‘It's a game between Jews and Arabs’: Soccer journalism, otherness and abjection in the Israeli context

These are the voices. Years of cautious and deliberate existence, the living memory of the trauma of 1948, and the sight of their brothers rotting in the refugee camps have taught the Palestinians in Israel not to go to extremes in anything and not to take any irreversible position. Every acrobat knows the secret of walking a tightrope over an abyss; the Arabs in Israel have learned something even more difficult to stand still on the wire. To abstain, for years, from any hasty movement. To live a provisional life that eternally suspends and dulls the will. Thus, for many long years, has the Palestinian acrobat in Israel stood in place on a high wire one foot in the air, never set down. He glances out of the corner of his eye to the audience below, which never stops shouting its warnings and its anger. Jewish shouts, Arab shouts he dares not make a false move.