Tidal Wave of Palestine Solidarity at International Tournament

Seeing all of the Palestinian flags, Free Palestine banners, and Kuffiyehs (the traditional Arab scarfs worn by men) take over this World Cup has demonstrated something many of us have understood for years: the Palestinian people believe in a Free Palestine and are determined to make their voices heard.

Not only the World Cup was taking place on the other side of the Arabian peninsula for us, the Moroccan team kept up the Arab hopes, and with it their spotlight on Palestine’s life and death campaign, till the last reaches of the tournament. All through the Arab and Muslim worlds, fans demonstrated their support for their Palestinian brothers on social media. Both players and their supporters showed how football can be used to convey solidarity and hope for a brighter future for all nations and peoples.

This wasn’t the first time this tournament coincided with Palestine’s history. Tournaments before have with Israel’s two wars against against Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements in 1982 and 2006. The 2022 World Cup came at a time when the Palestinian territories were witnessing heroics in the West Bank against the occupation forces, who had escalated their oppression and terror against the Palestinians with the advent of the most right-wing Zionist government in the occupation’s history, led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

This support is inextricably linked to the Arab nations’ overwhelming rejection of normalization of Zionism. The trouble with Zionism is that while it concerns itself with the establishment of a separate nation for its people, it does so by violent removal and at time extermination of innocent Arabs who were living in the original Palestinian lands for centuries. As the famous liberal Zionist, Peter Beinart asked only last year in the Jewish Currents, “Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for Palestinians?