Seeing red about soccer

Violence on the soccer field gets thrown into the limelight after a fan rushes the field Monday night and attacks one of the players. Photos from the incident at the Maccabi Tel Aviv versus Hapoel Tel Aviv match dominate the front pages as pundits ask how this could have happened.

Israel Hayom reports that there were six hundred police and security personnel on detail at Tel Aviv’s Bloomfield Stadium for Monday night’s game, which it calls the “black derby,” using the British term for a game between cross-town rivals. Despite the beefed up security, however, a fan charged onto the field and attacked a player from Maccabi Tel Aviv.

Yedioth Ahronoth writes that Israeli soccer has reached a “new low” and earned “new levels of disgust” with Monday’s assault. What fanned the flames was the referee’s dismissal of the attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv player — Eran Zahavi — with a red card for what he considered use of excessive force in self-defense against his attacker.

Zahavi refused to get off the field and demanded that the team trainer take the whole team off and blow the game, Haaretz reports. The Maccabi coach also took to the field, and his counterpart attempted to cool his nerves. Zahavi was sent off, but shortly afterwards, once the game was restarted, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans rushed the field, at which point authorities shut the game down.

A pundit writes in Yedioth Ahronoth that the attacker killed soccer for Israel, but fortunately didn’t go so far as to kill the player. He lists a litany of violent acts carried out by Hapoel Tel Aviv fans, and says, “It’s hard to think what would have happened if there were a knife in the hand of the fan. It’s a great miracle that we didn’t end the derby with loss of life.”

Shlomo Scharf writes in Israel Hayom that there’s a “violent and criminal subculture” surrounding Israeli soccer that in other places is known as hooliganism. He criticizes the referee for giving the red card to Zahavi for defending himself, saying “even if the rules said that a fight between a player and a fan requires dismissal, he must have understood that it was an exceptional incident.” He also levels blame at Zahavi, the security companies, the soccer league administrators, but most of all the polluted soccer culture.

Haaretz by and large rises above the punditry, but opens its brief front page coverage of the incident saying that “the concentrated violence which in recent years entered around the field of Israeli soccer slipped in between the guards on its way to its final target: killing the game. Not the game between Hapoel and Maccabi Tel Aviv, but the assassination of the thing we call sports.”

Beyond the sports, which made a front page appearance for the first time in ages, the papers cover the testimony of Shula Zaken, former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s aide, in the trial against her ex-boss. The clear and simple headline from Haaretz says everything: “He knew it all,” it quotes Zaken saying damningly.

“Ehud asked that I lie,” Zaken is quoted in Israel Hayom testifying against Olmert in the corruption trial. Yedioth Ahronoth simply runs a transcript of an apparently incriminating recording in which Olmert acknowledges that he gave his subordinate hush money and was complicit in corruption.

Tova Tzimuki writes in Yedioth Ahronoth that Zaken’s testimony on Monday made it clear why the Supreme Court allowed a retrial of Olmert. She writes that it’s depressing how Olmert was considered one of the better Jerusalem mayors and prime ministers, in spite of his rampant corruption.

“We can say that in every Western country — it goes without saying every third world country in which it’s well known — they find acts of corruption. The problem is that Israel, which faces an existential crisis, can’t permit itself an internal threat of corruption as well,” she writes.

With much of the focus in the tabloids on the soccer story and Olmert’s retrial, the announcement of the approval of 500 new housing units in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo gets nearly no play in Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom. Only Haaretz puts a brief piece on the move and its immediate condemnation by the United States on its front page.