Game is dying with a society

James Montague

• Last Updated: November 06. 2009 9:17PM UAE / November 6. 2009 5:17PM GMT

Ribhi Sammour scrawled his instructions in exaggerated flourishes on the faded green chalkboard that hung from the wall of the Palestine Stadium’s decrepit dressing room. The coach of Al Shate Sporting Club had gathered his players, all sitting in nervous silence, for one last briefing before the biggest match of the season would decide who would be Gaza’s undisputed champions.

They had good reason to be nervous, and for Sammour to be especially exacting about his tactics for the big match. For one, their opponents, Al Salah Islamic Organisation, a new team aligned with Hamas, were an almost unknown quantity and the match was to be watched, if rumours were to be believed, by Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh.

Equally as important was the weight of expectation. Al Shate, a mixed team of Fatah and Hamas members who hail from the 80,000 strong Al Shate refugee camp, and Gaza’s oldest and most popular team, had not won any silverware in almost 25 years.

The most recent impediment to breaking their poor run wasn’t the lack of talent or even motivation. There simply had not been any other teams to play against.

For the past few years football has been slowly dying in Gaza. War, instability and an Israeli siege has brought Gazan society to the brink of collapse.

The football league had managed to survive even the darkest of days until, finally, they crumbled after Hamas overran the Gaza Strip. It was not just the political and economic apparatus they seized: they also forcibly took over Gaza’s top football clubs, angering the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Football Association [PFA] based in the West Bank. Much like almost every area of Palestinian society, the beautiful game has been paralysed by the internal conflict, leaving the fans, players and senior politicians angry. Now all that is left is a hastily arranged cup, branded as a so-called “Dialogue and Tolerance” cup, organised by the clubs themselves, and resentment at the politicians that have tried to control the sport for their own ends.

“We have no championship and we haven’t won any trophies since 1983,” Sammour explained after he had directed his players on to the pitch. “Hamas and the Fatah government in Ramallah do not give us the chance to play, so the 16 teams got together and we were given some money by the UNDP instead.”

Sammour strode into the unseasonably warm, early autumn afternoon to a deafening crescendo of cheers and drums. With little to do and even less to get excited about in Gaza, 5,000 hyperactive fans had made the journey to the stadium in Gaza City, the blue and yellow of Al Shate dominating the terraces. In front of them stood camouflaged members of Hamas’ security forces armed with machine guns, ready for any crowd disturbance. In the confusion, only the players heard the referee blow to start the match.

How different things were a year ago. Monday October 26 2009 marked the one-year anniversary of Palestine’s first home international, against Jordan, in the purpose built Faisal Al Husseini Stadium on the outskirts of East Jerusalem. 15,000 fans turned up to watch their team draw 1-1 in a hugely symbolic match.

Hopes were high that it would usher in, if not a new era of Palestinian football, then at least a normalisation of a game scarred by political infighting, Israeli movement restrictions and poor results. But in Gaza, the civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah, and the subsequent Israeli war, has shattered all that.

Ibraheem Abu Saleem, vice president of the PFA and the man in charge of football in Gaza, made some last-minute phone calls from the PFA’s office on the morning of the match. These days they share space with the Palestinian Olympic Committee, not out of choice, but because the head quarters of both organisations were levelled when the Israel’s bombarded Gaza last winter.

Now, though, the biggest threat to the game doesn’t come from Israel. “We as sports people want to remove sport from politics but politicians on both sides, Hamas and Fatah, play on this, they try to make politics come into sport,” explained Saleem.

“The main problem lies with Hamas. When Hamas hands back the clubs to their legal board of directors, sport will be running again in Gaza as in the West Bank.”

More precisely, it is the military wing of Hamas that has so far refused to hand back the clubs to their rightful owners.

Football holds a powerful place in Palestinian hearts, partly to do with the game’s ubiquity, partly to do with the fact that Fifa are one of the few truly international bodies who recognise a Palestinian entity. In the slow process towards self determination, the Palestinian leadership realised that to be a proper nation, you need a proper national football team.

So when Fifa controversially recognised Palestine in 1998, they offered an opportunity to publicise and win concessions for the Palestinian cause in a way that political channels had failed to do.

The dream was to reach the World Cup finals in Germany in 2006, a dream destroyed by Israeli movement restrictions. The game was in chaos, which was no more evident than the last time I had met the Palestinian national team in June 2007.

As the team travelled to Amman to take part in the West Asian Championship. Hamas forces had seized control of the Gaza Strip, trapping the entire squad in Jordan as the Israelis denied entrance to the team back into the West Bank.

It was worrying enough for the players based in the West Bank. But for the 13 players who lived and worked in Gaza, it was a disaster.

“Every second I am thinking about my family,” Saab Jende, the captain of the team who lived in Gaza City, told me.

“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.”

Al Shate’s captain, Hamada Shbair, played in that tournament, which marked the beginning of the end, at least for now, of a united national team.

