Jewish-Arab kids’ soccer team bridges Jerusalem divide amid Euro 2024 excitement
Squad recently resumed training after long hiatus after October 7, as project organizers hope it will foster mutual understanding in one of Jerusalem’s few mixed neighborhoods
Gianluca Pacchiani is the Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel
As the July 14 Euro final approaches and excitement mounts among fans around the world, a group of children in Jerusalem recently resumed soccer practice together in the hope of one day being able to emulate their European idols.
For three hours every Tuesday afternoon, a soccer field in the neighborhood of Abu Tor is abuzz with the shouts and laughter of the young players, aged 6 to 13. But while the green patch looks like any other training ground, the players are a unique bunch.
The non-competitive team is made up of Israeli and Palestinian children, who train under the watchful eyes of their two bilingual coaches, Arturo Cohen and Muhammad Dajani, as part of Inter Campus, a longstanding social project of the Italian soccer club Inter Milan.
The field becomes a rare space where children from the two communities play side by side, bridging the invisible but seemingly insurmountable line that bisects the city.
“We are trying to change a very complex reality,” said Cohen, a Milan-born Italian-Israeli who has coordinated the project since its early days.
The training program started over a decade ago in 2013 in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Bet Safafa and was moved to central Abu Tor five years ago. It was suspended after October 7 and only recently resumed.
“The reality was more complex than we could handle,” Cohen said in an interview with The Times of Israel on the sidelines of the field. “There are unfortunately a lot of external events that are stronger than playing football together.”
Common ground for communities in conflict
Inter Campus has been running similar projects around the world since the mid-1990s, offering free access to quality soccer training to tens of thousands of disadvantaged children in over 30 countries to safeguard their “right to play.” Founded by the club’s president, Massimo Moratti, the philanthropic project is today run by his daughter Carlotta Moratti.
Among Inter Campus programs, the Jerusalem initiative is unique in that it is the only one bringing together participants from two communities in conflict.
“This is the only soccer field in Abu Tor,” said Palestinian coach Dajani. “In the past, we would use it in turns, one week Arabs, one week Jews. Today, children are playing together. We teach them that in order to be players, they first need to be good human beings. Soccer then becomes a language for peace.”
The team currently comprises about 30 participants, two-thirds Palestinians and one-third Israelis. The young players are given original Inter Milan shirts and coaches are flown in from Italy three times a year to check in on the project and train the local coaches, explained Cohen. But physical practice is only one goal of the project.
“For kids this age, the impact is huge because they have absolutely no idea about the other side. They don’t know the language. They only know that the others are the enemy,” Cohen said.
“For those three hours a week, children hear the others’ language and become conscious that they are human beings. They understand that not everyone who is shouting in Arabic wants to kill you, or not everyone who is shouting in Hebrew is a soldier,” he said.
Social Goal, the Israeli nonprofit that organizes the training on behalf of Inter Milan, today runs a similar project for both boys and girls in Bet Safafa, as well as a project in south Tel Aviv for children of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers, as well as in Ramallah.
Grassroots efforts pay for the pitch
While Inter Campus offers jerseys, equipment and coaches, the Abu Tor soccer field is rented through funds raised by an association of Israeli and Palestinian residents, called “Good Neighbors.”
The area appears to be a good testing ground for this type of social intervention, as it is one of Jerusalem’s few mixed Jewish-Palestinian districts. But while they nominally share the same neighborhood, Jews and Arabs actually live in distinct areas.
Straddling the Green Line that once separated West Jerusalem from the Jordanian-controlled East, Abu Tor now numbers about 2,000 Jewish residents, concentrated in its western section, and about 15,000 Palestinians in its eastern part. Assael Street, where coils of barbed wire once ran to separate warring Israel and Jordan, still constitutes the demarcation between Jews and Arabs.
“Good Neighbors” was started nine years ago to cross the line separating the two communities and lobby the municipality to tackle common problems affecting all residents, such as garbage collection or speed bumps.
Today, besides fundraising to rent the soccer field, it runs a series of community projects, including a weekly Hebrew-Arabic language exchange, and dual narrative tours of the neighborhood under the name “Abu Tours.”
The association became a local partner for the Inter Campus soccer project because residents, particularly Palestinian ones, looked for a way to keep their children away from the street.
“In the Jewish sector, there’s a wide variety of afterschool activities that just don’t exist in the Palestinian sector,” said David Maeir-Epstein, one of the founders and co-director of Good Neighbors.
His partner, Palestinian co-director Khaled Rishq, qualified the mixed soccer team as a “bright spot in hard times” that offers children an opportunity to “get to know each other in person, instead of through the media and stereotypes.”
Two weeks ago, Rishq hosted the first-ever meeting for parents of young players since the launch of the project in Abu Tor five years ago.
“We were afraid nobody would come,” said Maeir-Epstein. “Or that the parents would start talking politics, or yell at each other. But instead, they came with two very clear messages. Firstly, they love the fact that their kids are not only learning soccer but also learning to be better human beings. Secondly, they want more opportunities for their children to get to know each other and each other’s culture, and not just play.”
Maeir-Epstein said the parents’ group has set up a task force to explore ways for their children to meet outside the soccer pitch and deepen their acquaintance, for instance by expanding their knowledge of the language of the other, “something that absolutely would never happen naturally, even though they live within meters of each other.”
At the end of their weekly training, as the children walked out of the pitch dripping with sweat and grabbed their hard-earned popsicles from Maeir-Epstein’s hand, everyone’s thoughts ran to the Euro 2024 game later that night, Austria vs. Turkey.
Coach Cohen said that kids don’t really root for national teams in this tournament, but rather venerate individual players.
“The real divide here is between Mbappé supporters and Ronaldo fans,” he said.
