Soldiers without weapons: Palestine footballs painful journey

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It was May, 2014, and the final of the AFC Challenge Cup. Eight of Asia's lowest ranked teams had competed and the winner would qualify straight into the Asian Cup finals, Asia's equivalent of the European Championships.

It was a shortcut to the continent's biggest finals for Asia's minnows. Palestine beat The Philippines by a single goal, a brilliant second half free kick by Ashraf Nu'man. They had reached the final without conceding a goal, too.



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For Palestine -- a team recognized by FIFA, soccer's global governing body, since 1998 but not yet as a fully fledged country by the United Nations -- qualification meant more than any progress on the pitch.

Ever since the Palestinian Football Association was recognized by FIFA -- one of the first and only truly global organizations to recognize an entity called Palestine -- soccer had reflected the shifting political situation around it: Occupation, allegations of terrorist links, arbitrary arrest, death, bombings, allegations of torture, hunger strikes, movement restrictions, exile, internecine warfare and failure.

Palestinian experience

On the pitch the eleven men were a microcosm of the Palestinian experience.

The goalscorer Ashraf Nu'man was from Bethlehem in the West Bank and had played for the champions Taraji Wadi al Nes before moving to the big money of the Saudi Premier League.

Hussam Abu Salah was born in Israel, one of the country's Arab citizens who make up 20% of the population. He played in the thriving West Bank Premier League, now professional and attracting many more Arab Israelis who felt increasingly alienated in a country where many viewed its Arabs citizens with suspicion.

In the center of defense was Abdelatif Bahdari, a center back who had also moved to Saudi Arabia but was now playing in Jordan. He was from Gaza, where many Palestine's believe their best soccer players come from.

But Bahdari had frequently been prevented from playing national team games. Israeli forces regularly detained players at the border, for alleged security reasons, as they tried to leave to meet the squad before important matches away from home.

Next to him stood Omar Jarun, a six foot five defender with a blonde mohawk.

Jarun looked like a hometown quarterback. Born in Kuwait but raised in Peachtree City, Georgia in the U.S., to an American mother and a Jordanian Palestinian father, he nevertheless identified as Palestinian.

In the absence of a mosque, he would pray in a function room at a local hotel, rented by Peachtree's small Muslim community. He speaks in a broad southern accent and speaks no Arabic.

After the referee blew for full time, the bench rushed the field to mark the greatest moment in Palestine's short soccer's history.

The coach Jamal Mahmoud, a young Jordanian of Palestinian origin who had masterminded the victory, was picked up and thrown in the air before the team's veteran captain, goalkeeper Ramzi Saleh, raised up the trophy.

The trophy meant that Palestinian players started their first ever Asian Cup campaign in the Australian city of Newcastle, against Asian champions Japan. Tens of millions would be watching, completing one of the most remarkable rises in world soccer.

Read: American soccer star plays for Palestine

Rewind eight years, to the Palestinian city of Jericho in the West Bank, and the situation was very different.

It was the summer of 2006, a summer dominated by the Second Lebanon war. The windows outside the forlorn looking and hopefully named Jericho International stadium were smashed.

Peeling posters of Yasser Arafat decay from the pitted concrete walls as a single line of fans shuffled through the stadium's one working turnstile, paying seven Israeli shekels for a ticket. Inside, a handful of fans prayed to Mecca. There was only one stand, half full with supporters as a team from the northern town of Tulkarem take on Wadi al Nes.

This wasn't a league match but a cup game. Israeli movement restrictions and road blocks -- imposed following the the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2000 -- had made league fixtures all but impossible to fulfill. Since the late 1970s less than 10 seasons had been completed. But today it was the quarterfinals. The loser may not play another game for months.

With no changing rooms the two teams dressed on the pitch, each squad sat around their coach receiving last minute instruction. Tulkarem were the clear favorites. The team consisted of a number of Palestinian internationals and were coached by Mohammed Sabah. Short and dressed in a tracksuit with a bushy mustache, Sabah and his players were separated from the crowd by a high metal fence. A line of Palestinian Authority policemen in riot gear added another layer of security.

Kick off came and went without any movement. The referee was nowhere to be seen. Half an hour after the planned kick-off he still hadn't arrived. A few minutes later the rotund man in black came puffing onto the pitch to a wall of jeers. He had been held up at a checkpoint.

Fractured relationship

In 2006 soccer in Palestine mirrored the world around it. It was poor, fractured, beset by internal, seemingly intractable political and cultural differences and defined by its deteriorating relationship with Israel.

When FIFA recognized the Palestinian Football Association in 1998, it was greeted with jubilation. Sepp Blatter, in one of his first acts as FIFA president, flew to Gaza and was mobbed as he landed at the Rafah airstrip near the Egyptian border.

