What does a football player feel when he plays for a country that consists of only fragments on the map? What does he feel when he represents a people whose millions have to live abroad? When you ask Mohammed Rashid these questions, despite all odds, the answer is: pride. To explain how this is possible, he looks back at how football changed his life. “Back then, on the streets of Ramallah, we were kids kicking the ball around for pure joy,” says Rashid, now 28 years old. “None of us had much hope of ever making it big or making money from the sport like we have seen in other countries. We knew: the world looks different for us Palestinians.”
The fact that Rashid managed to become a professional and national player is not only due to his ambition, but also to the importance of sport in his homeland. For Palestinians, football in particular has a significance that goes far beyond the role of a popular leisure activity. As historian Ibrahim Rabaia notes in his essay “Beyond the Game: The Politics of Palestinian Football since 1995,” sport is a significant part of Palestine’s sociopolitical structure. Football reflects a society that has been shaped since 1948 by expulsion in the wake of the founding of the state of Israel, resistance against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the fight for international recognition as a people with an independent state.