At a rickety roadside café on the outskirts of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian football fans crowd a small TV screen watching the United States lose to the Czech Republic.
When the screen goes fuzzy, the half dozen onlookers — stricken with World Cup fever — shout in protest. Hani al-Saqaa, a barefoot 14 year old, dutifully jiggles the antenna bringing the unfolding drama back into focus.
”We don’t need satellite dishes, we have Palestinian TV,” Saqaa says proudly.
As the first week of World Cup action winds to a close, Palestinian football fans across the West Bank and Gaza have an unlikely batch of local media execs turned modern day Robin Hoods to thank for free broadcasts of the matches.
With few Palestinians able to afford the $400 charged by the satellite TV provider here, local Palestinian TV managers are showing pirated World Cup broadcasts to cash strapped fans.
”Some might say we’re stealing it, but we just want our people to be able to watch the World Cup like the rest of the world,” says Basem Abu Sumeya, chairperson of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, which is intercepting and rebroadcasting a Turkish satellite company’s World Cup programming.
On the screen, Abu Sumeya slaps the gold dome of the al-Aqsa Mosque — his channels logo — over the Turkish station’s logo and beams the matches into homes across the Palestinian territories.
”We give it free to the people because we don’t have millions of shekels to buy the licence from ART,” he adds, referring to the Saudi-based channel that owns the West Bank and Gaza broadcast rights for the month-long soccer tournament.
Palestinians, facing hard times after an international aid boycott left the government of the militant Hamas movement unable to pay salaries, are mostly too impoverished to fork over cash for the broadcast.
Ayman Qadry, however, did.
Qadry, the head of a local TV station in the northern West Bank town of Nablus, bought a single subscription to ART’s World Cup package and is rebroadcasting the games free to Nablus 170 000 residents.
”This is not a money making venture for me,” Qadry says from his sparsely equipped studios housed in a converted apartment. ”This is about giving Palestinians a spot of joy during bleak times.”
A spokesperson for ART, which is presumably losing out on scores of lost sales as a result of the rampant pirating, refused to comment.
Qadry says he received an initial complaint letter from ART, but ignored it, confident that Arab sympathies for the Palestinian cause would trump financial calculations in the end.
”No respectable Arab company would bring further pain on the Palestinians now,” he said.
The abundance of free World Cup football in the West Bank and Gaza has been the source of jokes in Israel, where consumers are also souring to World Cup television fees.
A cartoon in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper showed Israelis climbing over the separation barrier to watch the World Cup free of charge in the West Bank.
Israeli discontent with the $110 initially charged by local satellite providers for World Cup broadcasts prompted a parliamentary probe into the matter.
Owners of Israeli bars and cafes showing the games to customers are facing a challenge from the Charlton Company which owns the broadcast rights and is demanding commercial licensing fees. Charlton officials did not return calls seeking comment.
Like the Palestinian TV executives, these barkeeps and restaurateurs insist they’re mere public servants, standing up to the corporations who seek to rob ordinary Israelis of an affordable World Cup experience.
”In this day and age Israelis need a reason for happiness and this is what the World Cup is about and this is why were showing the matches. Il’l go to court before I pay Charlton a dime,” says Gal Ganzman, owner of Mikes Place, a Jerusalem bar showing matches nightly.
Few Israelis are likely to stop by the dusty café in Khan Yunis to seek respite from World Cup TV fees. And if they did, says Saqaa, they wouldn’t be welcome.
”They’d surely be rooting for the United States and were all Brazil fans.” – AFP
