Although a sporting minnow, Israel certainly punches above its weight when it comes to tying its enemies up in legal knots, Declan Hayes writes.
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Just as it was with Nazi Germany, so also is it with Israel, where sport cannot be divorced from the nation’s underlying supremacist ideology. For Israel, it is the Zionist project, much more than participating in the particular sport that matters. Christian Zionist fanatic Orde Wingate and those who followed him were not sportsmen. They were, like their modern day clones, cold-blooded colonial killers with, in Wingate’s case, more than a screw loose upstairs. In so much as Israelis and the wider Zionist family venerate such Charles Mansons, unlike the Spartans, they should have no place, great or small, in sport’s pantheon.
The Spartans, whatever their other faults, respected their opponents’ sporting competitors. Not so the Israelis who tortured heroic Jordanian weight lifter Nader Afouri for decades, leaving him deaf, dumb, blind, paralysed and incontinent. To reinforce this point, look at Gaza where Israel’s air force gun kids down on the beach for kicking ball, or consider the myriad of Palestinian footballers they shot in the knees so they could never kick ball again. Part of the reason for those crimes is because, when Palestine won bronze in the 1999 Pan Arab Games, they ended up being ranked higher in FIFA rankings than their Israeli overlords, a minor hiccup shooting the Palestinian players in the knees soon solved.
Straight out of the Nazi playbook and, although anywhere else such crimes would be loudly denounced, Israel never gets a yellow, never mind a red card. One need only look at such clubs like FC Ironi Ariel which, because it is in an illegal settlement should be, by FIFA’s own rules, expelled from all competitions or at least given an indefinite suspension, rather than the indefinite pass by presidential decree it currently enjoys. And then there is Beitar Jerusalem, rightly universally regarded as the world’s most racist football team, which suffers no FIFA or other sanctions.
Not only does Israel not play fair but Israel never played fair. Prior to independence, the Zionist dominated Palestine Sports Federation were grassing up the Arab Palestine Sports Federation as a subversive terrorist supporting group, even though the Haganah and Irgun were up to their criminal necks in all equivalent Zionist and Jewish groups.
Israel’s attitude to sport can best be exemplified in krag maga, a Jewish form of pankration the Spartans excelled at. Imi Lichtenfeld, krag maga’s pioneer, learned his muscular Jewry beating up goyin in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, before emigrating to Palestine to establish the Haganah, where he trained the Palmach, the Haganah’s shock troops.
As krag maga is part of the master plan to breed the Doberman instinct in Israel’s citizens and allies, it may be seen as a continuation of Zionism’s plans to construct the new Jewish Superman, which took place along with the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Superman.
The tangled ideological roots of the New Jewish Superman are reflected in the Talmud, which condemned sports because of its associated idol worship and, horror of horrors, the propensity of Sparta’s women to compete in the nude.
Although the Book of the Maccabees, after which the modern Jewish Olympics are named, condoned and encouraged Jewish terrorism, it condemned the permissive Jewish Hellenisers for being enthusiastic members of Greek gymnasiums. This schizophrenia continued into the modern era where the Jewish Haskalah were rejected in Eastern Europe, whose Jews colonised Palestine even as American Jews were the dominant ethnic group in prize fighting and basketball, while also holding their own in (white) baseball.
Because Zionism’s founders were not into such frivolities, the1898 Zionist Congress saw Max Nordau, Theodor Herzl main sidekick, put the emphasis on a muscular Jewry which saw a massive rise in Jewish clubs throughout Europe.
George Eisten’s Jewish History and the Modern Sport, tells us that, though Zionist sport harnessed a range of primeval forces, one can never ignore the military implication of sport in Zionist thinking, all the more so as the dominating philosophical principles of the Maccabiah Games is Zionist at its core. Haim Kaufman and very many others make it plain that there were three inter-twined reasons for the growth of Jewish sports clubs. They were to counter the real and imagined threats of anti-Semitism, to allow Jews to prepare for armed combat and to propagate Zionism.
The Maccabiah Games is one of only seven worldwide competitions recognised, for God only knows what reason, by the International Olympic Committee. Given Israel’s modest Olympic successes when compared to the successes of American, European and Australian Jews and given the sheer size of the Maccabiah/Mossad network, it can be posited that Zionist and Jewish networking is much more important to Israel than are transient victories in one or other sport.
Certainly, Max Nurdau and Herzl’s other sidekicks, who started the Maccabiah movement, had no interest in sports per se. Their focus was to harness Jewish sports to the Zionist cause.
