The news that Hamas forces had broken out of the Gaza Strip on 7 October was met with disbelief, especially once we saw pictures of fighters tearing down fences or surmounting them on motorised gliders. Was this a jailbreak? Any sense of exhilaration quickly curdled as stories of massacres began to emerge, illustrated by images taken by the victims on their phones. Israel’s security forces struggled to respond to an attack that had caught them unprepared. The massacre at a dance party in Kibbutz Re’im became emblematic of the horror. I recognised one of the names of the dead: Lior Asulin, an Israeli-Jewish footballer who had played for Israel’s most successful Palestinian-owned team, the Sons of Sakhnin FC.
Israel responded to Hamas’s attack with a devastating barrage of air strikes, clearing entire city blocks ahead of an expected ground invasion. My heart feels hollowed and black as, day by day, friends from Gaza fill my timelines with prayers for the injured and memorials to the dead, wrapped in their shrouds on the city’s pavements. But I know my pain means nothing.
One picture of a survivor was familiar, a Palestinian footballer, Hazem Alrekhawi, who played the past season for a club on the outskirts of Bethlehem. Between 1994 and 2014, I was married to a Palestinian woman, and Bethlehem was my second home. Alrekhawi was pictured in football shorts, covered in cement dust and blood in the rubble of the southern city of Rafah, his home town on the Egyptian border. The shock was all the more acute because Alrekhawi had survived an Israeli missile strike in 2008. He had been travelling home from college in Gaza City when his bus was struck by a missile. It was a night that saw Israeli air strikes kill 205 people and leave 700 injured across Gaza. Alrekhawi had lain in the morgue with the dead for five hours before a woman saw his hand move.
My life in Bethlehem began shortly after the Oslo Accords. The Palestinian-Israeli peace treaty of 1993 brought together the leaders of the two preeminent parties of the time, Yitzhak Rabin of Israel’s Labour Party and Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Fatah Party. Rabin was murdered in 1995 by an activist from the settler movement, a section of Israel’s political spectrum that has steadily gained influence, and is now part of Israel’s ruling coalition. Fatah lost any presence in Gaza after a 2007 uprising by Hamas, and now struggles to exert influence even in the cities of the occupied West Bank.
Thirty years after Oslo, it is not simply the peace process that is dead: the two parties that signed the deal are also dead. Instead, it is the groups that operate the levers of violence that hold sway. For the past decade, we’ve seen a sustainable level of violence – a horrible status quo – that benefits Israel’s Right-wing coalition and Hamas to maintain domestic power.
At least that was the situation up until 7 October. Israel has declared that it will defeat Hamas, which means it must find a way to penetrate the tunnels and bunkers that riddle Gaza and provide holes to hide Hamas’s 200 plus hostages. Under international law, Israel’s control over the borders and sky, as well as water and energy supplies, means it is the occupying power. Even if Israel succeeds in wiping out Hamas, nothing will essentially change. Gaza remains a prison, and the situation will return to the inhumane status quo. Hamas will rebuild as the gang best equipped to flourish in a prison environment.
The fatal Nova dance party was scheduled to start on 6 October, but had lost its original venue just two days earlier. Lior Asulin and the other festival-goers discovered its location only hours before it opened. The venue, Kibbutz Re’im, is adjacent to Gaza Command, the military base overseeing Gaza. For reasons that may be revealed in a future inquiry, the base lacked its usual security.
To non-Israelis, a militarised zone will seem an unlikely venue for a New Age festival with DJs playing trance music from a Mushroom Stage. Yet not only were the ravers genuine in celebrating values of peace and unity, the residents of the kibbutz included stalwarts of the Israeli peace movement. What seems strange to outsiders is normal within Israel, in many respects a young country with its own experimental values.
Kibbutz Re’im was founded as a socialist cooperative. The kibbutz movement traditionally represented the far Left on the spectrum led by Rabin’s Labour movement. Left-wing Zionism focuses on the Israeli headspace: it sees collectivism as a way for Jews to create a new vision of Jewish life that is both autonomous and free. Right-wing Zionism, in contrast, places its focus on external space — which is to say, on the land. As the Israeli Right has gained ascendancy over the Left, it has faced the consequences of its gross territorial ambitions: the five million Palestinians living under its control in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the two million who are citizens of Israel.
Rabin had a solution: separation. A Jewish-majority Israel would permit the growth of a new Palestinian polity, divorced from the Israeli space. This experiment never happened, and instead the Palestinian world has been forcibly shattered into pieces, with almost no communication between Palestinians in the various West Bank cities, Jerusalem, Gaza, and the towns in Israel that contain Palestinian communities.
Even if Israel succeeds in wiping out Hamas, nothing will essentially change
Israel may well now divide Gaza into northern and southern zones, and both zones will remain under Israeli occupation, like every other Palestinian community. This is separation within Israel, by force, on the basis of ethnicity, rather than separation from Israel, as two self-governing communities. As always, Israel will struggle to deny this is militarised apartheid.
Why start with football? Though he was from Gaza, Hazem Alrekhawi played in Bethlehem for a team in the West Bank Premier League. He was freer than me. I’ve travelled all over the West Bank and Israel over the past 30 years, but I have never visited Gaza because my wife wasn’t permitted to. Exalted Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh has not visited Gaza since 1999.
We might think of FIFA as a corrupt body, yet it is one of the few international bodies to operate a rules-based order within Israel, giving Alrekhawi enviable freedoms. Football also gives Jewish-Israelis an insight into Palestinian lives, their families and culture that is otherwise impossible, because Jews and Palestinians are also separated even within Israel. Lior Asulin was one of the few Israelis who had worked alongside Palestinians as an equal. He signed for Sakhnin, a town in the Galilee of Christian and Muslim Palestinians, in the 2003-2004 season, the year Sakhnin were the surprise winners of Israel’s FA Cup.
The last time I was in Israel, I was researching a history of football in Israel and Palestine. I stayed with Jewish friends in Tel Aviv, a city that began life as a Jewish-only suburb of the mixed city of Jaffa. Tel Aviv is the totemic city of the Israeli Left. Until a few weeks ago, my friends were taking their children to mass demonstrations in the square where Rabin was murdered to protest changes to Israel’s Basic Law.
Football also took me to the stadium of Beitar Jerusalem, the team and the city that represents the Israeli Right. Jerusalem is where Jewish Israelis move to, to assert their ownership and control over Palestinian homes and districts.
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem represent competing visions of Israel, but there’s also another world where ordinary people do ordinary things. Oddly, this is better represented by football. If international bodies as flaky and flimsy as FIFA and UEFA can find ways for people to travel, mingle and share their experiences, perhaps there is a future in which local politicians and world leaders strive to do the same?
Nicholas Blincoe is the author of “More Noble Than War: The Story of Football in Israel and Palestine”
