By Larry Derfner
I suppose Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans should be congratulated for restraint. They didn’t start making monkey sounds — chanting “hoo-hoo-hoo” as loud as they could — at black players on the opposing team until one of them scored a goal.
It’s quite a sensation to hear “hoo-hoo-hoo” every time a black player touches the ball when you’re watching a soccer game in a big stadium in Tel Aviv. That was the scene at Bloomfield Stadium in a Saturday game recently between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Kfar Saba.
None of the chanters were sitting next to me and my two sons, although I could hear some of them a few rows back. In the next section, Section 10, where the hardcore Maccabi fans sit, “hoo-hoo-hoo” made a tremendous din.
Observers in the stands for the New Israel Fund’s “Kick Racism Out of Football” project put the number of chanters at 2,000. It was probably more like a few hundred in the overall crowd of 2,000 in Section 10.
But since none of the fans was protesting, it seemed like all 2,000 were chanting “hoo-hoo-hoo” at Hapoel’s black players. In effect, they were.
Bloomfield wasn’t the only stadium where you could have heard monkey chants that day. According to NIF’s observers, fans of Hapoel Tel Aviv, Betar Jerusalem and Maccabi Netanya also did it to opposing black players.
All but one of the targets were foreign players, usually from Africa. The exception was Hapoel Tel Aviv’s Baruch Dego, probably the best-known Ethiopian Jewish immigrant in Israel, who heard it from fans of Betar Jerusalem.
There was one bright spot on the anti-racism front that Saturday. Some of the Hapoel Tel Aviv fans tried to shut up the chanters in their midst. That takes guts. It can mean standing up to a mob.
What is the excuse?
We all know the common excuse for Israeli racism against Arabs — it’s not really racism, you see, it’s just the unfortunate but understandable reaction of people provoked by a history of Arab terror, war and hatred.
But what is the excuse for “hoo-hoo-hoo” at Israeli soccer games? What did people in Ghana or Ethiopian Jewry do to Israel?
The monkey chants have been going on in Israel for nearly 15 years, ever since the first black player, Cyril McEnackey of Cameroon, came into the league. It’s become common, part of the game.
No newspaper’s sports pages reported the taunting at the game I saw. In fact, Yediot Aharonot ran a feature on two of Hapoel Kfar Saba’s Ghanaian players, and the jungle noises they’d endured weren’t even mentioned.
So maybe Israeli racism against Arabs can’t be explained away by Arab hostility alone. Maybe it is, at least in part, an outgrowth of Israeli racism in general. Personally, I don’t think there’s any maybe about it.
To put things in proportion, though, soccer racism — including anti-Semitism — is worse in European countries than it is in Israel. It used to be murderous in Britain until lawmakers and police started cracking down.
I’ve never thought Israel was unusually racist in comparison with other countries. But I do think Israel is unusually hypocritical about racism, and may even be the world leader in that regard, because our national identity is based on Jews being victims of a form of racism — anti-Semitism — and we never stop lecturing the world about it.
One thing about Israeli soccer racism never gets mentioned publicly, but I think everyone who follows Israeli soccer knows it: The fans chanting abuse at blacks and Arabs are almost always rough, uneducated Sephardim.
They, along with Russian immigrants, are the demographic group that produces most of the pure, primitive racism — the kind that doesn’t stop at Arabs by any means — that’s found in this country.
I’m not saying all uneducated Sephardim and Russian immigrants are racists. But I’m saying that Israelis who show open contempt not only for Arabs, but for blacks and other non-whites as well, tend to be uneducated Sephardim or Russian immigrants.
At Israeli soccer games, the chants of “hoo-hoo-hoo” at black players, along with the whole repertoire of abuse directed at Arab players, is heard almost exclusively from Sephardi punks and brawlers.
The monkey chanting has gone down over the last 15 years, but the taunting of Arab players is getting worse, said Itzik Shanan, who started the soccer racism project for the NIF a few years ago.
Since July of last year, the law says Israelis convicted of creating racist spectacles can be jailed for up to a year. Shanan says police have made several such arrests at soccer games.
But I didn’t see them budge at Bloomfield. The fans in Section 10 were completely free to act like animals in the jungle, literally.
“Why are they making that noise?” my 7-year-old asked me. “Shhh, don’t tell him now; if they hear you, God help us,” my 11-year-old, the soccer player in the family, whispered.
Larry Derfner writes about Israeli society for U.S. Jewish newspapers and the Jerusalem Post.
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