Recognition was a huge political act as well as a sporting one. Palestine could now compete on the international stage, including the chance to reach the World Cup finals. But the playing field was far from equal.

FIFA had relaxed its rules on citizenship, allowing the Palestinians to call on its huge diaspora to fill its team sheet. An advert was placed in a German magazine looking for players, whilst a team of scouts scoured Chile -- where a first division team whose identity was forged by Palestinian immigrants, Palestino, thrived -- Sweden and the United States looking for eligible players.

When qualification for the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany began, a multinational squad was assembled. The volatile security situation meant the team could not play any games on 'home' soil, instead traveling and training in a third country; either Egypt, Qatar or the UAE. They thrashed Chinese Taipei 8-0 and earned a respectable 1-1 draw with Iraq but players from Gaza would frequently be prevented from getting through the border, due to alleged security precautions by Israel.

Whatever hope the Palestinians had of World Cup qualification ended when five Gaza-based players on their way to Doha for a game against Uzbekistan were held at the border in the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Beersheba. The Palestinians could barely scrape together 11 players. It was a miracle they only lost 3-0.

Qualification for the 2010 World Cup finals ended in a similar manner, with the Palestinians claiming that they couldn't field a full team for their game against Singapore. They forfeited the tie.

The match in Jericho in 2006 went all the way to penalties. As night fell, Wadi al Nes prevailed before the expensive-to-run and notoriously temperamental floodlights were turned off as soon as the last kick went in. Back then, the thought that Jericho, Tulkarem, Ramallah or any other Palestinian city might aspire to being a stadium of international importance seemed like a joke.

Fall out

Ten months later, Sabah is sat in the lobby of the his hotel in Amman, the capital of neighboring Jordan, devouring as much information from his newspaper as he can and wondering when he'll be allowed home.

The previous summer Sabah was coach of Tulkarem, but now he was also in charge of the Palestine national team at the West Asian Football Federation Championship, a regional tournament held every two years. His Palestine side had lost both of their group games to Iran and Iraq and had been eliminated. Their journey back, however, had been made impossible by events at home.

'The main problem is the situation in Gaza as we have 13 players from there,' Sabah explained. 'What has happened in the past week means they are very worried, stressed.'

Tensions between Hamas, an Islamic military organization considered by many in the West to be a terrorist organization, and Fatah, the Palestinian nationalist movement of Arafat, had simmered since the former's parliamentary victory in 2006.

Now Hamas was, after weeks of bloody fighting that had killed several hundred Palestinians, in total control of the Gaza Strip. The Israelis responded by closing the borders. Effectively, there were now two Palestinian entities, both claiming political and moral legitimacy, at war with each other.

'It's very difficult at the moment as some of the players and coaches wanted to go back as their minds and their hearts are with their families in Gaza but they can't because the border at Rafah is closed,' Sabah said.

Unable to travel between Gaza and the West Bank, there were already essentially two national teams, one set of players training in Gaza, the other in the West Bank. He brought out his captain, Saeb Jendeya, who played in Gaza City.

'Every second I am thinking about my family,' Jendeya explained, noticeably downbeat. 'Every time I'm here I'm calling them in Gaza asking about the border, when they are going to open it and whether my family has food or not.

'In the past two days it has been difficult for them to get food and I have five very young kids. And my salary from the government hasn't been paid for 10 months.'

The team was eventually allowed back in to the West Bank a few days later. But it would be weeks before all 13 players from Gaza would be allowed home.

Sabah, the team's coach, was later fired.

The Gaza Cup final

By 2009 Hamas was entrenched in Gaza. The restrictions in and out of the strip had continued, through the civil war that saw Hamas rout Fatah in Gaza and through Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008 -- designed, they said, to stop cross border rocket attacks aimed into Israel -- that led to anywhere between 300 and 1,000 civilian deaths.

The blockade and the internal fights had brought Gazan society to the brink of collapse.

Gaza City was a hopeless place. Bullet holes, piles of rubble -- once former housing blocks -- and broken buildings sat untouched from the bombing that destroyed them months previously. The import of cement was banned in case it was used for military purposes. The black uniforms of Hamas now kept order on the streets, pacing in front of large, colorful murals of Palestinian martyrs.

Huge piles of rubbish burned permanently, throwing up acrid plumes of thick black smoke. Manic children danced around them, throwing glass bottles at passersby.

Gaza's soccer league had managed to survive even the darkest of days of the conflict, but it couldn't survive this season. The fallout between Hamas and Fatah had extended to soccer, where Gaza's teams had been run under the patronage of the two movements. Now all that was left was a 'Dialogue and Tolerance'' cup between Al Shate and Al Salah Islamic Organization, organized by the clubs themselves, and resentment at the politicians that were trying to control the sport for their own ends.

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