitar movement, inspired by the militant revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky. The British were sufficiently nervous about Beitar to intern most of the team, sending them to Eritrea, where they played against camp guards. The suspicions were well grounded: in 1946 the Irgun—the military wing of the Beitar movement—blew up part of the King David Hotel, which housed the British CID.
Across the road from the hotel is the Jerusalem YMCA and its small stadium, once the centre of the city's football culture. The complex was opened in 1933 by Lord Allenby, commander of the British mandate. The opening words of his address are inscribed on a tile outside the ground: "Here is a place… where political and religious jealousies can be forgotten and international unity developed." It didn't quite work out like that.
Next to the inscription I meet Udi Robovich, once a star player with Beitar. These days he runs a spare parts business north of Jerusalem. "I trade with Hamas, Fatah, I trade with everyone. It's no problem," he says. When he was playing in the 1950s and 1960s, football was a matter of local pride and grudges. Jerusalem was a backwater, the teams were amateur and the pitch at the YMCA was packed sand. West Jerusalem was cut off from the old city and a long way, physically and culturally, from the cities of the coastal plains, the heartlands of the new Israeli state. Jerusalem's bitter local divisions—between Ashkenazim and Sephardic Jews, the Labour party and the Herut (Likud's predecessor), the establishment and the excluded—were played out in the lower divisions between Hapoel and Beitar. A Hapoel card was the key to gaining jobs and access to public services, but you would find plenty of Hapoel card-holders spending their weekend in the Beitar stands. There were Arabs there too, something impossible to imagine now.
The fate of Beitar, like all of Jerusalem, changed with the 1967 six-day war. The Israelis captured the whole of eastern Jerusalem and expanded the municipal boundaries into the West Bank. From a provincial town, Jerusalem assumed the mantle of the "eternal capital" of Israel. The following season, Robovich himself scored the goal that took Beitar into the top division for the first time. Another decade on, and Beitar were established in the top flight, while Likud had come to power under Menachem Begin, a former head of Irgun. The citadels of the football and political establishment had been breached, and Beitar, for all its self-declared marginality, had become the mainstream. Members of Likud cabinets, from Benjamin Netanyahu to Ehud Olmert, could be seen in the stands. The yellow convoy of cars and buses would throng the narrow road along the Jerusalem corridor on match days as fans streamed in from across the country.
***
As Beitar rose, Hapoel Jerusalem descended, steadily falling down the league tables. The atmosphere in the stands became so bad, and the owners so implacable, that last year the remnants of Jerusalem's sporting left took the momentous decision to break away from Hapoel and form their own club. Over 3,000 people bought into the project, and now, scrapping it out in the fourth division, Hapoel Katamon is the last bastion of the secular Jewish left in Jerusalem. In the upper tier of the stands you find what they call the House of Lords—Jerusalem's scribes, professors and venture capitalists. Down below are their kids and their friends, the Ethiopians that the club have been reaching out to, taxi drivers and their families. Hapoel's games at Teddy Stadium are the best attended in the lower leagues, their cause is righteous and their energies unflagging, but they look beleaguered in the vast stone bowl.
Yet, even in recent times, Beitar have not always had a smooth ride. Like Hapoel, the club has had a series of irrational owners who have taken it to the brink of bankruptcy, and it has had to rely on its political connections to bail it out. Since the signing of the Oslo accords in the early 1990s, Beitar's fans have become ever more militantly anti-Arab and pro-settler. Five years ago, this seething mass of discontent and anger was given organisational shape by the creation of La Familia, who imported techniques of support and protest perfected in Italian football. Yet Beitar still could not claim the top spot in Israeli football. The old guard, like Maccabi Haifa and Tel Aviv, kept their edge, continuing to stoke the Beitar crowd's sense of marginality.
What finally took Beitar to the top of Israel football was the arrival of Arcadi Gaydamak. A man of many passports, he generally travels on his Angolan diplomatic one. Allegations of money laundering and arms dealing hang over him in France and elsewhere. Since his arrival in Israel, he has bought into the media, food companies and supermarkets. Beitar were among his first acquisitions, and after Gaydamak's cash bought up most of the Israeli national team and selected foreigners, Beitar stormed to victory in the championship last year.
