Raising hell over Israel’s holy days

IT HAS taken an intervention by Israel’s attorney-general, Yehuda Weinstein, to save the country’s football season. A bizarre sequence of events began with a pay dispute in one of the minor leagues; continued with a labour court ruling on September 9th that playing professional sports on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, was illegal; and was then passed like a hot potato between government ministers. They were caught between a desire not to annoy fans and a need to keep orthodox Jewish opinion onside. The fans have finally been saved by Mr Weinstein’s legal opinion that since football has always been played in Israel on its day of rest, there was no reason to start now to enforce labour laws on the status quo.

 

 

Football in Israel has always been a continuation of politics on the playing field. In the past, before privatisation, the teams belonged to political parties, and were used for drumming up support during elections. In recent years, Arab-Jewish hatred has found its way onto the pitch, particularly in the matches of Beitar Jerusalem, the team supported by many senior Likud politicians, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, which is much criticised for never having fielded an Arab player. The legal fracas over “Shabbat football” has also been politically motivated.

 

 

With a stroke of the pen the economics minister can exempt any company from the law prohibiting employment on the weekend, and so could have solved the football issue. However the current minister, Arye Deri, is leader of the ultra-religious Shas party. There was no way that he was going to sign off on desecration of the Sabbath. Neither was the culture and sport minister, a rising Likud star named Miri Regev, going to help. A former military censor, Ms Regev has become a leading warrior in Israel’s culture wars, threatening to deny government funding for productions that she thinks “deride” Zionism and saying proudly in a recent interview that she “never read Chekhov and nearly never went to the theatre”. Moving football away from the Sabbath could certainly win her votes among Likud’s more traditional wing.

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