Although the majority of the Palestinians who lived in the territory which became Israel were uprooted in the war and their return was prevented to ensure a Jewish majority, 156,000 Arab-Palestinians remained in Israel, became Israeli citizens, but lived under the strict Military Government until 1966. The emergence of Arab soccer as an “integrative enclave” has roots in these first two decades of the state's existence. During those years soccer was used by both the state apparatus and by the Palestinian minority for different purposes, and in order to fulfill different needs, but the combined effect of these forces was shaping Arab soccer as a sphere of limited integration.

As Yoav Peled and Gershon Shafir argue, Israeli political culture has been characterized by a continuous tension between three partly contradictory political goals and commitments: the colonial project of settling the country with a specific group of people, the ethno-national project of building a Jewish nation-state, and the liberal project of establishing a democracy. The tension between the first two commitments and the third commitment was partly solved by ensuring that most of the non-Jewish population remained beyond the state boundaries. The existence of the remaining Arabs, however, forced the political leadership to find creative solutions to reconcile between the divergent commitments. Therefore, as Shira Robinson (2005) has demonstrated, from the very first years of the state's existence, its apparatus implemented extensive and diverse practices towards the Arab-Palestinian minority to ensure a limited form of inclusion, one that simultaneously emphasized their liberal inclusion in the project of state-building, excluded them from the project of nation-building, and made them the victims of the colonial project.