Game Changer: Israel’s Embrace of Sports as a Tool of Ideology and Propaganda
A shot of Columbia University’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment on its fourth day after being reinstated by protesters, April 21, 2024. Photo credit: Abbad Diraneyya, Creative Commons.
By virtue of the United States’ regional foreign policy, Zionism has long been entrenched in American institutions.
Israel is functionally a patron state of America, and receives over $3.8 billion in military funding per year in military-specific aid from the United States – a particular point of contention at a time when nearly all objective analyses, and indeed even statements by top Israeli military officials themselves, have indicated that Israel is actively engaged in genocide towards the Palestinian population in Gaza.
America funds Israel for many reasons, including the hope of preserving its long-standing foothold in the Middle East and serving its broader geopolitical interests. This support is reflected on an ideological level, as well, and Zionism has evolved alongside American culture in many ways – including in sports.
The Zionist movement’s principal founder, Theodor Herzl, understood the capacity of sports to form communal and social bonds, especially among a largely oppressed and disaffected populace such as European Jewry. In order to fulfill these bonds in response to rising anti-Semitism and European nationalism, unity was needed. Herzl knew that sports tend to develop strength, fortitude, and mental stability – and this was not overlooked in the foundation of Zionism.
Theodor Herzl’s right-hand man and another major co-founder of the Zionist movement, Max Nordau, stressed the embellishment of “a muscle Jewry” – which, according to both Nordau and to later critical analyses by Jewish feminist author Andrea Dworkin, comprised an attempt to re-center the perception of Jewish masculinity in response to European propaganda portraying Jews as weak, cowardly, or otherwise physically ineffectual.
This concept of a “muscle Jewry” has since become embedded in Israeli culture and is centered within a broader sense of hypermasculinity reflected across all segments of Israeli society, from military to politics to sports – often to the detriment of women in Israel and Palestine. This is demonstrated in many ways, not least in the perpetual gendered segregation of Israeli society or the skyrocketing rates of domestic violence against Israeli women, but also in a broader, concerted ignorance of women serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) – including the mostly female surveillance troops which repeatedly attempted to flag warning signs of an impending Hamas terror attack on October 7th, only to be systematically ignored by nearly all elements of the IDF’s chain of command.
The conceptual establishment of a “muscle Jewry” has been a calculated move, and alongside this, there has been a deliberate attempt to imbue sports within the broader Jewish community with Zionist ideology in support of the state of Israel.
The incorporation of nationalist symbols within sports clubs throughout British Mandatory Palestine heightened as sports grew in popularity among both the local and colonial populace. As a result, sports teams slowly became associated with military training among the Zionist colonial populace. In the words of Theodor Herzl:
“I must train the boys to become soldiers…. I shall educate one and all to be free, strong men, ready -to serve as volunteers in the case of need.”
Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Vol. 1 (New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff,
1960), pp. 51
Early Jewish sports teams were organized under the nominal banner of “Maccabee,” and the early Jewish Olympic-inspired games referred to as the “Maccabiah Games”, to remind the Jewish population of Jewish independence efforts in the 2nd century BCE. Other names evocative of Biblical and early Jewish history, including Betar, were used for sports teams as encouragement for Jews to embrace ideological Zionism.
In the 1920 and 1930s, Jewish clubs across Europe, including the Austrian sports club Hakoah Vienna, traveled to Israel to compete with the teams there. To solidify a colonial presence, different strategies were used to ensure a cohesive settler presence. One of these strategies was intentional provocation through the visual spread of Zionist ideology. Sports teams often showcased Zionist symbols, including the white and blue flag, which was initially adopted as the official flag of the Zionist movement by the first Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.
The desire to spread Zionism through sports ultimately culminated in athletic events, and various youth parades associated with the Scouts movement – itself active in various forms in Palestine since at least 1912 – were organized by Israeli settlers. The Polish-born Jew David Ben-Gurion, a principal founder of the state of Israel and its first prime minister from 1955 to 1963, recognized the Hapoel Football Club, initially established in 1926 and associated with the Zionist labor organization Histadrut, in its relation to the Israeli settler-colonial project in that it served “not only [as] an athletic organization but a castle for the working class [which] must help the new immigrants.”
