This cartoon was published in Davar on February 1, 1981, after the games between Maccabi Tel Aviv and CSKA Moscow which took place in Brussels.
The cartoon shows two halves of a basketball court. On the right appears the text “יום אסל” meaning a day of honey and on the left is written“ יום בסל”meaning a day of onions. This is Israeli slang derived from Arabic and implying that some days are sweet while others are bitter. The picture on the right has a head poking out of the basketball net with the initials CSKA next to it. The person’s head is resting on the side of a bowl containing an unknown food, possibly falafel, onto which honey is being poured. The honey is being poured from a bottle with an Israeli flag on it, showing that the Israeli team has emerged victorious and is thus able to feed the loser. For the Israeli viewer, this image represents a “day of honey,” namely, a sweet day of victory. The picture on the left shows an Israeli head, emblazoned with Maccabi Tel Aviv, emerging from the basketball net and eating from another bowl of unknown food onto which salt (or onion powder) is being poured. The salt cellar has a Soviet star on it. The text above denotes that this is a “day of onions”, a bitter or sour day presumably because the Israeli team has lost.
The cartoonist has included the national flags rather than the logos of the specific teams, inferring that the teams represent their countries and that the games were far more than simply a competition between two teams.
CSKA Moscow and Maccabi Tel Aviv were among the best basketball teams in Europe in the 1970s. CSKA was considered stronger than Maccabi Tel Aviv dues to its superior athletes. Prior to 1977, CSKA Moscow refused to play against Maccabi Tel Aviv on political grounds, as the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. In 1977, a Belgian Jewish activist named Leon Wendel managed to organise a game in the neutral venue of Belgium; Maccabi Tel Aviv, the underdogs, won 91:77. The team’s captain, Tal Brody, summed up the victory by saying: “We are on the map and we are staying on the map – not just sports, everything.” A month later, Maccabi Tel Aviv won the first European Cup in its history.
This cartoon refers to a game held in 1981. Maccabi won the European Championship again this year but in the sixth round it lost the match to CSKA 83:81.
