By Hatem Abudayyeh, Fight Back!, 4 October 2007
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The Palestinian National Football (soccer) Team functions, or barely functions, under more difficult conditions than any other team in the world. Players from Gaza cannot travel to the West Bank or Jerusalem, West Bankers cannot travel to Jerusalem or Gaza and neither Gazans nor West Bankers can enter the 1948 Palestinian territories (now called ‘Israel’).
So although 2.2 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, with 1.1 million in Gaza and another million in the 1948 areas, a consolidated team that can practice together is impossible to field. Add to this dilemma the fact that finely manicured pitches (forget finely manicured, there are hardly any grass fields at all) are impossible to come by in the West Bank or Gaza and it becomes painfully obvious that football (although loved by Palestinians and other Arabs across the world) is another casualty of the U.S.-supported Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Goal Dreams, a movie directed by Jeffrey Saunders and Maya Sanbar and screened, amongst other places, at the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, chronicles the trials of the Palestinian team as it unsuccessfully attempts to qualify for the 2006 World Cup. In scene after powerful scene, viewers experience the humiliation afforded the Gazans as they try to cross the border and join their teammates training in Egypt. As the Israelis constantly reject these attempts, the rest of the team, which includes one Palestinian American from New York and a number of Chileans of Palestinian ancestry, could not scrimmage because, without the Gazans, they did not have the requisite 22 players to do so.