Chile’s ‘Palestino’ soccer team wears its anti-Israel politics on its sleeve — and jersey
In sport where athletes are penalized for flaunting political affinities, club in country with largest Palestinian diaspora community outside Middle East is an unabashed exception
Arms raised high. Banners denouncing the war in Gaza. Crowds united in song and wrapped in keffiyehs, the black-and-white checkered scarves that have become a badge of Palestinian identity.
It could have been any other pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel rally erupting over the Israel-Hamas war if it weren’t for the fact that these thousands of protesters were actually soccer fans at a league match in Santiago, the capital of Chile.
Although the players darting across the field had names like José and Antonio and grew up in a Spanish-speaking South American nation, their fervor for the Palestinian cause and red, white, black and green-colored jerseys underscored how Chile’s storied soccer club serves as an entry point for the world’s largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East to connect with an ancestral home thousands of miles away.
“It’s more than just a club, it takes you into the history of the Palestinians,” said Bryan Carrasco, captain of Chile’s legendary Club Deportivo Palestino.
As the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, sparked by the terror group’s October 7 massacre, stretches into its 12th month, the club’s electric game atmosphere, viewing parties, and pre-match political stunts have increasingly tapped into a sense of collective Palestinian grief.
“We’re united in the face of the war,” said Diego Khamis, director of the country’s Palestinian community. “It’s daily suffering.”
In a sport where authorities penalize athletes for flaunting political positions, particularly on such explosive issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Club Palestino is an unabashed exception that wears its pro-Palestinian politics on its sleeve — and on its torso, stadium seats and anywhere else it can find.
The club’s brazen gestures have caused offense before. Chile’s Football Federation fined the club in 2014 after the number “1” on the back of their shirts was shaped as a map of British-controlled Mandatory Palestine before Israel’s creation in 1948.
But players’ fierce pride in their Palestinian identity has otherwise caused little controversy in this country of 19 million, home to 500,000 people of Palestinian heritage. “It’s our roots and it feels like home,” said Jaime Barakat, a Palestino fan and shawarma vendor.
Palestino is hardly the only team to be affected by the politics of the Israel-Hamas war. In Turkey, which has been publicly supportive of Hamas, soccer clubs have ejected Israeli players for calling on the terror group to release Israelis taken hostage in its attack last year.
In Israel itself, the left-wing Hapoel Jerusalem team was one of the most prominent voices calling for the release of 23-year-old hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was abducted from the Supernova music festival on October 7 last year, and survived in captivity for some 11 months until he was murdered at the end of August.
Chile’s leftist president, Gabriel Boric, called Israel a “genocidal, murderous state” on the campaign trail in 2021 and has harshly criticized Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
His government recalled its Israeli ambassador and in June joined South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide in the International Court of Justice — allegations that Israel denies.
Chile’s small Jewish population of 16,000 was unsettled. “Boric, who frequently speaks of peace, has imported the Middle East conflict to Chile,” the Jewish Community of Chile said in a statement at the time.
Israel has pushed back against Boric’s denunciations, castigating Chile for what it sees as an insufficient response to the Hamas terror group’s brutal October 7 attack, when thousands of terrorists invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, starting the ongoing war.
Chile’s Palestinians say the Mideast conflict was imported decades before Boric, and spurred waves of displacement that forged the surprising history of Arab immigration to this Pacific coast nation from the late 1800s as the Ottoman Empire crumbled and the Zionist movement took root.
In 1920, the year the League of Nations approved the British Mandate of Palestine, Club Palestino was created by a group of Palestinian soccer enthusiasts who gathered one winter day in Chile’s southern city of Osorno.
“My father told me they came here because there were more possibilities,” said 90-year-old Juan Sabaj Dhimes in Patronato, a historically Palestinian neighborhood in the capital, with its coffee shops and hookah bars splashed in the colors of the Palestinian national flag and plastered with Palestino club crests.
Chile’s Palestinian community exploded after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, which was sparked when the Arab world rejected the partition plan adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1947 calling for independent Jewish and Arab states in what was then British-controlled Mandatory Palestine.
During the war, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were pushed from their homes in what Arabs call the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” and dispersed all over the world. Some 850,000 Jews were forced to flee their homes in Arab countries across the Middle East during the same period.
Chile was then an upwardly mobile nation among poorer neighbors seeking to attract migrants to populate the country. Palestinian descendants say the arid land, coastal desert and fresh figs and olives conjured an earlier generation’s nostalgia for historic Palestine.
“The climate is one of the things that most captivated the Palestinians who arrived,” said Mauricio Abu-Ghosh, former president of Chile’s Palestinian Federation.
The scrappy soccer club went professional in 1947, becoming the pride of the community. Rocketing to Chile’s top division and clinching five official titles, its appeal soon stretched to the Middle East, where the descendants of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan still congregate in camps and cafes to catch Palestino matches broadcast by Qatari-funded satellite network Al Jazeera.
The team’s political message also won supporters across Chile — a soccer-crazed country with a spirit of social activism and an ex-protest leader as president — and beyond.
Despite being a small soccer club, with an average of only about 2,000 spectators per game, Deportivo Palestino — winner of five official titles and a regular fixture in continental tournaments — is the third most followed Chilean club on Instagram, with more than 741,000 followers, only behind eternal rivals Universidad de Chile (791,000) and Colo-Colo (2.3 million).
“They tell us about the violence suffered by their people,” said 20-year-old Chilean fan Luis Torres at Palestino’s home stadium in Santiago. “It makes me angry, sad, so we’re here to bring a bit of joy.”
Joy has been harder to come by in the Palestinian diaspora since Hamas’s October 7 attack started the war, which has devastated Gaza in the 11 months since.
Palestinians streaming out of church in Patronato on a recent Sunday said they had prayed for the safety of their families in Gaza. “We all have cousins, siblings, grandparents who still live there,” said Khamis.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 40,000 people in the enclave have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 17,000 combatants in battle and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
The war has wrenched Palestino, forcing the club’s training school in Gaza to shut down and disrupting programs it supports across the West Bank.
But within Chile it has breathed new life into players and fans. Before kickoff, the team now rushes the pitch clad in keffiyehs, brandishing anti-war banners and taking a knee.
In May the team abandoned one little pre-match ritual of emerging on the field holding hands with child mascots. Instead, players extended their arms to the side, grasping at empty space.
It was a subtle gesture — a tribute to the “invisible children” killed in Gaza, the team later explained — that could have been lost entirely on ordinary soccer fans.
This crowd, however, went wild.
