Because you don’t really choose the sports team you root for, I am bound by family and fate to Beitar Jerusalem, the soccer powerhouse better known for its rowdy and frequently racist fans than for its prowess on the pitch. Calling themselves La Familia, a tribute to the Italian mafia, the hardest of the team’s ultras have long been on the warpath with the Israeli police, with their own team—whose clubhouse they burned down some years ago—and with the basic tenets of human dignity and civility. But last night their streak came to a halt when an undercover police agent busted 51 of La Familia’s most notorious members and seized a staggering amount of ammunition, including 20 stun grenades, two pounds of explosives, two tear gas grenades, two smoke bombs, 29 torches, and 19 IEDs. The detained fans are being charged with numerous counts of violent behavior, illegal possession of military-grade weapons, and unlawfully smuggling contraband into their team’s Jerusalem stadium. The undercover agent’s work also led to the capture of nine major drug dealers affiliated with La Familia, an unexpected bounty for the police.
While most of Beitar’s fans were relieved to hear of the arrests, La Familia’s remaining members and their supporters doubled down on defiance. Avigaial Shara’abi, for example, one of Beitar’s most vocal fans, gave a combative interview to Israeli sports media, saying that “the real criminal organization is in the Knesset” and alleging that her fellow hard-line fans were harassed for no other reason save for an ideological left-wing bias on behalf of the media and the police. Throughout this entire dramatic development, Beitar’s remarkably inept ownership continued its time-honored tradition of saying or doing nothing of consequence. And never mind: Those of us who’ve cheered on Beitar for a while now know only too well the struggle of taking back the team and its reputation from a small handful of vile and violent fans. As we say in Teddy, our team’s beautiful arena: Yalla Beitar Yalla.
Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.
