As a child in a Kibbutz in the western Galilee, and a mediocre player on our very mediocre soccer team, I sometimes participated in regional soccer competitions against teams which represented Arab towns and villages. These competitions were among the rare opportunities for us, the Jewish youth from the Kibbutz, to meet Arab youth, who despite their numerical predominance in the Galilee, were almost invisible for us. My memories from these encounters include sentiments of alert and worry; I always felt that for our Arab rivals, it was much more than a game, as if they were trying by any means to prove something to us, or to themselves.

Holding a very superficial and selective knowledge about the social history of the landscape of my childhood, as well as about the political dynamics of Arab–Jewish relations in Israel, I did not yet have the tools to decipher the political complexity of these encounters. Years later, as a graduate student at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University, equipped with much more historical and political knowledge, as well as theoretical perspectives and methodological tools, I had the opportunity to investigate in a scholarly way Arab–Jewish soccer encounters and study the tension I felt as a teenager. Between 1998 and 2001, I conducted a doctoral study on Arab soccer in Israel, which constitutes the core of this book.