Football and Fat Ham

Cairo, Egypt, July 1st of 2007

Two weeks ago the Palestinian National Football Team was here in Cairo, Egypt. Twelve of the twenty-eight players plus three coaching staff members arrived directly from Gaza, the rest did it from the West Bank, via Amman, Jordan.

Seeing many of the players I had followed for more than a year running on the green grass of Cairo’s Olympic Stadium evoked profound emotions. First, the silent tears; I could not believe that I was seeing the team so decidedly willing to practice. While Al Fatah and Hamas killed each other in Gaza, these young players showed a sense of unity that overrated all the news coming from the territories. Then a sense of admiration hit me, how in the world can these guys be training with this energy and with this optimism?

The situation in Gaza is terrible, unimaginably terrible. When I was there –before Hamas won the elections in 2005- unemployment was over 85%. After the elections and the boycott of the entire world: USA, The UN, The EU, and Israel, the already critical situation in the territories, particularly in Gaza, worsened to catastrophic levels. Public employees have not received a salary in more than a year. What a shame for the planet!! Something that no one ever mentions is the fact that 90% of the population in Gaza is made out of refugees, in other words, of its almost two millions inhabitants, nearly a million and a half are not from Gaza.

Although I am not a sympathizer of Hamas nor I am kin to their political-religious platform, they were the just winners of the elections organized after the death of Arafat. In November of 2005, Hamas swept Fatah in the elections scoring a huge victory in both Gaza and the West Bank. However, to understand the current situation in Gaza it is necessary to understand the historic-political context of the conflict between Fatah and Hamas. Norman Finkelstein, professor of Political Theory in Chicago, sustains that after the first invasion of the US to Iraq in 1991, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) lost financial support of gulf countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia due to its ties to the Hussain regime. All the political analysts at that time anticipated a premature farewell to the mainstream of the Palestinian resistance. But the boldness of Israel quickly moved its cards and ad-portas of the imminent PLO’s bankruptcy, made them an offer impossible to refuse. The timing could not be more favorable for Israel who was trying to “rationalize” the occupation of Palestine because to the eyes of the world it did not want to be seen as a racist apartheid system like the one in South Africa. In 1993, with the Oslo Agreement, Professor Finkelstein continues; the occupation of Palestine by remote control materializes. The remote control is Israel and the forces in charge of doing its dirty work in the territories now are Palestinians –legitimized by its people. At that moment, the PLO yields its way to the Palestinian Authority (PA) who replaces the PLO inside the territories. It is like this how the exile (read it Fatah) g0es back to Palestine in 1994, sponsored by its archenemy, Israel. For the laurels, Arafat and Rabin are given The Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. The circus must go on!!

The current Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, was Arafat’s emissary to Oslo in 1993 when an agreement with Israel was SECRETLY signed. Arafat did it this way because all his political advisors and analysts –including figures of the statue of Edward Said, rip- clearly told the president that the agreement offered Palestinians nothing more than Bantustan like the ones in South Africa. The term “state” was nothing more than a semantic concession granted by Israel: “Lets call this a state, what the hell!!!”

In 1996, two years after the PLO return from the exile, the PA incarcerated hundred of Hamas and Jihadis fighters in Gaza. The Preventive Security Services, in the hands of Fatah, tortured and killed militiamen in the jails of the strip. The problem is only magnified when Palestinians ponder the situation in the territories since the exile returned from Tunisia in 1994. For the great majority of Palestinians the situation has only worsened and insecurity lives in everybody’s home. And,…what about the Quartet? The USA, the EU, the UN plus Russia, with Tony Blair as the front-runner, plans to intervene the conflict more closely. But Tony Blair? How can such obstinate defender of Israel and close collaborator of the Bush administration –and the invented war in Iraq- can be a just moderator between Palestinians and Israelis? More over, how can an inclusive and just formula can be found without Hamas in the equation? Nor the Quartet, neither Blair, neither Palestine won’t find a real solution until Hamas is included in the talks. One cannot talk about peace with Fatah in the West Bank while Israel bombs the shit out of Hamas in Gaza. Aside from all the Israelis and US efforts to demonstrate the opposite, the Palestinian issue is one issue. The Mecca Agreement, moderated by the Saudis, was completely overlooked at by the Americans and the Israelis who kept their embargo against the legally elected government of Palestine.

As long as Israel continues to illegally occupy Palestine, as long as Israel continues building illegal settlements in the West Bank, as long as Israel continues to selectively assassinate Palestinians citizens, as long as Israel continue to ban peoples’ freedom of movement, and as long as Hamas does not take part of the dialogue, there won’t be peace for anyone, although we all know who loses the most.

Marcelo Piña from Cairo