You Are Here: In Israel, a Soccer Game Reflects a Divide

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

And the team that Sakhnin has to beat to survive is the one they hate the most, Beitar Jerusalem, which has been associated with right-wing politics in Israel for decades and may be the only first-division club never to have an Arab player on its roster.

As the crowd presses toward the gates, I find myself next to a tall and slim bearded man named Ali, who made the long drive here from Tamra. He’s visibly anxious and speaking quite loudly. Sakhnin doesn’t merely represent a city, he tells me, but an entire sector of the population.

“It’s just a game,” I say, trying to calm things down.

“For you, maybe,” Ali responds, “because you’re a Jew. But for us, soccer is the only place we’re equal in this stinking country. If Sakhnin gets thrown out of first division, then they’ll be taking that away from us, too.”

Beitar’s jerseys say “Stop Racism,” but everyone knows that the slogan is there only because the team is trying to lighten the penalty imposed by the Israel Soccer Association for the constant anti-Arab chanting of Beitar’s hardcore fans, called “La Familia.” (“Muhammad is a homosexual” is a favorite cheer.) The bad blood between the two teams has caused many of their matches to end in rock--throwing brawls.

My friend Uzi finds a scalper near the police barrier and asks him for tickets. The scalper looks stressed out, too. As I dig around in my pocket for money, he presses me: “Come on! Come on!”

“Cool it, bro,” Uzi tells him. “What’s the big rush?”

Uzi isn’t into soccer at all. He only came with me because my wife asked him to. She was afraid I would get hurt here. As I hand the scalper the money and take the tickets from him, he keeps shouting: “Come on! Come on!” And then we understand why. The Sakhnin fans have pressed up against the police barriers and finally broken through, and a wave of red shirts and scarves is surging forward toward the field, carrying Uzi and me along with it. The ushers are squashed against the walls, unable to do security checks on the fans rushing past.

Doha Stadium is fit to hold 8,500 people, but there are far more than that here today, almost all of them stuffed into the Sakhnin side. There are only about 100 people in the Beitar section; half of them are fans and the other half are policemen there to prevent clashes.

The game begins, and the first yellow card comes out almost immediately. Two minutes later, the sprinklers somehow come on, soaking the players on the field. At halftime, there is no score, but the Sakhnin fans never stop cheering.

They cheer for the Sakhnin players in Arabic and curse the Beitar players and the referees in Hebrew, so they’ll understand the slurs. When a Beitar player is injured, they chant: “He’s dead, he’s dead!” The rest of the time, they scream, “War” and “Beitar’s a whore.” And when they get tired of that, they switch to “Cops are whores,” in no small part because 11 years ago, during the October riots, two young Sakhnin residents were shot to death by security forces, and the shooters were not, in many people’s view, properly punished.

With every passing minute, as Sakhnin is unable to score, its side sinks deeper into gloom. When the fans in the eastern stands unfurl a huge banner showing the team name and a drawing of the Al Aqsa Mosque, it manages to draw a few calls of “Allah hu akbar,” but the feeling is that God is not on their side today.

With less than 10 minutes to play, the match looks sure to end in a draw, and Uzi signals that we should start walking toward the exit. Neither one of us wants to be among the thousands of hopeless fans and hundreds of jumpy policemen when Sakhnin gets demoted to second division.

As we leave the stadium, we hear it: a collective shout coming from thousands of mouths, followed by the sound of firecrackers. On the car radio, we hear that Sakhnin has scored in the 85th minute, winning 1-0, and that a few fans were injured during the celebration.

Tomorrow doctors will say that a fan will lose his sight in one eye. The police will claim a firecracker was responsible. The Sakhnin fans will say it was a plastic bullet. In an interview from the hospital, the fan promises he will be at the opening game next year.

Etgar Keret’s latest book is “The Girl on the Fridge."

