The friendly soccer match between the joint Israeli-palestinian soccer “peace team,” and Spanish team Barcelona (mentioned in this post), went ahead as planned, with Barcelona beating the Israpals 2-1. But the result was not important; the most important thing was the spirit of coexistence on display, a sentiment agreed with by most.I say most because not everyone was happy about the game.
The Palestinian athletic community has rebuked a number of Palestinian athletes who this week joined Israeli athletes in a trip to Spain where they on Tuesday played the famous Barcelona Team at Nou Camp Stadium in Barcelona.The trip was organized and financed by the “Peres Center for Peace” and designed to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians.However, Palestinian officials told PIC that the event constituted an “unacceptable and deceptive form of normalization between “the occupied and the occupier.”“The Israeli occupation is an act of rape, Palestinian athletes, like all Palestinians, are constantly harassed and prevented from traveling outside their places of residence in the West Bank, the world should come and see the ugly reality here, not be duped by the artificial rosy picture in Barcelona,” said Jamal Muhesin, Director-General of the Palestinian Ministry of Youth and Sport.Muhesin accused the Peres Center for Peace of “trying to deceive the world by giving a false impression that things are alright between Palestinians and Israelis.”“This so-called peace center is trying to normalize an inherently abnormal situation. There can be no real normalcy between the tormentor and the tormented, between the persecutor and persecuted. The Israeli occupation is an act of rape.”Officials from the Palestinian Olympic Committee, which supervises athletic activities throughout the Occupied territories, distanced itself from the event.“We are decidedly against this activity. Israel is killing our children tormenting us on a daily basis and reducing our towns and villages to isolated ghettos. We must never take part in propagandistic activities aimed at blurring reality here,” said a spokesman of the committee.Abdu al Nasser al Sharif, an athletic official in southern West Bank said athletic normalization between Israel and the Palestinians would encourage normalization between Israel and the Arab world.“The Arabs would argue that ‘we can’t be more Palestinian than the Palestinians themselves’ and eventually Israel will remain occupying our land and holy places while everybody is normalizing with her as if everything is normal.”“We are shooting ourselves in the foot.”Muhesin said his ministry would conduct a thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding the joint Israeli-Palestinian trip to Spain.A spokesman for the Peres Center for Peace, Alon Beer, told PIC that the trip to Spain by the joint Palestinian-Israeli soccer team was coordinated with the top echelon of the Palestinian Authority, including PA President Mahmoud Abbas and National Security advisor Jebril Rajoub.
Yep, the spirit of peace and tolerance sure is catchy..