Not content to shake up Israeli football, Gaydamak has dipped his toes into the country's politics. During the second Lebanon war in 2006, he set up a tent city on a Mediterranean beach to which residents of embattled border towns could flee. He did the same for Sderot in the south when the city came under persistent Qassam fire from Gaza. Then, in mid-2007, he created a political party, Social Justice, and stated his intention to run for the mayoralty of Jerusalem this year and the Knesset in 2009.
So far, Social Justice has been little more than a press release exercise, but it now appears to be acquiring material form. Gaydamak himself is not available for interview, and his brusque Israeli spokesman made it clear that no one else can speak for him or the party. However, the Moscow office doesn't seem to know this script, and they send us off to meet Gaydamak's legal adviser at the party's new headquarters, a run-down industrial unit in a Tel Aviv back street.
Our lawyer-adviser—let's call him N—has a shaven head; his eyes are a stark pale blue. A tight white silk polo neck is teamed with a blue blazer and nautical gold buttons. One ear is mutilated; in the other hangs thousands of pounds worth of diamond earring. I try to get N to explore the party's origins (Arcadi's brilliant idea), its supporter base (few and far between) and its agenda (anodyne populism and the pretence of having no foreign policy). But instead he gets out his laptop and shows us a slideshow of his time in the commandos.
N tells us that Arcadi is a philosopher, a deep thinker, and a gvir—the patron and kingpin of the shtetl. Maybe he will meet us, maybe not; who can say? We finish on a rambling tale of inter-oligarch feuds that terminates suddenly with a Russian political proverb: "If you want to fuck me, kiss me first."
Gaydamak and his staff are intoxicated with their own self-importance and their capacity to turn money into power. However, their influence remains limited. The polls give Gaydamak 10 per cent support in the Jerusalem mayoral elections. He may have Beitar, but the ultra-Orthodox don't care about football. His party might get eight or nine out of the 120 Knesset seats at the general election next year, and so at best he can hope to be a kingmaker, using his expensively bought votes to support one or other of the vying factions in Israel's fragmented party system. There seems little likelihood of a Labour revival, and Olmert's Kadima party is badly tarnished by its period of office. Likud, under Benjamin Netanyahu, is not doing much better, but with the support of the religious parties, the hardline Russian-Israeli party Yisrael Beiteinu and Gaydamak, it could lead the most hardline Israeli government ever.
***
We arrive to meet Guy Israeli again at Beitar's training ground in south Jerusalem. Guy is late, and we are greeted instead by a younger cohort of La Familia, who skulk around, smoke and throw bangers at us. When Guy arrives, we sit in a temporary stand and he tells us how he started La Familia to raise support for Beitar, and how he now controls thousands of fans through a pyramid of junior officers and mobile phones. La Familia, he says, cost him his marriage. His wife, a member herself, eventually asked him to choose—and he chose La Familia. "This is my family, my house, everything."
I ask him again about praying at Nazareth. He is clear-headed, but uncompromising. "When I see a million Muslims praying in my country, it makes me nervous. So I want them to see me. The Arabs have ten, 11 countries; we have only one. And they want this one. Why?"
"Do football games against Nazareth feel like a war?"
"The government expects football to make peace. But we don't want peace. We want war. A week ago an Arab killed eight students at the yeshiva. So we will take revenge. We want revenge, we want blood."
"How will it end?"
"You can't make peace without war. If you have a dog, you love him, but if he bites you, you hit him. The same here with Arabs—if he kills you, you must kill him. Then they say to you, OK, I won't do anything. And then you make peace."
"Do you think that time will come?"
"No."
