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By Amira Hass
Haaretz, 30
Nov. 2005
Even those who
don't understand a thing about soccer cannot ignore its importance in the
lives of Palestinians. That's why the much ballyhooed initiative by the
Peres Center for Peace - to organize an Israeli-Palestinian soccer team to
play against Barcelona, in Barcelona, seems so logical and natural.
Furthermore, according to the center's press release, it has been bringing
together young Israeli and Palestinian players for the last three years. The
television ads about the game send a message of peace. If Israelis and
Palestinians can play on the same team, it is a sign that there can be peace
between the nations. Shimon Peres, who together with actor Sean Connery is
supposed to sit in the VIP gallery, is the most appropriate person to sell
that sign.
If this had been initiated and financed by some tycoon or European soccer
club, one could say that bringing some Palestinians and Israelis to play on
one team would be like pretty cellophane wrapping. A private individual,
even a tycoon, doesn't need to know that a young soccer player from Gaza,
who can go to Barcelona or Tel Aviv under the cover of a well-publicized
project, is not allowed to play in Jenin or Hebron. That's because Israel
prohibits Gazans from traveling to the West Bank and vice versa, except in
very special cases and after much bureaucratic effort, and sometimes only if
the people asking to leave have good connections with institutions like the
Peres Center for Peace and former senior officials in the Shin Bet.
A European soccer club is not supposed to go into the exhausting details of
the systematic restrictions on movement that Israel has imposed on the
Palestinians for the last 15 years. After all, most Israelis don't bother to
find out those details. Why should such a European team know about 10
physical therapy students from Gaza who have been waging a legal battle for
the right to go to school in Bethlehem, but whom the Israeli authorities
refuse to allow out of Gaza for mysterious security reasons? Why should
movie star Sean Connery know that the players from Kafr Qasem, for example,
can play in Barcelona with their teammates from Rafah and Tul Karm but not
in Kafr Qasem, let alone Rafah and Tul Karm? It's not Connery's role to know
that Israel prohibits Israelis, including Arabs, from entering the
territories of the Palestinian Authority, or that human rights groups and
lawyers work for long months and sometimes years trying to get the Defense
Ministry and army to allow Palestinians out for medical treatment, family
matters, schooling - and are not always successful.
However, when the player behind the game is an institution named after a
leading politician, this is no mere wrapping. When the person marketing the
game is the same senior politician who for long years helped design policies
that impose draconian limits on Palestinian movement - the cellophane is
meant to hide, to portray the opposite of reality. That is deception.
Israeli-Palestinian meetings with the potential and basis for peaceful
relations take place all the time, and without the public donations and
journeys for a soccer game: at the joint demonstrations against the
separation fence, in the activities of MachsomWatch and Yesh Din, in the
weekly trips by Physicians for Human Rights to Palestinian villages. For an
Israeli-Palestinian meeting to carry a sincere message of peace it must
begin with one starting point: recognition that these are relations between
the occupied and the occupier, and that the termination of that status is
the precondition for peace.
The occupation did not come to an end with the signing of the Olso Accords
and the disengagement, despite the supreme (and disastrously successful)
efforts of Israeli governments to portray matters as such. But it seems the
European Union ministers love to love the cellophane and its marketer, and
they throw out the bitter fillings. That filling was most recently delivered
to them in the detailed report by the consuls in Jerusalem and Ramallah, in
which they warn that Israeli policy in Jerusalem, which Peres was a partner
in shaping and apparently will continue to be, sabotages the chances to
reach a permanent settlement, meaning a peace agreement.
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