Column: The name of the game
While Palestinian militants rain rockets on the southern Israeli towns of Sderot and Ashkelon, the Israeli premier goes under the investigative knife on what everyone expects to be corruption charges. As news breaks that Syria and Israel have been conducting semi-fruitful peace talks for months, the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, returns from Washington with nothing but bad news on the on-going talks between Israel and the PA.
It is summertime, again, in the Holy Land. And as the convoluted business of Middle Eastern deal making staggers on, straining under the weight of past transgressions, both real and imagined, the entire carnival keeps one eye always on the dangling carrot of success: "normalcy" and "security" for Israelis, "return" and "justice" for Palestinians and the Arab world at large.
Perhaps every word I just wrote was, for you, a lean summary of life here. Perhaps every term in the three preceding paragraphs sent you scurrying to Wikipedia. Either way, anyone thinking, reading and talking about the Middle East today finds themselves at the bottom of a very deep pile of informationAt times, the number of news articles, television clips and academic tomes makes finding useful knowledge, much less anything hopeful, a daunting task.
Yet perhaps there are avenues not yet explored. Everywhere in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, I get the question: "What are you doing here?"
What am I doing here? I'm playing, sometimes coaching, once-in-a-while refereeing basketball. And maybe there's something in this project that could begin to unravel the entire Israel-Palestine mess.
The group I'm volunteering with is Peace Players International, but its premise is universal: If you get kids to play basketball together, maybe some of the barriers to peace can be taken down while they're still small. I do not think it is any secret that shaping young people is an effective move for shaping political futures. The number of Israelis and Palestinians who complain about the school curricula of the other side is testament to that fact. But the level of prejudice in kids as little as 10-years-old is startling.
In Jaffa, I watch as the best player on the team, an Israeli, pulls down a rebound and looks downcourt to a streaking teammate, an Arab. The rebounder's eyes light up — easy points, he thinks. But something catches inside of him as he's cocking his arm back to unleash the outlet pass. He looks away from his Arab teammate, drops his shoulder and barrels up court. His teammate, still alone under the opposite basket, throws his hands up in disgust. This general scenario happened a dozen times over the course of the next hour.
In Jerusalem, at an Israeli professional basketball game, the Jerusalemite squad ekes out a dramatic overtime win over the visiting team. As the crowd — including Palestinians and Israelis from the Peace Players program — explodes, I'm drawn to one young Palestinian, discontent amidst the revelry. When I ask him what he's thinking about, he replies, "I am Palestinian. I do not like it when Israelis win." Of course, he came to this game knowing that Israelis populated both teams and at certain moments he too was among the throng of cheering fans.
These two cases represent the best and the worst of attempting to bring people together through sports. In the first case, once it was made clear that there existed a direct correlation between passing to all of your teammates and time spent in the game, the level of genuine teamwork shot up dramatically. In the second, even during the warm camaraderie of competition arose the dark totem of political identity.
Yet the fact remains that given the ups and downs, the search for neutral space, places where Israelis and Palestinians can come together is undeniably worthy. In neighborhoods where kids go to single identity schools, whose parents work in single identity jobs and whose lives are run with the other group at the fringes except for instances of bad behavior, the ability to even get everyone on the same court is a victory in-and-of itself.
From the meeting place, the ultra egalitarian stage of athletics brings the humanity of both peoples to the fore. Through sport, people's imaginations are transformed. By struggling and succeeding together, these two peoples might gain the ability to imagine a future where coexistence means engagement instead of geographical proximity.
Whether in Jaffa or Jerusalem, Tulkarm or Tel Aviv, if Israelis and Palestinians cannot imagine a better future, all of the diplomatic dealing and posturing in the newspapers will continue to be for naught.
While sports are not singular in broaching this broadening of the imagination, they are certainly a start. The name of the grander game is peace. But on the way to peace, one must battle with the confines of imagination. Through basketball we might begin to push the frontiers of imagination just a little bit farther.
