Political Football

When Ahmed Kashkash burst through the last line of the Jordanian defence, rounding the keeper before sliding the ball into the empty net, he guaranteed that his name would go down in the history of Palestinian sport. White and green tickertape fell from the stands of the newly inaugurated Faisal al-Husseini Stadium as the players dived all over him in a celebratory pile. Regaining their composure, they turned and knelt before the crowd. In a match few people thought they would ever see, it was the first international goal a team called Palestine had scored on home turf in more than 70 years.

After more than a decade of exile, playing in lonely, deserted stadia in Amman and Qatar, and having suffered an unusual array of broken dreams and individual tragedies, the Palestinian national football team finally ran out on to a field they can call home. The Faisal al-Husseini Stadium, built on the outskirts of Jerusalem, was enabled through financial help from FIFA and the personal blessing of its head, Sepp Blatter – and while Kashkash took the plaudits from its freshly-packed terraces, there was another, entirely more unlikely hero who had made it all possible: Jibril Rajoub.

Yasser Arafat’s controversial National Security Advisor has the reputation as both a maverick operator, known for being the West Bank’s internal “hard man”, and also a political moderate opposed to militant attacks on Israeli soil. A divisive, sometimes unsympathetic character, Rajoub does deserve considerable credit for what he might come to regards as the defining achievement of his career: bringing Palestinian football home.

By 2004, the Palestinian national football were ready for a crack at the 2006 finals in Germany, with a newly recruited team gleaned from Palestine’s Diaspora, combing players from the Middle East, Chile and the United States. But movement restrictions between Gaza and West Bank, not to mention the restrictions within them, meant the team could rarely train together; training camps were set up in Egypt, but the players from Gaza were unable to get through Israeli checkpoints. The coaching staff, headed by the beleaguered, almost comical Austrian Alfred Riedl, realised that nine-man squad drills probably weren’t that great preparation for a World Cup qualifier and started picking more players from the West Bank. This, in turn, bred resentment amongst the two groups of players and effectively created two different national teams – three, if you factor in the linguistic clique of the Spanish-speaking Chileans with names like Pablo Abdulla.

The nail in the coffin was when half the team was denied permission to leave Palestine to play Uzbekistan. The Palestinians, without their Gaza contingent, could barely scrape together a starting eleven, and it was a miracle they only lost 3-0 to a nation currently flourishing in international sport. It was, sadly, just the start of the decline. Back home, the West Bank’s league was suspended after it became impossible to fulfil the fixture list; players, fans and, in some cases, referees were held for so long at Israel checkpoints that organising matches simply became impossible.

The final straw was the team’s failed efforts to reach the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa, which again ended on the desk of an Israeli bureaucratic. They were eventually eliminated when half the team were denied travel visas to a first round qualifier against Singapore. The FA complained but their objections fell on deaf ears. FIFA awarded the match 3-0 to Singapore.

It was then, in May 2008, the unlikely figure of Jibril Rajoub came riding to the rescue. He was appointed head of the Palestine Football Association, a role that took many seasoned commentators completely by surprise. Yet Rajoub has always been something of a maverick. At 17, he was sentenced to life in jail for throwing a grenade at Israeli troops and was only released in 1986, 16 years later, directly into exile in Lebanon where the rest of the PLO had relocated. The angry young man emerged in his thirties with more sanguine politics, and by the time of the Israeli-Palestinian détente of the early 1990s, he had risen through the Fatah ranks to become Yasser Arafat’s trusted National Security Advisor.

It didn’t take long before he put this ruthlessness and a single mindedness to the test, moulded over five decades by resistance, jail, exile and power. “From the first moment I was elected president of the Palestinian Football Association,” he says, in that now famous forthright roar, as multiple phones went off around him, “I started organising to have a match here between our first national team with any team that would play us. In my first meeting with Sepp Blatter in May I asked him and he said ‘Okay’, that he would sponsor such a match, and the process began.

“Then the deputy president of Jordan’s FA approached us. Many, many teams approached us to be the first team to play in Palestine but our brothers in Jordan insisted and they deserve to be the first to play the match because they have contributed to where we are today.”

