7: Politics and Sport: The Development of the Different Sports Organisations
7A. HaPoel 
7B. Betar
7C. Elitzur
7D. A.S.A
A: HAPOEL
The primacy of the Maccabi organisation, both internationally and within Eretz
Yisrael, has been emphasised previously. In international terms, the pre-eminence
of Maccabi as the premier Jewish sporting organization would remain uncontested.
In the early years this was true of the situation in Mandate Palestine too.
Basically, anyone who wanted to be part of a sporting association became part
of Maccabi. Over time, however, tensions began to develop.
Many of the arguments had been caused by increasing class tensions as the
atmosphere in the country became increasingly ideological and Jews lined up
on different sides of what was more clearly being seen as the beginning of
a full-blown class conflict. In the years following the war, large numbers
of Halutzim – pioneering Jews imbued with a strong labour and socialist
ideology – came to the country, and the tensions grew more pronounced.
Up to this time, the groups that had joined the umbrella organization of
Maccabi, included some groups of workers who had formed their own sporting
clubs, but it was becoming more difficult for those groups to co-exist peacefully
with the rest of the Maccabi organization. While Maccabi had formed itself
as a non-political Zionist sporting organization, the labour movement identified
the general line of Maccabi as being more in line with what they termed “bourgeois”
interests, i.e. the interests of the employer class. It was finally decided
to set up a separate sporting framework for those with a labour orientation.
It took some two years for the organization to come to full fruition after
the opening of its first club in Haifa, but, in this way, in 1926, the new
organization, HaPoel, (the worker), was launched. By this time, all of the
workers' groups had seceded from Maccabi. The great split that was, in many
ways, to have such difficult consequences for the future of Israeli sport
had begun.
HaPoel soon allied itself to the International Workers' Sports Union and
this created obstacles in the way of their cooperation with Maccabi in a number
of different ventures in the international arena.
When Maccabi set up the Israel Soccer Association (Hitachdut HaKaduregel)
and the latter body requested membership in FIFA, the top international soccer
body, HaPoel, who wanted to join the Hitachdut, stated that they would not
join if the Hitachdut applied to join FIFA. To HaPoel, FIFA represented a
professionalisation and a capitalist ethos with which they refused to be connected.
At the other end, FIFA made it clear that they would not consider the request
of the Israeli body if HaPoel - which was part of a different international
body, (something that made membership of FIFA impossible) - was party to the
application.
In the end, the problem was worked out in a solution that allowed HaPoel
to be connected with the Israeli association, without endangering the FIFA
membership - but it was a good example of the latent tensions and the destructive
tendencies of the mixture of sport and politics.
In general, the relationship between HaPoel and Maccabi created enormous
difficulties for the organizers of sport in the pre-state years. The first
two Maccabiah games in 1932 and 1935, the only ones held in the years before
the state was founded, took place without the participation of HaPoel, despite
its considerable presence in the field of sport in the Yishuv.
The different sides jockeyed for position and each viewed the other group
with great suspicion, over and above the normal tension of sports rivals in
any arena. This represented the politicization of sport - an abnormal situation
which is usually felt to have no place in the world of sport -, but in the
highly charged ideological atmosphere of the Jewish community of Mandate Palestine
(and later Israel) it was almost inevitable that non-sporting tensions would
make their way into the sporting sphere.
It should be noted, moreover, that despite the protestations of non-politicization
on the part of the Maccabi organization, they indeed revealed themselves as
politically connected - and ultimately aligned themselves with the General
Zionist Party, after the foundation of the state.
B: BETAR
Nor were they the only two politically affiliated organizations in the sporting
world. Two other sporting “mini-empires” developed in the pre-state
years.
The first to develop was Betar, which began in 1923 as the youth arm of what
would become known as the Revisionist party associated with Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
In 1925, the first Betar graduates arrived in Mandate Palestine and became
involved in the general institutions of the Yishuv including the Histadrut
and the Haganah, both of which were associated with the Labour Zionist movement.
In sporting terms, the members of the movement joined Maccabi, where they
tried to bring their own perspective on sport to expression within the organization.
