Ori Lewis

UEFA President Michel Platini got a close-up view of the ugly side of Israeli soccer in Tel Aviv on Tuesday when a small band of angry young men who support Beitar Jerusalem briefly disrupted a news conference he attended with Israel FA chairman Avi Luzon.

The half-dozen irate supporters, including one in military uniform, sneaked in with the media throng to one of Tel Aviv's top hotels and sat to one side. Security guards were nowhere to be seen.

After a few minutes, the men began making expletive-filled chants against Luzon, as Platini, who did not understand what was being said, looked on bemused.

One of the supporters approached Platini and attempted to place a Beitar scarf around his neck but he was easily thwarted by Luzon who plucked the scarf away. Once the protesters had made their point they began to exit, shouting more abuse on the way. You can see a clip of it here on the sport5 website.

There is little love lost between the often outspoken Luzon, who has boasted big plans and a bright future for Israeli soccer that many critics say are unrealistic, and Beitar, the club seen as a bastion of Israel's right-wing. Beitar are one of Israel's most popular soccer clubs with huge support but they probably also elicit more deep hatred from rival supporters than any other outfit.

Luzon called on the police to arrest the hecklers and clearly, far more stringent security measures will be in place when UEFA holds its annual congress in Tel Aviv next March.

It must have been an embarrassment for Luzon and the Israeli FA, who have always touted their ability to guarantee total security for  visiting sides. It was a no-brainer that the main dailies would mention the incident on their front pages -- and they did, with the word "disgrace" most prominent.

PHOTO: UEFA President Michel Platini (L) attends a news conference in Tel Aviv October 6, 2009. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

The 18th Maccabiah Games opened in Israel on Monday with some 7,000 competitors from 65 countries set to take part in a 12-day sporting extravaganza.

The organisers say it is the third-largest sports gathering in the world behind the Olympics and the University Games. You might have thought the world would take notice, but it barely even attracts interest among the vast majority of Israeli sports fans.

The event that was founded in 1932 was originally intended not only for pure sporting ends but as a way for Jews to circumvent immigration restrictions imposed by the British Mandatory rulers of Palestine.

For decades, mainly during times when sport was largely an amateur pursuit, the Maccabiah had merit as a gathering of top athletes and quite a few notables have taken part. The names of swimmer Mark Spitz, tennis player Brad Gilbert and gymnast Mitch Gaylord immediately come to mind as relatively recent top participants and the list of Olympic medallists and champions in big sports is not short.

But over the years, as Israel has established itself as a genuine competitor in international sport, the event has taken on much more the role of a jamboree for Jewish athletes from all over the world to express solidarity with Israel. It is also an event where young Jewish singles get the chance to meet an enormous number of potential future partners in a jovial environment.

The participants might be offended to hear that many ordinary Israelis care so little about the Maccabiah and that they ask why so much money need be spent on it. But those critics are also largely ignorant of the fact that the participants pay their own way to the tune of thousands of dollars per person. Indeed, the Jerusalem Post said on Tuesday that many potential participants could not afford to join their colleagues and were "priced out" of the games.

Some 3,500 participants came from 65 countries as far away as Palau in the Pacific Ocean -- the other half of the participants are Israeli and they and those involved in the organisation will spend the next 12 days being gracious hosts to their enthusiastic visitors.

The Maccabiah is run very loosely along Olympic guidelines and includes athletics, swimming, soccer and tennis as well as lawn bowls, chess, bridge, netball, cricket, rugby and golf.

One of the few notable participants in these games was U.S. Olympic swimmer Jason Lezak who won three gold medals at the Beijing Games. He lit the flame at the opening ceremony.

Another even bigger name taking part at the opening ceremony -- although not Jewish -- was former England and Manchester United soccer star Bobby Charlton who led the British team as they strolled into the stadium. But the organisers, in an effort to make everybody happy, also agreed that the British team could be supplemented by a Scottish team that included a small number of male competitors clad in kilts.

