‘The Palestine team carries hope’: football dreams live on amid conflict
One of Susan Shalabi’s duties as vicepresident of the Palestine Football Association is to record the death of registered players. It’s a task, never easy, that has become harder than ever. More names are coming in every day as Israeli assaults continue in Gaza in response to the murderous Hamas attacks. Seeing the photos makes it especially heartbreaking: images of the goalkeeper Haytham Areir from Shaja’yeh in the north, brothers Emad and Mohammed Hijazi of the Score Academy in Rafah standing proudly in their kits, and Shadi Sabah of Deir al-Balah who died with his entire family when his building was bombed.
“The list is long, and full of children,” Shalabi says. “I was supposed to sit and document it but this is very painful. Somehow I have this irrational fear that if I start then the numbers will increase and I haven’t even heard the stories of each one of these young people whose football dreams are for ever buried under the rubble.”
Football dreams exist in Palestine too, even if the game is put into perspective more in Gaza and the West Bank than elsewhere. Israeli bombs have fallen before – four boys were killed in 2014 playing football on a beach – but Shalabi is not alone in struggling to cope. The federation’s deputy general secretary, Sami Abu al-Hussein, has sent his children to stay with various relatives in the hope that if the worst happens and the bombs come, he would not lose them all. His house is understood to have been bombed, without casualties. The health ministry in Gaza has said more than 8,000 people have been killed there in the war so far.
Although Palestine has not achieved full statehood it has been a member of Fifa and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) since 1998, representing the people on the world stage.
“Football is one of very few platforms through which our youth can take pride in their national identity and show the rest of the world a Palestine that isn’t normally seen,” Shalabi says. “So you see, in the world of football, Palestine has a status it has yet to achieve on the international world map; in football, the political division between the West Bank in the north and Gaza in the south does not exist. The national team represents Palestinians inside Palestine and in the diaspora, and you can imagine the symbolism this status represents, and the hope it carries.”
The hope extends to the 2026 World
Cup. As a mid-ranking Asian team, Palestine have an outside chance of being one of the 18 teams that get to the final round of qualification and once there, with Asia’s automatic allocation doubling to eight, the tournament would be within touching distance.
“Every Palestinian would like to think so, and I do believe it is possible,” Shalabi says. “Our ranking reached 73 in 2018, which surpassed more than a few teams in our region who have much better facilities, more experience and much, much more freedom. We are a resilient people so, yes, I believe we can.”
That resilience has been shown on the pitch. Even when the situation is relatively quiet the national team face unique challenges. Israeli checkpoints in and out of Gaza and the West Bank mean that getting the team out for training camps and international games takes some organising. It usually involves hours of waiting, followed by entry into Jordan and a journey elsewhere.
Qualification is due to start in November against Lebanon and Australia and preparations were supposed to include involvement in the Merdeka Cup, a mini-tournament in Malaysia that started on 13 October. Six days before that, however, Hamas attacked Israel, killing more than 1,400 people, and everything changed.
Shalabi was at an AFC conference in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent. “Videos started coming in and football colleagues started asking: ‘What’s happening?’ The images coming were shocking and we all started thinking of the worst that was to come.
“As we were listening to speakers at the conference, the president of the Malaysian FA came to me, worried, asking if the team could still make it with things looking the way they were in all that media footage being exchanged. I went out and contacted our general secretary and the team manager, who were just as confused as everyone else. The West Bank was placed under blockade, and the border closed. In the end, the national team could not get to Malaysia.”
For Shalabi, getting home to the West Bank via Amman was tricky. “Only with the intervention by the Jordanian authorities were we able to get a chance to cross, after two days, on the 11th.” It took 12 hours. “The border was horrible, open for a few hours then closed with thousands of people blocked at both ends. Checkpoints were everywhere at the entrances and exits of Palestinian cities.”
Unsurprisingly, home games, including next month’s qualifier against
Australia, are out of the question. It is not just about finding neutral venues but fielding a team. Even if all the squad are fit to play, getting to the game may not be possible.
“It’s extremely difficult to move in and out – and even within – Palestine, with the volatile situation, checkpoints, the siege on the cities, and the frequent closure of the borders,” Shalabi says. “This is both a logistic, financial and operational challenge.” Algeria offered to host and cover costs but, according to Shalabi, the AFC and Fifa did not accept an Asian qualifier played in Africa. It looks as if Kuwait will be the venue.
Football has provided hope for the people of Palestine in the past, but it remains to be seen whether it will have the power to make any difference in these times of unimaginable pain. “We’re all living under an unprecedented state of uncertainty,” Shalabi says. “The only thing on people’s minds is the mass destruction of life and livelihood happening in Gaza as we speak.”