The pitch is scruffy, with bare patches of earth and sand. The crowd is desultory, half a dozen girls and boys, yawning in the winter sunshine of the Judean hills. The home players are having a lazy kick-about as they wait for their opponents’ bus to arrive.
As football games go, this is as ordinary as it gets. And yet the presence of a tiny Fifa film crew for this apparently insignificant fixture, shows that something rather special is taking place.
The match scheduled today in the Jerusalem dormitory town of Mevaseret, might be recorded by future sports historians as one of those rare moments when sport was history, when sport made history. To understand, you have to know the history of the two teams involved.
The home team is Katamon Abu Ghosh Mevaseret FC — ”Katamon” for short. The club was founded by one-time Israeli diplomat Alon Liel. A few years ago Liel approached the mayor of Abu Ghosh, a small Arab-Israeli town near Jerusalem, with the idea of combining Abu Ghosh’s team with a mainly Jewish team from the larger settlement of Mevaseret.
Liel’s intention was to fight the anti-Arab feeling prevalent in sectors of Israeli football.
Whatever the reason, this racism can be decidedly nasty. Liel recalls a match between the mixed Arab-Jewish team of Sakhnin and Betar Jerusalem, one of the leading teams in Israel. ”For 90 minutes the Betar crowd chanted horrible things. They sang: ”Ahmed, clean the toilets, Ahmed, get me coffee. Death to Arabs.”
To help fight this racism, Liel had a business lunch with the mayor of Abu Ghosh. The mayor agreed to Liel’s innovative proposal. Since then the mixed football team has fought its way through the divisions and now boasts a strong following.
All three youth squads attached to the club combine Arab and Jewish players. The management of the club is likewise divided between Arabs and Jews.
The diversity of Katamon is written in the faces of the young players in Mevaseret today. Some of these faces are dark; they are Jews from Ethiopia who speak Amharic. And some of course are Muslim.
One of the players, 15-year-old Fawzi, warms up for the match. ”I like playing with this team. It’s difficult for Arabs and Jews to play together normally. But here, that’s what we do — we play together, just like anyone else.”
Mohammad Isa is the sports director of the team. He is from Abu Ghosh. ”When kids reach their teens it is difficult to integrate them. Because they fall in love and marry — in their community. But if you start training them young, it is easier. I hope we teach the Arab and Jewish kids not just to train together, but to learn from one another.”
The work of Katamon is well known in Israeli society. Liel has harnessed the energy of his mixed-race football team to other causes, helping kids from Darfur for example. He likes to think of Katamon as ”socialist” in principle — assisting poor people everywhere.
But today’s match is a giant stride, beyond what Liel has tried to attempt before. As noon approaches, his face twitches with anxiety. Will the opponents even show?
A proper crowd has gathered by now, alerted to the unusual nature of the game.
At last a big bus sweeps in and the first person who alights is a woman wearing a white veil. She is a Druze Arab, from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. And her son is part of the first Syrian-born football team to play in Israel.
An editor from Yedioth Ahronoth — Israel’s biggest-selling Hebrew tabloid — arrives. As we watch the young team step down from the bus with their parents and grandparents, he explains why the game is so remarkable.
”The Druze team is incredibly brave. They are Syrian nationals, even though they live in the Israeli-occupied zone. Syria has been at war with Israel for decades. Yet they have come here anyway, to play football. That shows great courage.”
This football match is a crucial element of the normalisation of Syrian-Israeli relations. Liel puts it bluntly: ”The Syrians would not have been allowed to come here without the tacit permission of the Damascus government. I see this match as a smile from Syria.”
At first there are not many smiles on the faces of the young and muscular Druze players. But as the match unfolds everyone starts to relax. The Druze team slot three goals past the weaker Israeli squad. At half-time the friends and relatives of the Druze players hand out sweetmeats and pastries from Damascus, and rosy red apples from the Golan orchards. It is a touching scene.
Rifat and Nedaq, a young couple from the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Golan, are here to watch their brother play, a talented ”number 10” who whacked a brace of goals past the Arab-Israeli keeper.
Rifat says that it is his first time in Jerusalem. ”I am a Syrian national. It is very difficult for the Golan Druze to travel. We do not have Israeli passports, nor do we have Syrian passports. But we are very happy to be here today, especially now that we are winning!”
The final result is 7-1. The Israeli team hope to do better when they play the return match, in the green hills of the Golan, a few weeks later.
But the result is relatively unimportant. What remains is the sight of these players from so many varied and sometimes hostile cultures, brought together by a simple game.
Maybe that simplicity is the key. Make it any more complicated, any more significant, and it wouldn’t work.
Perhaps peace begins not with politicians signing treaties in palatial halls, but with a shy Arab woman handing out Syrian pastries to smiling Jewish kids on a scruffy football pitch. — Football’s Hidden Stories