“The blacks have different colors too. There’s dark black and there’s mocha. The ones who are mocha are smarter. I mean the ones who are a little more mixed, like Andrew Kennedy, for example. You can see it in the way he holds himself, in his personality. He checks you out, and he’s smart too. The other blacks really are idiots. They’ll do whatever you tell them to, just like slaves. Tell them to do something, and they’ll do exactly that.”

This isn’t a quote from some eighteenth-century slave trader. It’s from a speech given by Pini Gershon, a former coach of the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team, to a group of managers in 2001. His audience burst out laughing, and Gershon apologized as soon as his words hit the press. Still, he never actually paid for his remarks in any tangible way, and kept coaching the team long considered Israel’s national basketball team.

Twelve years have passed since he made those miserable comments, and the racist attitudes that they reflected have only gotten more deeply entrenched in Israel’s sports culture. The most recent scandal erupted on the Beitar Jerusalem soccer field, where a group of fans roared their disapproval at the management’s plans, as yet unfulfilled, to sign two Muslim players from Chechnya.

By the way, it should be noted that the current management is doing a lot, if not enough, to combat racism, with General Manager Itzik Kornfein actually getting into a confrontation with some of the more extreme elements of his team’s fan base. At an earlier game, fans protested the decision from the stands by raising a conspicuous yellow banner that read, “Beitar, Forever Pure.” This aroused public fury throughout Israel, in both the Jewish and the Arab sectors. The very use of the word “pure” in this context touched one of the few raw nerves that can still shock and infuriate Israeli society. If there is one thing that Israelis of all stripes reject with utter repugnance, it is evoking the horrors of the Holocaust.