Sports additionally served as an avenue for terrorism among prominent Jewish paramilitary groups in British Mandatory Palestine, including the Haganah and its offshoot, the Irgun, and weapons were notably smuggled into Jewish settlements in Palestine by the Hapoel sports club during this period.
This broader integration of sports into the Zionist settler-colonial ideology is reflective of the immigrant background of early Israeli settlers: European settlers inspired soccer, and as settlement increased from American and Russian Jewish communities, so too did sports like basketball, baseball, and figure skating gain a significant national foothold.
This deep cultural and communal integration of sports into Israeli society fed heavily into underlying Israeli culture, particularly among the “muscle Jewry” Max Nordau asserted as a straightforward path to Israeli dominance over the local Palestinian population. Along with basketball, soccer is one of Israel’s de facto national sports, and its players and games often inspire deep feelings of passion and rage among the fanbase. This rage and passion was often focused towards local Palestinian communities and sports teams, as Israelis knew their supposed competitors well and often sought to outdo Palestinian sports teams. This often resulted in an attempt to assert dominance even in Palestinian joy, and to reign in the sadness resulting from occupation and re-settlement – a sort of ego boost for Zionist settlers on the ashes of existing Palestinian homes and communities.
Ties between sporting programs and Zionist ideology continued across Europe, as well, which ultimately fed back into the effort by Zionist leaders to colonize existing Arab settlements in Palestine. Jews across Europe regularly established sporting groups to foster a sense of identity, and promote inter-communal cooperation. As a settler-colonial movement, the Maccabid became a way to insert settlers into Palestine, often circumventing local immigration laws. While Jewish immigration and refugee status was welcome among the local Palestinian population, Zionist colonialism was not. As a result, Zionists sought to portray an acquiescence to local law, but often used sports to transfer resident status to settlers. From 1933 to 1936, spurred in part by the Maccabid sports movement, at least 60,000 new Jewish immigrants arrived each year in Palestine.
Similar dynamics became reflected in Zionist sports leagues in the United States. The Maccabi movement’s slogan for its USA branch, “building Jewish pride through sports,” reflects the sustained attempt within the Zionist movement to co-opt the beautiful and deeply diverse ethno-religious identity of Judaism and Jewishness across the world, which is shattered and forced into a politically oriented homogeneity through the Zionist lens.
This lens also attempts to force an ideological and political rigidity of support for Israel across all sports in the United States, even those not directly affiliated with Israel or the Zionist movement. Recent waves of pro-Palestine protests at college campuses across the United States have seemingly shaken the ideological hold of the Zionist movement on institutions across the United States, and college sports affiliates have taken note. Robert Kraft, who among other roles is famous for his ownership of the New England Patriots football team, and infamous for his 2019 attempt to illegally solicit prostitution from a sex trafficking ring in Florida, also co-chairs the Columbia Campaign for Athletics. With this leverage, in May 2024, he announced his intention to personally withhold funding from Columbia University until “corrective action is taken” against Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protesters who peacefully exercised their first amendment rights to free assembly and speech on the university campus.
Though Zionism reflects one of the longest-standing efforts to entrench political ideology into sports around the world, this movement is not inherently isolated to Israel, either: in recent years, authoritarian backers from the Saudi Public Investment Fund and even the United Arab Emirates’ royal family have sought to purchase sports teams and embed their own authoritarian propaganda within major sporting events around the world, from soccer to tennis.
With such powerful institutional backers, Zionism – particularly in the United States – has weaponized sports as a tool to codify Israeli identity, and to encourage an entrenchment and fundamental redefinition of Jewish identity as support for the Israeli state, even amid that state’s rampant repression and subjugation of Palestinians. Not all Jews are Zionists, and many prominent Jewish movements, like the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), are readily able to see beyond this political facade.
But amid sustained efforts, this propaganda is not easily debunked, and sports in the United States and around the world has reached a critical moment: will there be a broader decolonial movement in sports and athletics, or will societies continue to move towards sporting as a “bread-and-circuses” propaganda form for authoritarian states around the world?
