Yuri Foreman

If Yuri Foreman did not exist, Israel would have to invent him---and they would have to hurry.

Foreman is the World Boxing Association’s super welterweight champion. He will be defending his title against Miguel Cotto tomorrow (Saturday) at Yankee Stadium in New York. Foreman is 29, born in Belarus, lives in New York and claims Israel as his home. He’s also studying to be a rabbi. He’s favored to win the match.

Foreman comes at just the right moment for Israel. The match can be used to deflect attention from the flotilla atrocity, push back against the growing international boycott of all things Israeli and give Israelis a victory of some sort---assuming Foreman wins---when the chips seem down everywhere else. The power of symbolism and symbolic victories or breakthroughs can rarely be minimized.

But there is another side to this. The typical Israeli defense of the attack on the flotilla has revealed the broken soul and wounded conscience of the country’s establishment and the ascendancy of a heartless Israeli right-wing which deals in double-talk rather than facts. This establishment deliberately acts just a bit crazy or over-the-top in order to terrorize its Arab and Persian neighbors. Foreman likewise seems cut from this cloth, whatever his strategic means and methods in the ring. If Foreman’s probable victory in New York tomorrow has some political and symbolic meaning for Israel, it also illustrates the peculiar stream of its new soullessness as only a boxing match can.

Putting aside the tragedy that an Orthodox rabbinical student finds boxing instructions in the Torah, as Foreman’s trainers have said he does, we are left with a boxer who is opportunistically using his Israeli citizenship while deriving his main benefits from his American residency and Belarusian roots. Boxing has long been a low-road sport and it speaks volumes that Israel is putting so much hope in a boxer who is not really Israeli—-and one whose main American boxing idols are boxers who have undisciplined, checkered or criminal pasts.

I’ll agree with the Israelis who think that Foreman is a representative of their country, a kind of global ambassador who won’t be pushed around, a man of the moment. And I’ll add how pathetic and tragic this really is.

Shame on the WBA and the American media for allowing the match and for giving Foreman any publicity at all and for not boycotting the match.

Cotto should show up with Furkan Doğan’s name on his shirt.