A: HAPOEL

The primacy of the Maccabi organisation, both internationally and within Eretz Yisrael, has been emphasised previously. In international terms, the pre-eminence of Maccabi as the premier Jewish sporting organization would remain uncontested. In the early years this was true of the situation in Mandate Palestine too. Basically, anyone who wanted to be part of a sporting association became part of Maccabi. Over time, however, tensions began to develop.
Many of the arguments had been caused by increasing class tensions as the atmosphere in the country became increasingly ideological and Jews lined up on different sides of what was more clearly being seen as the beginning of a full-blown class conflict. In the years following the war, large numbers of Halutzim – pioneering Jews imbued with a strong labour and socialist ideology – came to the country, and the tensions grew more pronounced.Up to this time, the groups that had joined the umbrella organization of Maccabi, included some groups of workers who had formed their own sporting clubs, but it was becoming more difficult for those groups to co-exist peacefully with the rest of the Maccabi organization. While Maccabi had formed itself as a non-political Zionist sporting organization, the labour movement identified the general line of Maccabi as being more in line with what they termed “bourgeois” interests, i.e. the interests of the employer class. It was finally decided to set up a separate sporting framework for those with a labour orientation. It took some two years for the organization to come to full fruition after the opening of its first club in Haifa, but, in this way, in 1926, the new organization, HaPoel, (the worker), was launched. By this time, all of the workers' groups had seceded from Maccabi. The great split that was, in many ways, to have such difficult consequences for the future of Israeli sport had begun.
HaPoel soon allied itself to the International Workers' Sports Union and this created obstacles in the way of their cooperation with Maccabi in a number of different ventures in the international arena.

When Maccabi set up the Israel Soccer Association (Hitachdut HaKaduregel) and the latter body requested membership in FIFA, the top international soccer body, HaPoel, who wanted to join the Hitachdut, stated that they would not join if the Hitachdut applied to join FIFA. To HaPoel, FIFA represented a professionalisation and a capitalist ethos with which they refused to be connected.
At the other end, FIFA made it clear that they would not consider the request of the Israeli body if HaPoel - which was part of a different international body, (something that made membership of FIFA impossible) - was party to the application.

In the end, the problem was worked out in a solution that allowed HaPoel to be connected with the Israeli association, without endangering the FIFA membership - but it was a good example of the latent tensions and the destructive tendencies of the mixture of sport and politics.
In general, the relationship between HaPoel and Maccabi created enormous difficulties for the organizers of sport in the pre-state years. The first two Maccabiah games in 1932 and 1935, the only ones held in the years before the state was founded, took place without the participation of HaPoel, despite its considerable presence in the field of sport in the Yishuv.

The different sides jockeyed for position and each viewed the other group with great suspicion, over and above the normal tension of sports rivals in any arena. This represented the politicization of sport - an abnormal situation which is usually felt to have no place in the world of sport -, but in the highly charged ideological atmosphere of the Jewish community of Mandate Palestine (and later Israel) it was almost inevitable that non-sporting tensions would make their way into the sporting sphere.
It should be noted, moreover, that despite the protestations of non-politicization on the part of the Maccabi organization, they indeed revealed themselves as politically connected - and ultimately aligned themselves with the General Zionist Party, after the foundation of the state.

B: BETAR

Nor were they the only two politically affiliated organizations in the sporting world. Two other sporting “mini-empires” developed in the pre-state years.

The first to develop was Betar, which began in 1923 as the youth arm of what would become known as the Revisionist party associated with Ze’ev Jabotinsky. In 1925, the first Betar graduates arrived in Mandate Palestine and became involved in the general institutions of the Yishuv including the Histadrut and the Haganah, both of which were associated with the Labour Zionist movement. In sporting terms, the members of the movement joined Maccabi, where they tried to bring their own perspective on sport to expression within the organization. The perspective that Betar held regarding sport was to consider it a tool in the building up of the country and as a preparation and an accessory for military training. Sport and military training were two sides of the same coin for Betar members who perceived themselves as involved in the building up of the nation, with their every activity being subordinated to that larger goal.
Betar was organized differently from Maccabi and HaPoel, which were first and foremost sporting organizations; Betar was first a movement, but one with sporting interests and expressions.

