Tamir Sorek Pa L E S T I N I a N N at I O N a L I S M H a S L E F T

This article examines the historical development of Arab–Palestinian soccer under the British Mandate, and then afterward under the State of Israel. It strives to explain why the Arab sporting grandstands—particularly those of soccer—did not become a site for the construction and expression of Palestinian national pride in Israel. “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.” This famous phrase of Eric Hobsbawm has been cited frequently in the current research on sports and collective identity. Social scientists as well as popular writers describe soccer and nationalist consciousness as two phenomena that tend to have at least an “elective affinity” relationship, to use a Weberian term. John Sugden and Alan Bairner even argue that “wherever there are national or regional conflicts between societies which share a passion for sports, those conflicts will be in and carried on through respecting sport cultures.” This article, however, indicates that under certain conditions, sports may function in the opposite way. The particular case of Palestinian citizens of Israel is evidence that sports in general, and soccer in particular, may be used by the state as a tool to inhibit the nationalist consciousness of a national minority. The Palestinian citizens in turn tend to use soccer to smooth their tense relations with the Jewish majority rather than to emphasize the tension, and therefore they hide their Palestinian identity in the stadium. Commonly, the success of national minorities in certain sports turns the sports arena into a central location for the expression of nationalist feelings. Through their performances, well-known soccer teams bear the flag of their supporters’ separate national identities. For example, the Celtic soccer team in Glasgow represents the Irish Catholic minority in the city, and the Athletic Bilbao team represents the Basque minority in Spain. The Barcelona team represents Spain’s Catalonian region, and alWihdat, a Palestinian team in Jordan, gives its fans an opportunity to vocalize their identity as a national minority. The British used the sport that they exported to the countries they conquered as a tool for co-opting the local elites. In many cases, however, those same sports that were adopted by the local population became, ironically