As the full-time whistle blew, Gaza-born defender Mohammed Saleh sank to the pitch in a heap. Eventually he rose, pulling his white, sweat-stained shirt over his head in a bid to mask the tears now streaming down his face. Palestine had just done the unthinkable and qualified for the last 16 of the Asian Cup 2023, thanks to a first ever win at the tournament (3-0 at the expense of Hong Kong). It was a moment of conflicting emotions, with professional pride and national history all playing out to the backdrop of a brutal war in their homeland.
For more than three months, Saleh and his teammates had watched from afar as the situation in Gaza rapidly deteriorated. To-date the Palestinian Health Authority has stated that some 26,400 people have died in the war, since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Southern Israel, with an alleged 88 sportspeople amongst the dead. That number includes the famed football coach Hani Al-Masdar, a man revered by a number of the current Palestine squad who fell under his tutelage at various points in their career.
For the likes of Saleh—who recently moved from the Egyptian team Eastern Company to Malaysian Super League side Sabah—playing through violence is nothing new. But having lost his house to an Israeli bombing campaign in 2021, the defender posted to Facebook in late October that his Al-Rimal neighbourhood in Gaza had once more been targeted by air strikes, with his cousins, and their families (10 people in total), tragically losing their lives. Meanwhile, fellow Gazan Mahmoud Wadi—the most expensive Palestinian footballer of all-time when he was sold to Egyptian side Pyramids for $1.1 million in 2020— received the heartbreaking news that his cousin had also been killed during the war.
In the early hours of Tuesday January 30, Palestine’s Asian Cup Campaign came to an end, thanks to a narrow 2-1 defeat to current holders, hosts (and favourites) Qatar. But the question of how this group of young men were able to watch such a catastrophic situation unfold back home and yet still create football history in Qatar remains… and it’s a complex one.
Journalist and author of When Friday Comes: Football Revolution in the Middle East and the Road to Qatar, James Montague met with some of the Palestine team for Al Jazeera shortly before the tournament. “I spoke to the team’s goalkeeper Rami Hamadi and he was stoic about it [the situation],” he tells Esquire Middle East. “There is so much pressure on the players. Not just those from Gaza who don’t know from one day to the next whether their families are alive. Because of the dreadful communication situation one player, Mahmoud Wadi, didn’t hear anything from his family for 10 days. But also in the West Bank where settler violence is out of control. So everyone is touched by this. However, it has obviously had a galvanising effect on the squad, and that can be positive.”
In Arabic, and specifically with a view to Palestinian culture, the word Sumud means steadfastness… It means resilience. And while the roots of its etymology can be found in a political strategy (in the wake of 1967’s Six-Day War it described how Palestinians refused to leave their land), you could also apply strands of it to the endeavours of Makram Daboub’s squad. Those Lions of Canaan.
The chastening 4-1 defeat to Iran in the opening game was swiftly followed up by the somewhat recalibrating 0-0 draw with Saudi Arabia. Heading into the final group game, Palestine found themselves sitting behind the United Arab Emirates on goal difference, with everything to play for. Daboub’s side somehow roused themselves to that 3-0 win—with two goals from Al-Arabi striker Oday Dabbagh sandwiched in between one from Jabal Al-Mukaber’s Zaid Qunbar. While the UAE would score a 93rd minute consolation against Iran in a 2-1 defeat to guarantee second spot in Group C, Palestine’s win was enough to ensure qualification as a high-pointed third spot team.
For Montague, those Herculean efforts are beyond comprehension. “Hamadi told me how the situation will make him play at a million percent. But the pressure can also be too much. I have no idea how these players performed at the level they have given the weight of everything. Remember they scored their first goal in the Asian Cup, won their first game and reached the knockout stages for the first time. That would have been an incredible achievement during normal times, let alone with the war enveloping everything.”
While the player’s were somehow able to, not only, function but even raise their performance levels, the feeling remained that Palestinian success could still bring joy to its people, even in these darkest of times. “Nothing can lift a country’s morale quicker than success in a major football tournament, and that effect is compounded during a time of economic strife or war,” says Motaz Bishara, a PhD researcher in Sports Sociology at the University of Leicester. “One of the most visceral examples was Iraq’s spirited victory at the 2007 Asian Cup, which momentarily cut across sectarian lines to unite its embattled population. More recently, Argentina’s win at the 2022 World Cup served as a major distraction from the country’s worst economic crisis in decades.”
