FOOTBALL TRIVIAGoals for Galilee: The Triumphs and Traumas of the Sons of Sakhnin, Israel’s Arab Football Club by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochdendler
[...Kessel and his cameraman made a documentary film],
We Have No Other Land, about the soccer team of Sakhnin, an Arab town in Galilee. It has a Jewish manager and several Jewish players, but is an Arab team. Against all odds it captured Israel’s State Cup, and represented Israel in Europe. It’s a true story of football conquering prejudice in one of the most suspicious lands on earth.
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The message is that Arab and Jew are so close to each other, the border is so thin, that they’re really the same people. It’s really like having two different tribes of the same person, forever warring. For the club, there are two successes really.
One is that the club survives, because its field has been bombed just about every time that Israel bombs across the border. But, forgetting the material side, the second success is a spiritual thing – the club has a Jewish coach, it has Jewish players, but mostly it’s an Arab team.
To me, the biggest shock with this whole story is that they were allowed to compete and win the Israel State Cup. Israel allowed an Arab team to compete in their cup, and then win it, and then, having won it, they had the right and took it to compete in Europe as an Israeli team. And that’s very powerful. My feeling is that soccer is a lingua franca, it can cross all the boundaries.
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