VIDEO: Palestine World Cup qualifying

October 24, 2007
Sportsworld's Rahul Pathak reports on the Palestine and Singapore football teams and their long road to the 2010 Fifa World Cup finals.


This week in Soccer : 10/29/2007
Stephen Fontenot, San Antonio Express-News
Palestine misses qualifier due to Gaza travel ban
The Palestinian soccer team missed its World Cup qualifying game in Singapore because of Israeli travel restrictions. Eighteen of the squad's players and officials live in the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Strip has been under tight control since the Islamic militant Hamas took power by force in June. Last month, Israel declared Gaza "hostile territory" and said it would permit only humanitarian hardship cases to leave.

Jamal Abu Hasheesh, spokesman for the Palestinian soccer federation, said the 18 team members didn't receive Israeli permits to leave Gaza for the game.

The federation asked FIFA to reschedule the game. FIFA officials were not immediately available for comment.

=============================

Politics affects soccer : Can soccer influence politics?
Robert Evans, Inside Bay Area, March 13th, 2007
And now in little over a week from today, in London, we are going to have a public confrontation over the little matter of whether Israel should be allowed to continue playing in major
competitions. If you are a long-time follower of international soccer and the organization—FIFA—that controls it, you may know of historical precedents that would lead you to say either that they should be banned, or that they should not. Take your pick.

Sepp Blatter, the master politician at the head of FIFA, has gone on record for keeping soccer and politics separate. Last December in Asia he told a group of reporters: "We are not going to enter into any political declarations. There have been so many rants from heads of states, even in Europe, and we in football, if we entered in such discussions, then it would be against our statutes. We are not in politics."

How he kept a straight face while saying that I do not know, since in the last few years several member-nations of FIFA have been suspended for interference of their government into the sport, and others have been threatened. Iran, Kenya, Yugoslavia, Greece and Palestine have been suspended briefly until their respective governments backed off. Blatter believes that
FIFA, not government, must control the sport. But has that always been true?

In that particular case FIFA refused to act politically, eliminated the Soviet Union and allowed Chile to qualify for the cup in Germany. Earlier, however, in 1961, the organization had acted politically, banning South Africa because of its apartheid policies that did not allow a team to field white and non-white players together. That ban stayed in place for almost thirty years, until in the early nineties, apartheid itself was dismantled, and the modern South Africa
emerged.

What of this dispute over Israel? In 2002, Arab countries called for a ban for a list of reasons that included Israel's incursion into areas of Palestinian self-rule; racial and ethnic discrimination against Palestinians; and obstructions raised to block the progress of Palestinian sports. Just last November, Israel refused to allow members of the Palestine team to travel from Gaza to play a match in Singapore.

The current protest by The Boycott Israeli Goods Campaign and supported by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has not received much attention in U.S. newspapers, but gets a lot of attention in the press in Europe, Israel and Palestine, as did other sporting boycotts. And the subject of Israel's full compliance with international law, including the permanent lifting of all barriers to freedom of movement for Palestinian goods, people and capital, has been raised for governmental debate in London, supported by 57 members of the British parliament.

The intent is to put pressure upon Israel, which is seeking to improve its relationship with the European Union, whose members are aware of the illegalities in current Israeli policies of building the wall of separation across Palestinian land. The protest on March 24, the day of a match between England and Israel as a qualifier for Euro 2008, is in front of the headquarters of the Football Association in London at 1 p.m. In the recent past, similar protests were organized for tennis and cricket, in the latter case resulting on the cancellation of a planned match between Scotland and Israel.

On the world stage, soccer is a vastly more important sport than either tennis or cricket, and the idea that political action could affect scheduling of matches, or a country's right to participate in international competition, would have serious repercussions within FIFA. Which way will Sepp Blatter go?