“These points are Arab”: nationalist rhetoric in the sports press

Abstract

Previous chapters have emphasized the integrative aspects of soccer and the historical role it played in inhibiting national protest among the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel. Soccer's conservative role has been challenged by the new Arabic press that has been developed in Israel since the mid 1980s. Analyzing Arab soccer in Israel as a “contested terrain” is meaningful mainly because of the vocal and concrete opposition of Arab sports journalists to the hegemonic meanings produced both in the stadiums and in the Hebrew media. This active and extensive nationalist tone in the Arabic press is relatively new. The effect of the 1948 war on the Arab-Palestinian media was similar to its implications for the Palestinian independent sports infrastructure. Namely, the media elite – most of the publishers, editors, and journalists – were exiled and Palestinian newspapers ceased to exist (Caspi and Kabaha 2001). Under Israeli rule, these newspapers were replaced by official mouthpieces of the Histadrut and the Zionist parties. The only newspaper that survived the war was al-Ittiḥad , the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, which had expressed an oppositional line but was subjected to strict censorship. Since the mid 1980s however, the Arabic press in Israel has experienced relative prosperity in the number and diversity of newspapers and has undergone a significant shift in political tone. This shift is described by Caspi and Kabaha (2001) as a “transformation from a [status quo oriented] mobilized press, to a nationally conscious press, self mobilized for the struggle of the Palestinian minority in Israeli society.”