Israeli soccer team, infamous for anti-Arab fans, has new co-owner: a sheikh

Sports
By Editor_1
Beitar Jerusalem owner Moshe Hogeg (C) with UAE member of the royal family, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Nahyan (R), who bought half the team  - timesofisrael.com
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By David M. Halbfinger and Adam Rasgon

JERUSALEM — A top-tier Israeli soccer team with a notoriously racist, Arab-hating fan base has sold a 50% ownership stake to a member of one of the royal families of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The barrier-shattering deal is among the first fruits of Israel’s nearly 3-month-old normalization agreement with the Emirates and carries outsize symbolic importance: It puts a Muslim sheikh at the helm of Beitar Jerusalem, the only Israeli team that has never fielded an Arab player — and whose most extremist fans routinely chant virulent slurs like “Death to Arabs”.

The new co-owners, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, 50, and Moshe Hogeg, 39, an Israeli cryptocurrency executive who acquired the team in 2018, said in a telephone interview Monday (7) night that their union was motivated in large part by the goal of combating exactly that sort of hatred.

“Our message is that we are all equal,” Hogeg said. “We want to show to young kids that we are all equal and that we can work and do beautiful things together. The message is more powerful than the football.”

Sheikh Hamad, a first cousin of the de facto Emirati ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, suggested Beitar could soon have an Arab member on its squad.

“The door’s open to anyone, for any talented player, no matter where he is from or what his religion is,” he said. “It should be based on merit.”

He said he opposed building walls between people. “We should teach them that we are taking a positive step towards peace and harmony,” he said.

Already, several prominent Arab players have expressed a willingness to break the Beitar barrier, said Uri Levy, a soccer writer who runs the Israeli fan site BabaGol. (An Arab midfielder on the Israeli national soccer team, Diaa Sabia, was signed in September to the Al Nasr team in Dubai.)

Israeli liberals sceptical about the country’s normalization deals nonetheless found reason to cheer the conspicuous twist of the new alliance.

“The sale of Beitar to the Arabs is the clearest sign that God exists,” Noa Landau, the diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, wrote on Twitter.

Many Arab commentators jeered, however.

Saied Hasnen, a sports radio host, called the deal “shameful.” He said that he opposed any Arab normalization of Israel, but particularly lamented the sheikh’s decision to go into business with Beitar, calling the team and its supporters “a sinful and dirty swamp of racists who hate Arabs — the worst people in society.”

Khalid Dokhi, the director-general of Bnei Sakhnin, Israel’s most successful Arab club, expressed mixed feelings. “If it leads to a change in the racist culture, that would be beneficial,” said Dokhi, whose team plays in an Arab city. “But if it doesn’t, it’s a waste of money.”

Sheikh Hamad’s investment appears to be to a giant leap forward in what has been a long and often tempestuous struggle by several team owners to tame Beitar Jerusalem’s ultra-right-wing fan base.

While other clubs have long fielded Jewish and Arab players, who regularly play together for the Israeli national soccer team, Beitar’s far-right supporters’ group, La Familia, agitated against such a move, sometimes violently. The club has regularly been fined and handed stadium bans for violent behaviour as well as racist chants.

A Nigerian Muslim who joined the team in 2004 was regularly harassed and quit after less than a year. In 2005, La Familia protested over reports that Beitar might sign Abbas Suan, an Israeli-Arab who starred for Bnei Sakhnin. When he scored a vital goal for Israel in a World Cup qualification match against Ireland, Beitar supporters held up a banner saying, “Abbas Suan, you do not represent us.”

Another attempt was made in 2013 when two Muslim players, this time from Chechnya, were signed. Again there was violent opposition, captured searingly in the documentary ‘Forever Pure’.

When one of the Chechens, striker Zaur Sadayev, scored his first goal for the club to secure a 1-1 tie with rival Maccabi Netanya, hundreds of Beitar fans chose to leave the stadium in disgust rather than celebrate. The Chechen players lasted only a handful of games.

Levy, the soccer writer, said the film was a turning point. “It opened the eyes of many Beitar fans about the need to grow up and let go of this vicious, evil and ancient stance that has no place anywhere in the world anymore,” he said.

Sheikh Hamad said he planned to invest about $92 million into the club over the next decade.

In the interview, Hogeg said he had been drawn by the challenge of turning around Beitar’s reputation. “I thought it should be a great thing to do — to fix this and show the other side,” he said.

Hogeg said he had taken the trouble of obtaining the blessing of a leading Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbi before going ahead with the deal.

Sheikh Hamad, asked how the deal had come together, responded simply: “God connected us.”

-New York Times

 

 

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