View the original article here

The Lede: Israel 'Cannot Go Back to the 1967 Lines,' Netanyahu Tells Obama

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

As my colleague Steven Lee Myers reports from Washington, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told President Obama on Friday that he shared his vision for a peace between Israelis and Palestinians and then promptly listed a series of nonnegotiable conditions that have kept the two sides at an impasse for years.”

Here is Associated Press video of the two men recounting some of their conversation for the White House press corps:

Before the meeting, Mr. Netanyahu’s aides told reporters that Mr. Obama failed to understand “the reality” of Israel’s situation and suggested that the American president was harboring some “delusions.” Speaking to the press as Mr. Obama sat by his side, Mr. Netanyahu echoed those sentiments, saying “a peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle Eastern reality.”

The Israeli prime minister then reiterated his strong objection to Mr. Obama’s statement, in his speech on Thursday, that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”

In his remarks on Friday, Mr. Netanyahu said: “While Israel is prepared to make generous compromises for peace, it cannot go back to the 1967 lines, because these lines are indefensible; because they don’t take into account certain changes that have taken place on the ground, demographic changes that have taken place over the past 44 years.”

Israeli settlements, built on West Bank land Israel seized during the the 1967 war, are often referred to in Israel as “facts on the ground.”

Here is a look at the issue of settlements from Americans for Peace Now, a group that sees their existence as a stumbling block to a final settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

View the original article here

Israel Leader Outlines Points Before U.S. Trip

He also made clear that if the recent reconciliation accord between Hamas and Fatah, the two main Palestinian parties, led to Hamas becoming part of a Palestinian government, no peace would be negotiated.

“A government, half of whose members declare daily their intention to destroy the State of Israel, is not a partner for peace,” he said, speaking at the opening session of Parliament.

Mr. Netanyahu spoke a day after an unprecedented wave of Palestinian protesters marched toward Israel’s borders from four directions and Israeli troops responded with gunfire, killing more than a dozen people. The occasion was Nakba Day, when Palestinians mark Israel’s creation and mourn the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.

Commentary in newspapers and on airwaves in both Israel and the Palestinian areas suggested that what took place Sunday might serve as a dress rehearsal for the coming year, posing a serious challenge to Israel. While Palestinians and critics abroad questioned the killing of protesters, many Israelis focused on why the military was not prepared for the breaching of the border fence in the Golan Heights.

Mr. Netanyahu said in Parliament that those who sought to enter Israel on Sunday were not clamoring for a Palestinian state but for Israel’s destruction.

“We must stop beating ourselves up and blaming ourselves,” he said. “The reason there is no peace is that the Palestinians refuse to recognize the State of Israel as the Jewish people’s nation-state.”

He added: “As for those who orchestrated these riots, 63 years of our independence has not changed a thing. They yelled that they want to return to Jaffa, to the Galilee. And the head of Hamas in Gaza yelled that they want to see the end of the Zionist enterprise, repeating the words voiced by his Iranian patron.”

At the same time, Mr. Netanyahu showed more willingness to yield territory than he had before, strongly implying that he would give up the vast majority of the West Bank for a demilitarized Palestinian state. He said Israel needed to hold onto all of Jerusalem and the large settlement blocs in the West Bank, thereby suggesting that he would yield the rest.

The other principles he enumerated included Palestinian recognition of Israel as the home of the Jewish people, an agreement to end the conflict, resolving the refugee problem only within the new state of Palestine and an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley.

Palestinian leaders have repeatedly rejected every one of those. As a result of the impasse, they have been pursuing other approaches to statehood, including political unity with Hamas and a plan to ask the United Nations in September to recognize a state of Palestine within the 1967 boundaries. That would include East Jerusalem and all of the West Bank and Gaza.

After the unity deal between Fatah and Hamas was announced, Israel said it was suspending its monthly transfer of nearly $100 million in Palestinian tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority. But on Monday it announced that it would most likely hand the money over, after assurances that it would not fall into Hamas hands.

Sunday’s protests, involving thousands of Palestinians who live in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, showed how the populist spirit spreading across North Africa and the Middle East has reached the Palestinians and the edges of Israel.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the country was facing a whole new approach to anti-Israel activism.