The perspective that Betar held regarding sport was to consider it a tool
in the building up of the country and as a preparation and an accessory for
military training. Sport and military training were two sides of the same
coin for Betar members who perceived themselves as involved in the building
up of the nation, with their every activity being subordinated to that larger
goal.
Betar was organized differently from Maccabi and HaPoel, which were first
and foremost sporting organizations; Betar was first a movement, but one with
sporting interests and expressions.
The break with the Maccabi movement came at the time of the second Maccabiah
in 1935, when Betar was informed that it could not take part in the opening
ceremony of the Maccabiah while wearing its movement shirts, whose colour,
brown, was seen to be reminiscent of Mussolini’s fascist movement in
Italy. This led Betar to pull out of its intended participation in the Maccabiah
and to launch its own sporting organization, in a similar way to that of HaPoel.
It was smaller than HaPoel, however, boasting only two major clubs, Betar
Tel Aviv and, later on, Betar Jerusalem. It constantly perceived itself (with
justification, it must be said) as the victim of the co-operation of Maccabi
and HaPoel, which divided up the perks and positions of power in the sporting
world of pre-state Mandate Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel.
Associated with the controversial underground movements, Etzel and Lehi,
considered by Ben-Gurion to be the great untouchables of Israeli politics
- together with the Communists - Betar's marginalization in the sporting world
(as in other frameworks) was natural. The British, too, predictably came out
against them, at one time, banning their teams as "unfit for sporting
competition" and forcing them to change their names and to compete under
a different banner and name (Nordia).
C: ELITZUR
Another organization, founded in 1939, was “Elitzur”, the sporting
arm of the Religious Zionists, associated with HaPoel HaMizrachi movement.
Elitzur’s outlook and whole raison d’etre was based on the ideology
of Rav Kook.
It is interesting to see how the founders of Elitzur defined its goals.
To increase the physical strength of religious working youth,
to prepare a cohesive camp for the work of the community, to implant a spirit
of order and discipline in the circles of religious youth and to educate to
loyalty towards the project of the building up of a religious, working Eretz
Yisrael.
Originally, the Elitzur sporting organisation was set up to provide some
kind of a cover for the religious Zionist units who were doing underground
training within the framework of the Haganah, but soon it took on a life of
its own and began to take part in many different fields of sport, branching
out from its initial sphere of athletics. The one major exception was soccer.
Elitzur has never become a participant in Israeli soccer, because that sport
is played primarily on Shabbat, while Elitzur, by its own definition, will
not take part in Shabbat sport activities. Nevertheless in basketball, for
example, Elitzur is very active, since basketball is played during the week
in Israel.
It is worth mentioning (in parentheses!) at this point that there have been
a number of religiously observant sportsmen who have seen no contradiction
between their religious faith and their sporting activity. In 2002, a young
rising Jewish basketball star by the name of Tamir Goodman came to Israel
at the invitation of Maccabi Tel Aviv and currently plays for the Givat Shmuel
team. Goodman, a kippah-wearing youth is only the last in an admittedly not
very long line of Orthodox Jewish sports stars. Perhaps the most illustrious
of all was the “wrestling rabbi”, Rafael Halperin, who was educated
in Yeshivot before turning to sport, and with the encouragement of the great
Rabbinic leader, the Hazon Ish, went on to an outstanding career as a professional
wrestler all over the world in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.
One of the notable things about all the different sporting organizations
– Maccabi, HaPoel, Betar and Elitzur - is that their activities were
not restricted to sport but included many different cultural activities including,
often some kind of role in national tasks, working among new immigrants, teaching
Hebrew language and providing as institutional structure that included many
aspects of community life.
D: A.S.A.
There is one sports association that has always been non-political; it is
also the association that has concentrated most exclusively on a sporting
agenda. This is A.S.A. (Igud Sport Academi), the Academic Sports Association.
Founded in 1953, it represents the sports interests of all those involved
in higher education, and has been very active in many different sporting fields,
participating in and even hosting international sports competitions. It maintains
teams in the different sporting leagues, and its representatives can celebrate
many different achievements over the years.
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