Since Israel’s war in Gaza last winter, no players based in the strip have been allowed to leave.

The lucky ones have been poached by the West Bank league as Gaza is famed for producing the most talented footballers. At least 50 managed to make it to the West Bank and 14 now turn out for the national team. But Hamada has remained, angry that his career has been put on hold due to internal and external conflict.

But if football is dying in Gaza, it’s thriving in the West Bank. The comparison between Ramallah and Gaza City is stark.

The former has an abundance of three things: bullet holes, burning rubbish and claustrophobic, manic children scarred by the horrors of war. It’s an isolated enclave regressing on every measurement from child mortality rates to employment.

Everything that lines a Gazan shopkeeper’s sparse shelves, along with the cars and motorbikes that bump along its unpaved and pockmarked streets, has to be smuggled in, piece by piece, through the Hamas-controlled tunnels that stretch into Egypt.

In comparison, Ramallah is like something from another planet. New, alien-looking shopping malls announce their arrival like visitors from the future. Basic foodstuffs in Gaza are scarce; in Ramallah a sign stretches across one road proclaiming that the new Nintendo Wii was back in stock after selling out, yours for just 1,690 shekels.

Jibril Rajoub’s private office is a large villa in a quiet suburb of Ramallah, the colour of Jerusalem’s famous sandstone. He’s a busy man these days. The president of the PFA has arguably overseen the most successful period in domestic football in the West Bank’s history.

The former National Security Adviser to Yasser Arafat, who once spent time in an Israeli jail for throwing a grenade at an army checkpoint before being deported to Lebanon, has also just been elected to the Fatah Central Committee, making him one of the most respected political figures in the West Bank.

He’s known for his fearsome ability to bash heads together to reach agreement, and was the driving force behind securing Palestine’s own home stadium and for launching a now thriving West Bank league.

“Getting the league started here was not easy but we have 15,000 to 20,000 now coming to games from the north, the south, from areas that are difficult to travel from,” explained Rajoub of his success.

The blame for the failure of Gazan football to progress, Rajoub insisted, lies with Hamas. “In the West Bank we have two members of Hamas on the board. We have teams for Hamas, the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine],” he explained.

“There is a wall here between politics and factionalism in sport [in the West Bank]. I think the same should happen in Gaza.”

For those living in Gaza, the issue is not that cut and dried. “There’s a lack of funding for the PFA to launch competitions and we support ourselves,” Hamada said, articulating the player’s concerns that funding has been cut because of fears that any cash would end up in Hamas’s hands.

“Jibril Rajoub is the president, we appeal to him to support soccer in Gaza like he does in the West Bank. Political conflicts are the reason for this. I blame both sides [Fatah and Hamas]. They both have demands that harm the players.”

The final was anything but an exhibition in dialogue and tolerance. As Hamas’s forces prowled the touchline, fierce challenges flew in. The only time any unity was displayed was during half-time, when the press, Hamas security forces, players and officials lined up, 50 strong, to pray together on the pitch in front of their cameras, guns and boots.

By the time Al Shate scored in the 90th minute, the entire bench was on the pitch celebrating their unassailable lead. The referee had a brief stab at enforcing injury time, before giving up, awarding a 2-0 victory to Al Shate.

Now all eyes were on the small selection of dignitaries in the stand. The increasingly fraught armed guards gave a hint that someone important had arrived. Prime minister Haniyeh beamed in his camel coloured jacket as he took to the pitch and climbed the hastily constructed podium that been dragged on to the pitch. Haniyeh had been a tough tackling defender for Al Shate, where he grew up a few metres from the football club. Knowing Haniyeh’s love of the game, Al Shate’s captain took the trophy before bravely using his platform to beg for the return of the Gaza football league. “I told him: ‘You used to be a player, please solve this problem of the players quickly’,” Hamada said afterwards. “He replied: ‘I hope so, Insh allah’.”

Al Shate’s fans, still in the stadium to witness their rare piece of silverware, started to let off fireworks. The prime minister’s twitchy, stern-faced personal security men, dressed in all black, were acutely aware of the potential dangers. After all, the Hamas politician had been targeted for assassination by Israel and, he claims, Fatah. Taking no risks, Haniyeh was bundled, still waving, into the back of a waiting limousine seconds after he had handed out the last medal.

It was the last time Hamada saw the cup he had just won. Thousands of fans rolled down the dusty path towards the Mediterranean in the shadow of the setting sun, before they, and their cup, disappeared, in to the Al Shate camp, on a wave of adulation. Hamada didn’t mind too much.

“The Al Shate team wanted to make the people happy after the war and the martyrs and the siege, and we managed that.”

For a rare, precious few moments, the reality of life in Gaza melted into the background. Al Shate were champions of Gaza. They might have another long wait before they get the chance to defend their title.

sports@thenational.ae

James Montague is the author of When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone (Mainstream)