“We are just at the start of this matter, and it could be that we’ll face far more complex challenges,” he said on television.

Some Palestinian analysts also suggested that Sunday’s events marked a new phase of their struggle.

“This is a new era for the Palestinian people and the Arab nations,” wrote Talal Okal, a commentator in Al Ayyam, a Palestinian newspaper. “This new Arab age shows how to conduct the struggle in a totally different way.”

Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to meet Mr. Obama at the White House on Friday, address a large gathering of American supporters on Monday and then a joint meeting of Congress next Tuesday. His aides have indicated that since the Hamas-Fatah accord, he believes the likelihood of negotiated peace has declined and he is less obliged to make a strong offer to the Palestinians.

After he spoke in Parliament, the head of the opposition, Tzipi Livni of the center-left Kadima party, accused Mr. Netanyahu of having failed.

“If you do not initiate, decisions will be made for Israel,” Ms. Livni said. “You have missed your opportunity to provide Israel with a vision. You are going to the United States without initiatives for peace.”

 

Israel Clashes With Protesters on Four Borders

With an unprecedented wave of coordinated protests, the popular uprisings that have swept the region for the first time touched Israel directly. Like those other protests, plans for this one spread over social media, including Facebook, but there were also signs of official support in Lebanon and Syria, where analysts said leaders were using the Palestinian cause to deflect attention from internal problems.

At the Lebanese border, Israeli troops shot at hundreds of Palestinians trying to force their way across. The Lebanese military said 10 protesters were killed and more than 100 were wounded; Israel said it was investigating the casualties.

In the Golan Heights, about 100 Palestinians living in Syria breached a border fence and crowded into the village of Majdal Shams, waving Palestinian flags. Troops fired on the crowd, killing four of them.

In the West Bank, about 1,000?protesters carrying Palestinian flags and throwing stones and occasional firecrackers and molotov cocktails tangled with Israeli riot troops near the military checkpoint between Ramallah?and Israel. Scores were injured, local medical officials said.

In Gaza, when marchers crossed a security zone near the border, Israeli troops fired into the crowd, wounding dozens.

In Jordan and Egypt, protesters setting off for the border were thwarted by government security forces.

Every year in mid-May, many Palestinians mark what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe, the anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 and the war in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes through expulsion and flight.

But this was the first year that Palestinian refugees and their supporters in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, inspired by the recent protests around the Arab world, tried to breach Israel’s military border from all sides.

“The Palestinians are not less rebellious than other Arab peoples,” said Ali Baraka, a Hamas representative in Lebanon.

At day’s end, as a tense calm returned to the country’s borders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said the protests had been aimed at destroying Israel, not creating a Palestinian state alongside it.

“The leaders of these violent demonstrations, their struggle is not over the 1967 borders but over the very existence of Israel, which they describe as a catastrophe that must be resolved,” he said in a televised statement. “It is important that we look with open eyes at the reality and be aware of whom we are dealing with and what we are dealing with.”

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian authority, saluted the protesters in a televised speech, referring to the dead as martyrs. “The blood of the Nakba fatalities was not spilled in vain,” he said. “They died for the Palestinian people’s rights and freedom.”

Officials and analysts have argued that with peace talks broken down and plans for a request of the United Nations to declare Palestinian statehood in September, violence could return to define this conflict, which has been relatively quiet for the past two years.

“This is war,” said Amjad Abu Taha, a 16-year-old from Bethlehem who joined the protesters in Ramallah, a rock in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “We’re defending our country.”

Nearby, hundreds of Israeli troops roamed the area using stun guns and tear gas.

In Gaza, the Hamas police stopped buses carrying protesters near the main crossing into Israel, but dozens of demonstrators continued on foot, arriving at a point closer to the Israeli border than they had reached in years and drawing Israeli fire.

Later, in a separate incident, an 18-year-old Gazan near another part of the border fence was shot and killed by Israeli troops when, the Israeli military says, he was trying to plant an explosive.

