Sport, Politics and Exile: Protests in Israel during the World Cup (Argentina, 1978)

This article seeks to analyze certain questions concerning the protests mounted against the 1978 World Cup. After a brief review of the military government’s efforts to use the World Cup to legitimize its dictatorship, to Argentine society as well as the rest of the world, we examine the reactions of world public opinion to the fact that this event was being held in a country ruled by a repressive, criminal regime. Our focus, however, is on the people and groups in Israel who used the occasion of the World Cup to protest and denounce the crimes committed in Argentina. The Israeli case is particularly interesting because of the close relations between Israel and the Argentine dictatorship, as well as the fact that Israel had a large community of Latin American immigrants, most of them Argentines. Their numbers steadily increased as several hundred exiles fled the horrors of the military dictatorship.