There are other sides to Beitar. I meet the urbane David Frenkel, a software engineer in a dot-com start-up who was sufficiently obsessed with Beitar to have followed them to the Faroe Islands and driven across Europe to catch 20 minutes of a game at Wimbledon. But the arrival of Gaydamak and the rising tide of racism broke his fascination. Then there is gentle Jochi, who comes from the working-class districts of West Jerusalem and couldn't be anything but Beitar, which is why he's trying to fight back; recording racist chanting, posting it on the internet, denouncing the ultras. But I sense his love is fading. Guy Israeli is not Beitar, and Beitar is not Israeli football, nor a gauge of Israeli public opinion. But in the absence of other voices in the crowd, I wonder if he is moving closer to the centre of gravity.
Foreign observers eager to find evidence of the essential reasonableness of Israeli opinion point to polls that find 70 per cent of Jewish Israelis favour a two-state solution, and that 64 per cent, including 48 per cent of Likud voters, want their government to talk to Hamas. From this perspective, Beitar and La Familia are truly extreme, but dig beneath the surface of the polls and their views do not seem so outlandish. After all, even were there to be two states, 65 per cent of Jewish Israelis believe the border between them should be closed. Similarly, the kind of Palestinian state most Israelis are prepared to contemplate is geographically and economically fragmented, caged by permanent Israeli settlements, the separation wall and a massively enlarged Israeli East Jerusalem. Beyond the talk of solutions and borders, there is widespread distrust and antipathy. The polls also tell us that two thirds of Jewish Israelis would not live in the same building as an Arab; half would not let an Arab in their home; four in ten want segregation of entertainment places and a similar proportion believe the state needs to support "the emigration of Arab citizens."
On Saturday night, Beitar are at home to Maccabi Petah Tikvah, the team of Avi Luzon, the Israeli FA president. Outside the east stand, La Familia are gathering. We meet Guy again as he sells T-shirts and hoodies from the back of his car, emblazoned with, "No one fucks with La Familia." He and the hundreds milling around us let us know that Luzon will be a special target of their ire tonight. But other fans have their own reasons for attending. An older woman, a teacher in Tel Aviv, tells me that she comes to games "because I hate Arabs, of course." A teenage boy earnestly tells me that the only good Arab is a dead one.
Beitar's press office won't let us in the east stand, where the core of La Familia goes, but instead send us to the west, which houses the press and the director's boxes and where the older fans sit. Like the settlers, La Familia understand the power of infiltrations and outposts. The main body of the group is in the upper east stand, and they lead the singing. But in the north stand, behind the goal, they have a settlement on the concrete hilltops, and in the west stand there are fragmented groups of La Familia, positioned to influence the quieter fans, encouraging them to stand and sing. Huge banners across the east stand declare, "Ashkelon, Sderot, we are with you."
For much of the first 15 minutes, the crowd abuse Avi Luzon. When the Beitar management calls on the PA for them to stop, the jeers become louder and more insistent. Meanwhile, Beitar have taken control of the game. By the time the score is 3-0, Luzon is forgotten, Beitar are celebrating and one call comes to dominate all the rest:
Kale, Ramat Kal
Kale, Ramat Kal
I ask the man next to us to translate, which he does with a smile. Tvrtko Kale, a Croat, is Beitar's goalkeeper. Ramat Kal is Hebrew shorthand for the chief of staff of the IDF. Kale went on Israeli television earlier in the week. He said:
"Lots of friends ask me, how is the constant Hamas shelling of Sderot and Ashkelon being allowed? I remember how the Croats solved it when we had these problems: shoot, kill, destroy, and then you have no more problems… 50-60 years to try to make peace and it doesn't work?… I think it's time for Israel to go like this [smashes his hand down hard] and say, 'It's enough!'"
The man next to us says, "Kale's got the balls to say what the politicians won't." It is not just Guy Israeli celebrating. It is not just La Familia that is calling. The chant is coming from every stand and every quarter.
In mid-April, 1-0 up against Maccabi Herzliya, Beitar Jerusalem were within four minutes of clinching the Israeli championship. But then a prolonged pitch invasion saw the game abandoned. Initially the game was awarded to Herzliya, Beitar were docked two points and the fans banned for the rest of the season. But on appeal at the Israeli supreme court, the game was ordered to be replayed. Beitar are still on course for the championship. Meanwhile, Hapoel Katamon lost their key game of the season and remain marooned in the fourth division.
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