Reporting was contributed by Nada Bakri and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Fares Akram from Gaza, Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan, and David D. Kirkpatrick and Liam Stack from Cairo.

 

Mubarak Faces More Questioning on Gas Deal With Israel

The announcement, carried by the government-run Middle East News Agency, came after the agency reported that the former oil minister, Samih Fahmy, and five other top officials had been imprisoned pending an investigation of the deal.

Adel el-Saeed, the prosecutor’s spokesman, issued a statement saying that among other issues, Mr. Mubarak was being questioned about gas exports to Israel at a low price that amounted to “hurting the country’s interests.” Egypt lost more than $714 million in the deal, the prosecutor said in a statement quoted by wire services a day earlier.

Selling gas to Israel was deeply unpopular in Egypt from the time the pipeline opened in 2008, given the sour public mood toward its neighbor, and it was a rallying point for the Tahrir Square protest movement since its start in January. But the deal was protected at the highest levels as long as Mr. Mubarak was in power. The key shareholder in the private company that brokered the deal was the president’s longtime friend, Hussein K. Salem, and a senior Egyptian official said the intelligence service also owned a slice of the deal.

Now that the protection has been removed, however, the deal has emerged as a kind of public litmus test toward how relations with Israel will be handled in the post-Mubarak era.

“Hosni Mubarak would always be completely responsive to what Israel wanted with zero regard for what the man in the street wanted,” said Mansour Abdel Wahab Mansour, a Hebrew language professor and political analyst of Arab-Israeli relations at Ain Shams University. “That is not going to change 180 degrees, but the new government or the new system will have to give somewhat more consideration to public opinion.”

Egyptian gas exports, not yet fully restored since an explosion rocked the pipeline in the Sinai in February, used to supply 40 percent of Israeli needs.

There were questions from the moment the deal was signed, particularly since it was handed to Mr. Salem and an Israeli partner, Yosef Meiman, whose East Mediterranean Gas Company acted as a middleman between Egypt and the Israel Electric Corporation and other clients.

The basic accusation was that the partners obtained the gas at a preferential rate from the government of Egypt, which cut supplies to local consumers in order to fill the Israeli deal, and then sold the gas at a significant markup, pocketing the profits.

The details of the full deal have never been released publicly. But former Egyptian government officials who have seen it, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the price renegotiated around 2008 was raised to about $4 per million BTUs, up from the previous cap of $1.25 per million BTUs. East Mediterranean Gas could then negotiate its own terms with Israeli buyers.

There is no global benchmark global price for natural gas, noted Nikos Tsafos, an analyst at PFC Energy in Washington. But Mr. Tsafos said that in comparable deals in the region, Turkey, Greece and Italy were paying $7 to $10 per million BTUs.

Mr. Meiman, who controls about one-quarter of East Mediterranean Gas, could not be reached for comment. But the general attitude of the Israeli government toward the arrangement has been that it can accept a re-examination of the deal as long as it is only about price. A senior Israeli official said, however, that if the investigation becomes a pretext for halting the deal for domestic political reasons, Israel would have reason for genuine concern.

In 2007, Mr. Salem sold off separate stakes in the company to a Thai firm and to a partnership headed by Sam Zell, the American real estate tycoon. Mr. Zell’s spokeswoman, Terry Holt, did not respond to requests for a comment on Friday.

Permission for the sale came from the presidency and the intelligence agency, which had a small stake in the deal along with the government-owned Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company, said the senior Egyptian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Ministers outside the petroleum ministry were not consulted and the government ignored a court order to show publicly that the deal was not diverting gas needed domestically.

“That was a big question mark,” the official said. “We never understood why it was sold — and it would have made sense to allow local companies to buy it. From a national security point of view it did not end up with the most sensible arrangement.”

For the Egyptian business community, the answer came down to Mr. Salem, an intelligence agent turned tycoon who fled Egypt after the uprising and is being sought by prosecutors.

Ethan Bronner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.