Click here to read a report on the opening ceremony.

Flying model aircraft is no child's play, particularly when authentic models powered by miniature jet engines cost around $20,000 and countless hours of devotion by their buildiers are involved. Last week Israel hosted the world championships for jet model flyers. Read about the event here and watch the video below.

One of the dullest Israeli soccer seasons for many years dawdled to a quiet close this week with newly-crowned champions Maccabi Haifa and cup winners Beitar Jerusalem sharing the honours in a 1-1 draw that changed nothing.

It was a microcosm of an entire season almost bereft of "champagne moments" and prospects for improvement next season look doubtful.   

The Israeli FA hopes next season will herald a change for the better as the top two professional divisions increase in size from 12 to 16 clubs.

There are many critics who think the opposite and say that more thinly spread TV rights money and club funding from the football pools will actually wreak disaster.

"The league expansion is complete lunacy," said Haifa owner Yaakov Shahar.

Other critics pronounced that it will make no difference as the same clubs -- such as Maccabi Haifa and Hapoel Tel Aviv -- will vie for honours with the only difference visible in a larger contingent of mid-table also-rans who will pretty soon have little to play for.

Certainly, there do not appear to be enough talented players to maintain an expanded league at a satisfactory level but other pundits have suggested that it might inspire clubs to increase investment in growing talent at home through their youth programmes rather than fritter away scarce funds on second-string foreigners who rarely bequeath a legacy of improvement.

The number of adequate stadiums to host big matches is also a problem, as at least half the additional clubs in the top flight do not have appropriate facilities and will have to share with other clubs at more distant locations.

In the campaign just concluded, Haifa did the bare minimum to wrest the championship from Beitar, the title-holders in the past two seasons, and all that can be said to their credit is that they were the most consistent team.

The current Haifa outfit was a fairly ordinary group compared to those of previous championship years when the likes of Eyal Berkovic, Yossi Benayoun and Croatian international Giovanni Rosso blazed a trail to glory and every match began with a buzz and anticipation of great performances that materialised regularly. Such excitement was clearly lacking just lately.

Beitar, who over the past four seasons were supported by Russian-born billionaire Arkady Gaydamak, fielded the most talented side in the league but severe doubts over their future funding in the wake of Gaydamak's decision to stop bankrolling them from next season has already taken its toll.

The enigmatic Gaydamak made his intentions clear after being trounced in the Jerusalem mayoral elections last November and it immediately led to inconsistent results which clearly indicated that a hat-trick of titles would not materialise for Beitar. If they don't find a "white knight" in the next few weeks, Beitar's future looks bleak.

Haifa will play in the later qualifying stages of the Champions League next season and hope to re-enact their famous run in 2002 when they became the first Israeli club to participate in the group stages, during which they registered a memorable 3-0 win over Manchester United.

But Shahar is a hard man to please and as the most experienced of Israeli club chairmen he has realised that soccer in the Jewish state is a far from profitable business.

In outlining Haifa's slightly reduced budget for next season, Shahar said the club "will spend 35 million shekels (about $9million) and not one penny more".

PHOTO: Beitar Jerusalem players react after scoring against Wisla Krakow during their Champions League second qualifying round, first leg match in Jerusalem July 30, 2008. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Barely a week after Pope Benedict ended a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, vandals desecrated some 70 graves in two Palestinian Christian cemeteries in the occupied West Bank in what a Palestinian Authority official said was a rare attack on the Christian minority in the territory.

During his trip, Benedict tried to soothe Muslim anger over past remarks on Islam and urged Palestinian Christians not to follow others of their minority group in emigrating abroad.

A church official in the predominantly Christian village of Jiffna near Ramallah said that neither he nor Palestinian Authority investigators had any initial clues who was responsible.

To read the full news report published on May 24, 2009 please click here (Photos by Fadi Arouri)

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Original Post Text:

Barely a week after Pope Benedict ended a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, vandals desecrated some 70 graves in two Palestinian Christian cemeteries in the occupied West Bank in what a Palestinian Authority official said was a rare attack on the Christian minority in the territory.