The break with the Maccabi movement came at the time of the second Maccabiah in 1935, when Betar was informed that it could not take part in the opening ceremony of the Maccabiah while wearing its movement shirts, whose colour, brown, was seen to be reminiscent of Mussolini’s fascist movement in Italy. This led Betar to pull out of its intended participation in the Maccabiah and to launch its own sporting organization, in a similar way to that of HaPoel. It was smaller than HaPoel, however, boasting only two major clubs, Betar Tel Aviv and, later on, Betar Jerusalem. It constantly perceived itself (with justification, it must be said) as the victim of the co-operation of Maccabi and HaPoel, which divided up the perks and positions of power in the sporting world of pre-state Mandate Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel.
Associated with the controversial underground movements, Etzel and Lehi, considered by Ben-Gurion to be the great untouchables of Israeli politics - together with the Communists - Betar's marginalization in the sporting world (as in other frameworks) was natural. The British, too, predictably came out against them, at one time, banning their teams as "unfit for sporting competition" and forcing them to change their names and to compete under a different banner and name (Nordia).

C: ELITZUR

Another organization, founded in 1939, was “Elitzur”, the sporting arm of the Religious Zionists, associated with HaPoel HaMizrachi movement. Elitzur’s outlook and whole raison d’etre was based on the ideology of Rav Kook.

It is interesting to see how the founders of Elitzur defined its goals.
To increase the physical strength of religious working youth, to prepare a cohesive camp for the work of the community, to implant a spirit of order and discipline in the circles of religious youth and to educate to loyalty towards the project of the building up of a religious, working Eretz Yisrael.
Originally, the Elitzur sporting organisation was set up to provide some kind of a cover for the religious Zionist units who were doing underground training within the framework of the Haganah, but soon it took on a life of its own and began to take part in many different fields of sport, branching out from its initial sphere of athletics. The one major exception was soccer. Elitzur has never become a participant in Israeli soccer, because that sport is played primarily on Shabbat, while Elitzur, by its own definition, will not take part in Shabbat sport activities. Nevertheless in basketball, for example, Elitzur is very active, since basketball is played during the week in Israel.

It is worth mentioning (in parentheses!) at this point that there have been a number of religiously observant sportsmen who have seen no contradiction between their religious faith and their sporting activity. In 2002, a young rising Jewish basketball star by the name of Tamir Goodman came to Israel at the invitation of Maccabi Tel Aviv and currently plays for the Givat Shmuel team. Goodman, a kippah-wearing youth is only the last in an admittedly not very long line of Orthodox Jewish sports stars. Perhaps the most illustrious of all was the “wrestling rabbi”, Rafael Halperin, who was educated in Yeshivot before turning to sport, and with the encouragement of the great Rabbinic leader, the Hazon Ish, went on to an outstanding career as a professional wrestler all over the world in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.
One of the notable things about all the different sporting organizations – Maccabi, HaPoel, Betar and Elitzur - is that their activities were not restricted to sport but included many different cultural activities including, often some kind of role in national tasks, working among new immigrants, teaching Hebrew language and providing as institutional structure that included many aspects of community life.

D: A.S.A.

There is one sports association that has always been non-political; it is also the association that has concentrated most exclusively on a sporting agenda. This is A.S.A. (Igud Sport Academi), the Academic Sports Association.

Founded in 1953, it represents the sports interests of all those involved in higher education, and has been very active in many different sporting fields, participating in and even hosting international sports competitions. It maintains teams in the different sporting leagues, and its representatives can celebrate many different achievements over the years.