12Noon-2pm VIGIL at Israeli Embassy - FAIR PLAY FOR PALESTINE before Ireland plays Israel

dublin | rights, freedoms and repression | event notice Thursday March 24, 2005 11:56 by Ciaron, Des, Elaine - DCW 087 918 4552

Palestinian footballers being denied human rights by Israeli state.

*Ireland play Israel in Israel this Saturday 5.30 pm
*Return Game in June in Dublin
*Below is the Guardian article about
Israel restrictions on Palestinian football team
competing in the same competition (World Cup
qualifiers)

*This vigil is prelude to further nvda when Israel plays the return leg in Dublin

*Vigil Saturday March 26th. 12noon - 2pm at the Israeli Consul, Pembroke Rd. Ballsbridge D4 (opposite Jurys Hotel)
*This vigil is an outreach to Irish soccer fans - we wish them to consider the human rights being denied to Palestinian footballers
*People attending should wear footy shirts if possible (any club, if you've got more than one, bring to lend to others at vigil)
*Bring a ball for a kick about, broad sidewalk opposite Israeli Consul on Pembroke Rd. (opposite Jurys)

FOR OCCUPIED PALESTINE JUST TURNING UP IS A STRUGGLE

Israel has barred five players from tonight's World Cup qualifier

Eddie Taylor in Bahrain
Wednesday September 8, 2004
The Guardian

When Palestine's squad gathered at their Egyptian training base in early August to prepare for tonight's World Cup qualifier against Uzbekistan, only 11 players turned up; a week later injury had reduced their number to six. "And we have five coaches," their Austrian manager Alfred Riedl lamented.

Life has not been easy for Palestine since the country without a state was admitted to Fifa in 1998 but their build-up to a game they need to win to maintain a hope of progressing past the first Asian qualifying round has been particularly blighted. While the few fit players in Ismailia were sharpening up on an endless diet of drills and conditioning work, 10 members of the squad repeatedly trooped to the Israeli-controlled Rafah crossing in the Gaza Strip in an effort to cross the border.

For two weeks they were greeted with day-long detention and eventual denial. Finally five of the squad were allowed to cross after endless shuttle diplomacy between the Palestinian Football Association, Fifa and the Israeli authorities.

"It was like a soap opera," said the central midfielder Morad Fareed, whose parents swapped the West Bank for Long Island, New York, in the late 1970s, and who first heard of the team after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal. "Every day you'd wake up thinking the guys are going to appear and that we can finally do some proper work. The five who did show up were three weeks late and there's a limit to what you can do with a dozen or so players. It's very frustrating and, at times, pure chaos."

Palestine currently lie third in their group after an 8-0 victory over Taiwan and a creditable draw against the Olympic semi-finalists Iraq, their sole defeat coming against tonight's opponents.

With the four million inhabitants of the occupied West Bank and Gaza subject to Israeli "security" restrictions, and with no professional league to sustain or develop a steady stream of talent, players are thin on the ground. As a result of the latest disruption a second training camp in Hungary was cancelled and a truncated substitute hastily arranged in Bahrain.

Their prospects are not enhanced by having to play all their home games in Doha, Qatar, some 1500km from Jerusalem where games are rarely watched by more than a few hundred Palestinian exiles.

Palestine's political plight has other effects. In Bahrain the striker Ziad Al-Kurd learned his house in Gaza had been demolished by the Israeli Defence Force because they suspected (and the player strenuously denied) the presence of a tunnel to Egypt. Tayseer Amr was unsure what property his family in Qalqilya would have left once the latest leg of the notorious security wall is built near his home.

"I call them my little heroes," Reidl said. "The ones from the West Bank and Gaza are often leaving behind a wife and three or four kids and a situation that is very dangerous. As a father I don't think I could do that. The fear is always there but these guys keep coming back."

After last month's suicide bombings in the Israeli town of Beersheba the prospect of the absent Gaza five joining the squad all but evaporated.

Riedl instructed the Palestine FA's website to issue a call for players not requiring Israeli permission to travel. "I don't care where they come from," he mused. "Germany, America, honduras, wherever, as long as they have a Palestinian grandparent and play in the top two divisions of their country's league, we'll bring them over and have a look."

Previous recruitment drives, such as advertisements in Germany's Kicker magazine, had unearthed three members of the squad, including the bullocking Lebanon-born striker Wasim Abdulhadi. But the latest appeal generated few results. "I had one guy from Sweden email me," Riedl said, "claiming he was his team's star player and that everyone knows him. I find out he's 16."

Yet considering the unity of purpose, the team itself is a strange fusion of disparate groups that reflect the range of the Palestinian diaspora - and the team's desperate recruitment measures. Half the team is from Chile, the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world, and the blend is not always easy. Cliques form naturally along linguistic lines and communication remains a problem, not least with an Austrian coach and his Hungarian assistant, Tamas Viczko.

Yesterday Tayseer Barakat, the Palestine FA's director of international affairs, said Fifa had denied a request to postpone the game because of the weakened team. Palestine's struggle continues.