The logistical problems of hosting such a match were huge, some seemingly insurmountable. To start with, the West Bank has very few grass pitches, let alone stadiums, so a new home for Palestinian football needed to be found. Rajoub began by travelling to Israel and meeting with sympathetic Knesset members to build support for a new national stadium, built next to the Green Line on the edge of East Jerusalem in al-Ram, a stone’s throw – and in Palestine, this is less a metaphor than a provable fact – from the concrete separation wall that divides the landscape. Palestinian Authority policemen are not allowed to patrol the area, so a special deal had to be struck with the Israelis to allow them to police the stadium.

Then there was the slew of dignitaries to be taken care of; as it was money from FIFA’s Goal project that paid for the stadium’s completion, Sepp Blatter planned to be in town to admire his handiwork. After that, Rajoub had to contend with the same problems that have afflicted all of his predecessors: actually getting the players to the games. Six players from Gaza were denied permission to travel to the match, including Saeb Jundiyeh whom the Israelis deemed a “security risk”. Most worryingly for Rajoub, the Jordanian national team had been detained at the Allenby Bridge crossing between Jordan and the West Bank.

While most would buckle under the pressure, Rajoub knows a thing or two about operating under tough conditions. “Listen, you know my background,” he says, 48 hours before the match as his staff made frantic phone calls to try and ease the Jordanians’ passage. “I am a Palestinian fighter, wherever I go I make order and I make action plans. I define what I want and make sure the means are there to assure my ends and my goals. This is what I got as chief of security, Nation Security Advisor and when I was in the underground resistance. I’ve used the experience of my past and my contacts to ensure we’ve got what we wanted.”

It was for these qualities that Rajoub secured his almost unanimous election as head of the FA. But what makes his appointment even more intriguing is the current Hamas-Fatah rift in all things Palestinian; he is one of Fatah’s most important operators and was even spoken of as a potential president after the death of Yasser Arafat, and Islamic Jihad and Hamas have regularly criticised him for instigating internal purges of the security apparatus to halt attacks against Israeli targets, which he views as counterproductive to the Palestinian cause.

“There were some concerns,” Rajoub admits. “But I was elected by all the political factions – extreme right, extreme left, PFLP, Palestine Democratic Union, everyone. I am proud of that and I think football should not be used to divide and should present all the Palestinian people as one. There is no political affiliation in the team, it is a national issue.” Thanks to the success in building the 6,000-seat Faisal al-Husseini Stadium, his stock has risen to such a level that reports last month suggested that he had travelled to Gaza for secret security talks with deposed Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya – prompting some to wonder aloud whether football might offer the quickest route to a wider détente.

With Rajoub at the helm, you get the feeling that anything is possible. Already he has achieved more for Palestinian football, and Palestinian national unity, than almost anyone in the past few years. The West Bank football league has kicked back into action this season, too. For all of Rajoub’s rhetoric about being unable, or unwilling, to cooperate while under occupation, the exact opposite is playing out. As galling as it is for most observers, it was his decision to enter into talks with the Israeli authorities that made even the possibility of a match possible. “I have a strategy for the next four years, but I am using all my effort, all my power just to get through the next 48 hours,” he explained. “Let me cross this bridge first. The Israelis are still preventing the Jordanian national team from crossing over. It’s Friday. The match is Sunday so the challenge is very huge. See what can go wrong? Let’s see if we make it through the next 48 hours my friend, and then I’ll concentrate on what comes next.”

And, as is Jibril Rajoub’s way, he did make it through – and the Jordanians made it across. The match on October 26th went ahead and the stadium reverberated to chants of “football is more noble than war”. The game ended, appropriately perhaps, 1-1, which represented a good result for the home side against a team 68 places above them in the FIFA rankings. But back in Gaza, Saab Jundiyeh again sat observing drama unfold far away from the action, watching the match he should have played, watching the team he should have been leading proudly on to the pitch, on a small portable television. “I’ve waited all my life for this,” he lamented. Yet even Saab knew that, thanks in no small part to Jibril Rajoub, it is only a matter of time before he too tasted home advantage for the first time. And that was victory enough.

For the full version of this article, see NOX 30