The buzzwords flying around Israel this weekend, ahead of Saturday night’s massive protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, sounded more Italian than Hebrew: “La Familia,” a term that terrifies many Israelis.
La Familia, whose presence at anti-Netanyahu rallies on at least three nights last week has led to violence, started out as “La Famiglia,” a club of Beitar Jerusalem Football Club fanatics, or ultras, who chose the name as an homage to the tough-guy mafia movies they love.
Sixteen suspected La Familia members, along with a few of their Tel Aviv confederates, the Maccabi Tel Aviv Fanatics, were detained by police over growing violence last week against the swelling anti-Netanyahu movement known as The Black Flags.
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La Familia does not play around.
In 2008, fans of the opposing Maccabi Netanya team were robbed at knife-point by a gang wearing yellow La Familia shirts. In March 2011, three members of the group were charged with assaulting Arab cleaners at their home arena, Jerusalem’s Teddy Stadium.
In January 2013, when the team hired two Chechen players who were Muslim, La Familia torched their own team’s trophy room.
Netanyahu, a dyed-in-the-wool Beitar Jerusalem fan, condemned it as a “shameful” act of racism that embarrassed Jews, “who suffered from boycotts and ostracism.”
That same year, after a member of La Familia came close to killing a fan of the rival Hapoel Tel Aviv team with an axe, the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz demanded the government define La Familia as a terrorist organization.
On Friday, the call was reiterated by the left-wing party Meretz, after a La Familia Facebook post said “the haters and wreckers of Israel are continuing to make a mockery of every Jewish symbol and harm every Jewish concept in existence.” It warned: “Leftist wimps: from now on, the rules of the game have changed.”
La Familia was formed in 2005, one year after the previous diehard fan organization, “The Lion’s Den,” collapsed due to infighting. Like “ultras” the world over, they’re known for their extreme political allegiances and fanatical support of their chosen team.
The Beitar Jerusalem Football Club was formed in 1936, and if you ask the British, who then ruled the area, they have been trouble from the start.
In 1944, eight years after the club’s founding, and three years before their rule ended, British authorities expelled several players to Kenya, Eritrea and Sudan over their ties to the outlawed right-wing Irgun militia.
Two club footballers were killed when they attempted to escape via a tunnel dug beneath the center of the soccer pitch in the Gilgil detention camp in Kenya—but six others made it to Europe.
The fractious history between Netanyahu and La Familia does not change the fact that “La Familia are people with a very political bent,” said Arie Dayan, an expert on the interface of Israeli politics and sports, who is completing his doctorate at Haifa University. “If the situation now is perceived as Netanyahu against everybody else, then they’re with Netanyahu.”
He noted that while ultra fan clubs exist in many countries, “in Israel, in the past 15 to 20 years, the massive integration of Arab players to the Premier League and to Israel’s national team has caused a revolution. Every revolution has its counter-revolution, and that is what has defined Beitar’s La Familia.”
Beitar is the only Israeli Premier League team never to have had an Arab Israeli on its roster.
On Tuesday, small bands of Maccabi Tel Aviv Fanatics and La Familia members attacked anti-Netanyahu protesters in Tel Aviv with broken bottles and pepper spray, leaving several protesters bleeding and injured. On Thursday, La Familia members attacked journalists and a Palestinian bus driver after police prevented them from reaching Netanyahu’s official residence in Jerusalem.
The 16 gang members who were detained by the police were then released without charges, some to house arrest.
Yet the Israeli police have repeatedly used harsh measures, including charges by mounted police and water cannons, against the anti-Netanyahu protesters—and has detained over 70 of them, on charges ranging from not wearing required masks to disturbing the peace.
On Wednesday, Israelis were treated to leaked recordings of Interior Security Minister Amir Ohana, a close ally of Netanyahu, scolding the Jerusalem district police commander over the fact that the protests are continuing at all. “Stop this crap!’ he said, in one of the tapes revealed on Kan News.
On Thursday, acting Israel Police Commissioner Motti Cohen was obliged to restate the fact that Israeli law guarantees the right to protest.
“We will continue to allow demonstrations across the country, regardless of their messages or the identity of protesters,” Cohen said, vowing to stamp out “rioting.”
In what amounted almost to a plea, Cohen added that “the police are not a political body… The majority is protesting lawfully, and we, as police officers, must ensure they can exercise their rights.”
Ohana and Cohen were slammed by former police commissioner Yohanan Danino, who said the use of water cannons against peaceful demonstrators “crossed a red line.”
In an interview with the financial daily Calcalist, Danino called on the government to “maintain the separation of powers and safeguard democracy.”
“Everything here is fragile,” he added.
The Israeli police have been led by an acting commissioner for a-year-and-a-half due to a deepening clash between Netanyahu and the body that led the investigations which resulted in his indictment on three criminal counts of corruption early this year.
With his trial set to resume in early December, Netanyahu and his allies have ramped up their attacks against law enforcement and the judiciary.
“He needs to leave and go home,” said Eliad Shraga, chairman of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, during a Thursday rally across the street from Netanyahu’s official dwelling. “And not only because he faces criminal indictments and is not fit to serve as the prime minister of the State of Israel. He is a failed leader in every respect, including, health, economy and an accumulation of things that make this situation untenable.”
On Saturday, at a protest that organizers claimed drew 30,000 people demanding that Netanyahu resign, a former aide to the prime minister acknowledged that “Bibi’s got to go. He’s just got to go.”
Both in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and on the streets, there are signs Netanyahu’s popularity may be waning.
At the Thursday protest, Jessica Morgaine, attired in SuperGirl spandex, said, “This is not a right-wing or a left-wing protest, it’s the whole people’s protest.”
Originally a right-winger, and a resident of Moshav Hamra, a West Bank settlement in the Jordan valley, Morgaine is a private tutor who lost her job during the coronavirus pandemic. “People are hungry,” she said. “We have no food to put on the table. I have no food for my two daughters. People around the world need to know this. Bibi is killing the people of Israel—all the people.”