When it comes to that Iraqi precedent, it’s certainly true that the Lions of Messapotamia’s 2007 triumph will go down in history as one of those great sporting moments you rarely hear about. By July 2007—just six months after the execution of Saddam Hussein—Iraq was in the grip of civil war, as rival factions and criminal gangs vied to fill the void left, not just by the former dictator, but also the US and British forces who would eventually phase out their presence just four years later.
Iraq’s football team was ranked 80th by FIFA that summer, and the newly appointed Brazilian manager Jorvan Vierra knew he had an uphill task on his hands. Not just because of limited resources, but also because this was a team stripped of division. Vierra’s squad featured players from Shia, Sunni and Kurdish backgrounds—something that didn’t go down well with some of Iraq’s militant groups. As players and their families would be routinely threatened, the fear was palpable and real. Winger Mulla Mohamed once described how he would routinely bring a machine gun to training, while goalkeeper Nor Sabri’s brother-in-law was kidnapped and subsequently murdered on the streets of Baghdad. It was a harrowing backdrop to Iraq’s eventual fairytale victory. But the 1-0 defeat of three-time winners Saudi Arabia in the final remained entirely that… the stuff of dreams, a rare moment of unity for a war-fatigued country. Unfortunately it couldn’t last, and by November the team would seek asylum in Australia while away on Olympic qualification duty.
Despite football’s ability to unite, Montague believes that the reality of Palestine’s horror is simply too big a chasm for the Beautiful Game to adequately fill.
“At the moment I’m not sure football will matter much to the people of Gaza,” he says. “They are surviving hour by hour and won’t be able to watch the games. The Palestine defender Mohammed Saleh was asked whether anyone in Gaza was watching and he burst into tears. I think football can be incredibly important when it comes to creating a feeling of unity and to wave the Palestinian flag internationally but Gazans, I think, have bigger issues to deal with.”
Although there’s undoubtedly a lot of truth in that sentiment, for some people Palestinian success is more than just about morale, it’s about presence, and how each victory can shine a greater light on not just the plight of the nation, but also what it can achieve when placed on a even footing with the rest of the world.
Ahmad (who didn’t want to give his family name) started the Instagram page @SportingPalestine just a few years ago as a way to “highlight the main sporting events happening in Palestine and to give a platform for Palestinian athletes abroad.” The page now sits on more than 55,000 followers. “In a time when the world has turned its back on the Palestinians in Gaza, sport can be a great tool to bring a spotlight back to the situation,” he says via text. “Sport can educate people on what’s really happening there.”
When it comes to raising awareness for a cause, history certainly tells us that, thanks to that rich cultural and familial connection, these victories can have a resounding impact. “Politically, sporting success on and off the pitch has been used as a means of solidifying legitimacy for a nation or group of people over time,” says Bishara. “Whether it’s Jesse Owens’ impact on Black Americans at the 1936 Olympics or Qatar’s showcasing of the World Cup in 2022. For Palestinians, this Asian Cup provides a valuable opportunity to highlight the qualities and achievements of its people—removed from the topic of conflict and war—when they are given so few chances to do so on a global platform.”
Naturally, while reaching the last 16 for the first time under such duress is an astonishing success for the Palestine side, the question remains as to what happens next. While Iraq’s 2007 squad made the eventual decision to push for asylum, the Palestinian players’ futures remain uncertain and muddied.
“Some will return to their homes, and clubs, in Spain and South America, or elsewhere in the Middle East,” says Montague. “But the rest? Most of Gaza has been razed. The West Bank Premier League is not re-starting anytime soon and the Palestinian players who have Israeli citizenship are being threatened with having their passports taken away for the crime of playing for Palestine. We are walking down a dark and unknown path right now.
“When Iraq won the whole thing in 2007 you could argue that it had a profound psychological effect on the civil conflict. But this is different. The issue here isn’t Palestinian unity… it’s Palestinian existence.”