COVID Limits Beitar Jerusalem Fans To Chanting Racist Slogans At Home

“You haven’t lived until you’ve celebrated a national championship by chanting, ‘ein Aravim, ein piggu’im.'”

Jerusalem, June 17 – Staunch supporters of this capital city’s yellow-and-black-clad soccer team remain unable to bring their anti-Arab animus to games at Teddy Stadium, as the raging global pandemic keeps the sport on hold, local sources report, and forces the group known as La Familia to instead produce their slurs and shouted verbal abuse only within the residences to which the Ministry of Health’s lockdown restrictions confine them.

Beitar Jerusalem Football Club’s fans expressed their ongoing frustration this week at the lack of opportunity they have had in recent months to spew ethnicity-based venom at Arab players, staff, and co-citizens of Israel who cross their paths in the context of games against the Jerusalem team. The indefinite suspension of league play, and of organized sports in general, until the current coronavirus outbreak abates, deprives those fans of what many consider an important, critical expression of identity.

“I’m not sure how much longer we can sustain this,” worried Gilo neighborhood resident Dov Assoulin, 38. “I’ve been going to Beitar games since I was a kid, and my brothers and friends, we all cemented our sense of self around rooting for the team and yelling anti-Arab slogans. You haven’t lived until you’ve celebrated a national championship by chanting, ‘ein Aravim, ein piggu’im’ – ‘No Arabs = No Terrorist Attacks’. Not having that big outlet, I’m going a little crazy.”

“Some of my most intense experiences have occurred at home games against [the team from the Arab city of] Sakhnin,” recalled Ir Gannim neighborhood superfan Eli Mordekhai, 23. “We’d shout ourselves hoarse comparing the opposing players to every kind of livestock, to dogs, whatever. Insulting their ancestry, their culture, the Prophet Muhammad, their connection to this land – anything to feel superior, anything to try to get under their skin. It’s one of the strongest traditions among my group of friends, and I’ve made dozens of other lifetime friends as we’ve bonded over a shared dislike of Arabs. Not to have that vehicle for creating and reaffirming these strong connections is a real challenge, one that Zoom or Skype interactions just can’t hope to capture. I hope by next season we can go back to the way things were.”

The duration of the lockdown – that has seen some loosening over the last month, but organized league sports have not resumed – brings with it a bristling against continued restrictions; many in this city of over 800,000 now disregard the masks-in-public requirement, and enforcement has proved spotty at best. Beitar fans count many of their number in the defiant demographic, but acknowledge it will take more than simple rebelliousness to reinstate games at which they can abuse their fellow citizens.

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