ABSTRACT
In the field of Middle Eastern Studies, popular culture remains a marginalized field of study and research. The main focus is typically instead placed on formal politics, elites, states, economies, conflicts, and wars while a cultural phenomenon such as sport remains of marginal inquiry. In studies of Israel/Palestine, the same pattern is evident. Scholars have studied the history of the state, the history of Palestinians, and Israeli society/Palestinian society with little attention to the many cultural phenomena that can further contribute to understating both the state and society. When studying Palestinian society, little attention has been paid to its secular life or its cultural and political agency. Even more perplexing is the dearth of detailed studies of daily life. The focus on the Israeli state has been dominated by its political process, “peace” talks, policies, and regional security issues. The intimate aspects of state power and how it penetrates even “small” issues like sports within the Palestinian community are often ignored. This chapter thus aims to fill a gap in this area, illustrating how infrequently studied topics such as sport can help scholars understand the politics of peoples and states in the region. Through the case of soccer in Israel/Palestine, I show how sport is highly connected to politics, power, and state policies. The chapter also highlights how the present and past are connected when it comes to the relationship between the state and its society; this is especially the case for a settler-colonial state and its native citizens/subjects. My research is based on three years of local archival, fieldwork, and interviews with local witnesses in the village Kafr Yassif – in Galilee, Israel. I also analyze the Israeli government’s own fact-finding committee’s report on the violence that erupted around a soccer game in the village in 1981. After summarizing the event and its aftermath, I provide a general overview of the history of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and a history of the Israeli state. I show why categorizing this state and society as a
settler-colonial case is more helpful for understanding that relationship. Moreover, this lens assists in understanding state policies, even those not officially declared, as was the case with the violence surrounding the soccer game in Kafr Yassif. I will discuss how state security and police apparatuses operated in the time surrounding that event. I conclude by arguing that popular culture, and sport in particular, is an important area for the study of societies and states, and, in the case of Israel, reveals much about the relationship between each.