From Ireland in the west to the Russian Empire in the east, muscular Jewry was a fascist style movement to mould the New Jewish Man in the furnace of Jewish hatred to the goyim. Groups like the Prague based Hagibor Zionist club helped make the Zionist youth movement muscular, thuggish and tough. Sport afforded the Zionists the opportunity to weld the “Bolshevik” half of Jewry with the “banking” half, to marry opposites to each other under the Star of David and fables of Solomon, the Maccabees and other ethnic cleansers. Muscular Jewry helped Zionism replace old stereotypes of hook-nosed Shylocks, seductresses and subversives with newer ones that caught Hitler’s Aryan zeitgeist. Sport was nothing more than a Zionist building block.
Although Makkabi Helsinki the History of Helsinki’s Jewish Sports Club written by Zionist propagandists Rony Smolar and Adiel Hirschovits spins the lie that the club was formed in response to the (non-existent) persecution of Finnish Jews between 1939-45, muscular Judaisim and Zionist supremacism were at the heart of Makkabi Helsinki, the world’s oldest continuously functioning Jewish sports club, as it was with all such clubs.
Building der Volk and the sense of collective belonging to a superior and selective breed was the name of the game. Thus, when the Maccabi World Union was created at the 12th World Jewish Congress, building Zionist and the Zionist state, not dismantling anti-Semitism was its declared goal, just as it continued to be during and immediately after the Hitler years.
Yosef Yekutieili was the driving force in establishing the Maccabiah Games. Amnon, his son, was a squad commander in the Palmach, who was killed during the 1948 war to cleanse Palestine or its natives. Although many left wing Maccabiah were in the Palmach, which is pivotal to Israeli popular mythology, sport for sport’s sake was never their thing, just as it was never the pivot of the Waffen SS, who used it as a training tactic and to build camaraderie prior to the Battle of the Bulge.
Nina Spiegel’s Sporting a nation: the origins of Athleticism in Modern Israel argues that, in contemporary Israel, there is a “significant value placed on athletic ability” (p189) because the Zionists utilised sports for their nation building efforts before 1948, when sport was used to advertise supremacist ideas such as the New Jewish Man but that sport was hitched along to hikes, paramilitary training and manly, physical work, that are totally divorced from today’s commercialised, competitive and rather stale and sterile sports industry.
Although sport helped to forge the New Zionist Man, there were different nominally right and left wing groups competing to be the midwife of that Frankenstein. Zionism, however, was a national movement that strategically rejected a clear definition. Religious affiliation aside, almost none of its supporters could claim to share a common culture or agree on what kind of state they wanted Israel to be. To them, building Israel was a work in progress where, as we now see, differences between left and right would be ironed out and disappear over time and where sport would be subservient to Zionism’s meta-aims, which coalesced around the New Muscular Jewish Man giving the indigenous Palestinians their marching orders.
Thus, athletics and sports were seen as means for developing group spirit, controlled movement and discipline and for serving the goals of nationalism by cultivating unity and cohesion. Though the Spartans and the Nazis both would have understood all of this Zionist chicanery to a tee, post independence, sport was used as a tool for nation building and social cohesion, especially with immigrants from Arab countries where Zionism had been neither a significant social or political force.
Thus, Israel’s modest Olympic medal haul is due to Zionism putting less emphasis on flaunting the flag and more time on cementing the idea of the volk, of making Israelis see themselves as one Reich, one volk on one collective Zionist journey.
Although David Bolover’s The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide to Football Glory, which tells the incredible tale of Béla Guttman, is one of the many fine books extolling Jewish contributions to sport, there is, even in Guttman’s own Hakoah club, the ugly spectre of Zionist supremacism, which manifested itself more clearly in Wingate FC and similar front groupings. And though Israel may credibly claim much reflected glory from Guttman, that lustre is lost when we consider that Israel played a prominent role in banning the Russian paralympic team from participating in the 2016 Summer Paralympics. When Malaysia tried to ban the Israeli team from the 2019 World Para Swimming Championships, it was Malaysia and not Israel that got sanctioned.
Although a sporting minnow, Israel certainly punches above its weight when it comes to tying its enemies up in legal knots and sporting bodies as diverse as the Danish Olympic Committee, the Asian Football Confederation and UEFA have all had to kowtow to that litigious, pugnacious and repulsive little state. Because all of this is, at one level, childish, it might be time for more countries and sporting groups to tell Israel to keep its ball, to keep its bullets and to go play with itself and its fellow Western bullies, who see their own forms of sporting apartheid as a means towards equally devilish aims as those which inspired Wingate and his fellow crackpots to commit their crimes not only against sport but against good sportsmen like Nader Afouri and far too many equally innocent and blameless women and children to adumbrate here or anywhere else.