During his trip, Benedict tried to soothe Muslim anger over past remarks on Islam and urged Palestinian Christians not to follow others of their minority group in emigrating abroad.

A church official in the predominantly Christian village of Jiffna near Ramallah said that neither he nor Palestinian Authority investigators had any initial clues who was responsible.

To read the full news report published on May 24, 2009 please click here (Photos by Fadi Arouri)

  Barely a week after Pope Benedict ended a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, vandals desecrated some 70 graves in two Palestinian Christian cemeteries in the occupied West Bank in what a Palestinian Authority official said was a rare attack on the Christian minority in the territory.

    During his trip, Benedict tried to soothe Muslim anger over past remarks on Islam and urged Palestinian Christians not to follow others of their minority group in emigrating abroad.

    A church official in the predominantly Christian village of Jiffna near Ramallah said that neither he nor Palestinian Authority investigators had any initial clues who was responsible.

To read the full news report published on May 24, 2009 please click here (Photos by Fadi Arouri)

For decades, the small number of cricket followers in Israel has been trying to clear up what is so far an unsolved mystery: Why the sport never took off in the country after the British lowered the Union Jack on pre-state Israel in 1948. 

Cricket, along with golf, is probably the most enduring bequest of the British Empire to its former colonies, but definitely not in the Jewish state.

Because it was seen as such a complicated sport that needed so much explaining, for many years Israeli newspapers and radio and television stations preferred to deliberately ignore cricket.

Often you would get people trying to show that they understood something about the sport by saying to the frustrated and infuriated cricket follower: "ah cricket, that's like baseball, isn't it?"

On more than one occasion, I was questioned as to the identity of the rabbi in the framed picture on my living room wall: no prizes for guessing that it was actually this caricature of W.G. Grace, the father of modern cricket and with little doubt the sport's most enduring and most recognisable figure.

Recently, though, things have begun to change.

Since the introduction of satellite television, cricket has become better known in the country and now the media deigns to mention it when it's a really big story.

There are even a few cases of people from non-cricketing backgrounds who have become involved in the sport.

Organised cricket has been played in Israel since the 1950s and there is a proper league with about a dozen clubs, but even today there are no more than a few hundred players and probably no more than a few thousand followers of the sport. The Israel Cricket Association (ICA) is an associate member of the International Cricket Council and one of the founder members of the European Cricket Council.

For the past few years Israel's under-15 junior team has had remarkable success in European tournaments with teams comprising mainly Jewish players. Now, a British-based charity, Cricket For Change, has been invited by the ICA to help to set up a basic cricket programme among Israel's bedouin communities.

"Cricket For Change tries to bridge between communities but we did not have anything to bridge (our kids) to, so we decided to go to the bedouin communities," said George Scheader, the ICA's director of cricket development, who has worked since 2000 to introduce Israeli youngsters to the sport.

The hope is that Israel's bedouin, one of the country's most impoverished communities, will take up the cricket and enhance their generally one-dimensional sporting interest in soccer and that perhaps one day talented bedouin players will emerge and represent Israel alongside their Jewish teammates.

Click here to see our full report on Cricket For Change.

For many Israelis the sight of European delegates walking out during a speech by Iran's president at last week's U.N. conference on racism was a rare moment of solidarity by countries often critical of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians.

"Defeated" read a front-page banner headline in one Israeli newspaper next to a picture of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had to face the mass walkout by Western diplomats at the forum in Geneva when he called Israel a "racist state" in his speech.

In a bid to improve its image, Israel, which has always worried greatly about its international standing in public opinion, has launched a campaign called "Brand Israel".  You can read about it and the obstacles that the Jewish state faces by clicking this link  .

Ahmadinejad's speech was seen in Israel as doubly insulting as it came on the eve of the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day when the country remembered the six million Jews killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.