Goals from Galilee

"I have known Jerrold Kessel for 15 years. He’s a former CNN frontline reporter in the Middle East, and I saw at World Cups how the game gripped his imagination beyond some of the horrors he was sent to report. Now he lives in Jerusalem, and Kessel and his cameraman made a documentary film, We Have No Other Land , about the soccer team of Sakhnin, an Arab town in Galilee. It has a Jewish manager and several Jewish players, but is an Arab team. Against all odds it captured Israel’s State Cup, and represented Israel in Europe. It’s a true story of football conquering prejudice in one of the most suspicious lands on earth. The documentary is really moving, really powerful. It was filmed four years ago, at the time when the team broke through. The book is an afterthought, if you like. The book certainly tells me a lot that the documentary didn’t, because it’s written in the person of the founder of the club and the players. So it’s an attempt to get inside the club, and to get inside the minds of the people who formed it. But it doesn’t quite come off. Partly, I suppose, because I’m spoilt by seeing the documentary first. The film just worked superbly; you can feel the Gaza Strip from seeing the documentary… The message is that Arab and Jew are so close to each other, the border is so thin, that they’re really the same people. It’s really like having two different tribes of the same person, forever warring. For the club, there are two successes really. One is that the club survives, because its field has been bombed just about every time that Israel bombs across the border. But, forgetting the material side, the second success is a spiritual thing – the club has a Jewish coach, it has Jewish players, but mostly it’s an Arab team. To me, the biggest shock with this whole story is that they were allowed to compete and win the Israel State Cup. Israel allowed an Arab team to compete in their cup, and then win it, and then, having won it, they had the right and took it to compete in Europe as an Israeli team. And that’s very powerful. My feeling is that soccer is a lingua franca , it can cross all the boundaries."