Israel & Palestine 2006 – "Football For Peace" in Israel & Palestine

by Joel Rookwood

Soccerphile's Joel Rookwood spent part of December helping to run football coaching education programmes in Israel & Palestine. This is his account of what happened…

I spent the latter half of December working in the Middle East, with the majority of time spent in Jordan, Israel and Palestine.

The principle focus of the trip was to work on the 'Football for Peace' programme. This is a co-existence project for Israeli and Arab children, which has been running in Northern Israel since 2001. This project seeks to make grass-roots interventions into the sport culture of Israel and Palestine. The aims of the programme are to provide opportunities for social contact across community boundaries, to promote mutual understanding, to enhance the desire amongst the participants for peaceful coexistence, and to develop football skills and technical knowledge.

The five key values that F4P tries to instill in the players' minds are Neutrality, Inclusion, Respect, Trust and Responsibility. Within this context, neutrality infers that participants should not seek to promote their political views and ideological positions on others. This proved to be quite a considerable objective in itself.

Inclusion encourages the equality of individuals and their perspectives, regardless of ethnicity or background. Respect involves the appreciation of one's own individuality and the value of others in a context of social diversity. Trust relates to learning to have faith in the capacities of others to carry out their roles and responsibilities dutifully and mutually, in ways that also contribute to the well being of team-mates. Finally, responsibility emphasizes the importance of individual roles in working with and for others. Success in sport, particularly team sport, relies upon mutual aid and self-sacrifice.

Working on this particular project proved a quite different experience compared to those I had previously been involved with. Much of the work I have done in this field has been in somewhat more desperate circumstances, with less financial and organizational support than F4P enjoys. The project in Israel was the 21st country I've worked in within such a context, and it was by far the best organized.

To have transport, accommodation, equipment and expertise so readily available was incredible. I've lost count of the number of times I've turned up in some dusty African or Latin American town with a handful of balls and a few cones and then having been presented with either a quarter of or four times the number of players I had originally agreed to coach.

The 2006 project was run close to the Lebanese border, just north of a town called Nayariyya. There we worked with children who have an all-too familiar association with conflict. In July the country was at war with neighbouring Lebanon, and many of these children were forced to leave their homes and head South to safer areas. The project had been set to take place during this time, but had to be cancelled at the last minute due to an escalation of the violence. All of our group were sat in a London airport waiting to board the plane when the decision was taken by local staff in Israel to postpone the trip. Thankfully the violence has, for now at least, subsided, and so we were able to re-organise the programme before the end of 2006.

In Nayariyya eight of us ran separate coaching groups, each of which was supported by both an Arab and an Israeli coach, so to facilitate translation. The coaching sessions were made up of young players from two communities, usually within the same region – one Arab and the other Israeli. Whenever the group was split into teams, the two communities were always integrated. In truth however, I didn't always overplay the premeditated nature of the approach to 'mixing' the boys.

Team selection for the various drills instead was sometimes more a function of randomized selecting than something more deliberate – this was to try and make the experience a little more natural. It was thought that then maybe the players would view their opponents and team mates simply as players and not Arab or Israeli. Of course, the argument for rendering the selection more deliberate and for stressing the rationale for such a combination to the boys was equally persuasive. Not being able to understand the language, or appreciate anything of the intricacies of the cultural derivations however, I sometimes found it best to favour a more natural approach, and let them get on with it.

The value-based approach to the coaching was an extremely positive method of developing the understanding and connection between the players. In addition, the matches at the end of each session, together with the final tournament that was set up between all the groups, took place without referees. Instead the boys were encouraged to lead by example and take responsibility for the management of the games. Also the players were rendered accountable for making substitutions, which tested their drive to be inclusive, responsible and respectful of the needs and desires of all the players.

Not having referees for the games proved to be a notably positive factor, and also served to provide the coaches with some valuable opportunities to explain the integration of theory into practice. This self-regulation, did not come devoid of poor management of course, but I think that coping with that very fact, was perhaps the key lesson that the boys learned. Football, like life at times, occasionally has to allow itself to be wrong. It is right that fair judgments are passed whenever possible, but I tried to convey the message to the players that we learn and grow as social actors far more through dealing with injustice than we do with justice. In this society, it served as a pertinent message indeed.

After the final tournament signaling the conclusion of the project, I remained in Western Asia with a fellow coach until the New Year. We travelled around the area, and observed some of the work done by various separate organizations, such as the 'Israeli Commission Against House Demolition' in Jerusalem. We also went to the West Bank and saw some projects that have been developed by both Palestinians and internationals, including the 'International Solidarity Movement' in Hebron, which amongst other things seeks to protect Arab children who live close to Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory.

I also visited the orphanage 'SOS Children's Village' in Bethlehem on Christmas Day, where once again I saw firsthand some of the problems that a culture of conflict can produce. The day had started with a visit by invitation to the Midnight Mass at the Church of the Holy Nativity, the church which marks the location of the birth of Jesus.

As the sun set however, I had been presented with a much more significant perspective of the Holy Land than that seen by various dignitaries of the world, both political and religious, in front of the global media in an overly protected religious site that captured nothing of the complexity or injustice of Palestinian life.

As we entered the orphanage that afternoon, I was greeted at the gate by three boys, each of who was sporting a wooden machine gun which they had proudly handcrafted. The next few hours consisted of playing football, which was unfortunately interspersed with the children running off to play 'warfare'.

It was horrifying to watch these young boys mimicking the soldiers from each side of the various conflicts that are fought in this much-troubled region, pretending to shoot one another and blow each other up with imaginary grenades. The frighteningly authentic scene was shockingly reminiscent of the nightly televised footage we watched of the continuing violence in the Gaza Strip, some sixty miles away.

As we watched the boys in their after-match 'games', our thoughts were cast back to 'Football For Peace' and all the values it tries to instill into the minds of young boys such as these.

Whilst it is an extremely worthwhile programme, a visit to the rest of the region serves to illustrate something of the extent of the problems in this part of the world, and by extension the limitations of Projects like F4P, when considered in isolation. It was quite simply, a Christmas Day I will never forget.

Joel Rookwood

"The Onside In-Site" Copyright © From 2000. All rights reserved. Soccerphile Ltd.