By Paul Nicholson
January 2 – The shooting of footballer Ahmed Atef Draghameh before Christmas has prompted the Palestinian FA (PFA) to call for football’s governing bodies to look at Israel’s “racist policies” and “constant violations” of international sport conventions.
In a statement the PFA said: “As we grieve for the loss of this young life, we express our heartfelt condolences to the family of Ahmed, his club, and his team mates and demand the international football organisations to take a closer look into the racist policies and practices of the Israeli occupation and its constant violations of the international sport regulations, and hold it responsible for depriving Palestinian footballers from their enshrined right to develop and practice Sport.”
Draghameh was a striker for Palestinian Premier League team Thakafi Tulkarem, currently lieing sixth in the league.
He was shot in the back in the city of Nablus by Israeli soldiers. The Israeli forces were securing the safety of extremist Israeli settlers who were in the vicinity of the tomb of Yousif – a place of religious importance to both muslim and jewish faiths in Nablus.
Nablus is an administrative district of Palestine located in the Central Highlands of the West Bank, 53km north of Jerusalem.
Reports are conflicting as to Draghameh’s activity in the area, and the how far he was involved in resistance against the Israeli soldiers. Hamas have claimed him as one of their own while comment on social media says he was defending his home and family.
A video on social media shows three men, one of whom is said to be an armed Draghameh, retreating down a street. The person reported to be Draghameh is shot in the back.
In their statement the PFA says that the shooting of Draghameh is another example of the targeting of footballers by the Israelis in the West Bank and even goes so far as to suggest that it is part of a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing by the Israelis.
“Ahmed is yet another victim in the series of targeted assassinations, deliberately carried out by the Israeli Occupation against journalists, Sportsmen, and every other Palestinian who dares to stand up against the brutality of the Occupation and its systematic ethnic cleansing of our people,” said the statement.
The timing of the shooting came just days after the finish of the Qatar 2022 World Cup, the first time the tournament had been held in an Arab country. Qatar 2022 will be remembered as much for the politics and human rights issues that dogged the tournament as they will for the football. While political protests were banned by FIFA, the Palestinian flag was visible both in the stadia and outside as arabs generally unified against a perceived Western bias.
While organisers and FIFA worked diligently to remove any rainbow flags, t-shirts or player armbands showing support for the LGBT+ community, very little was done to remove the political statements of support for the Palestinian struggle.
In 2015 the PFA and its president Jibril Rajoub put a motion before FIFA’s congress to suspend the Israeli FA from world football due to the actions of its government and its interference and disruption of Palestinian football. The motion had strong support from FIFA’s membership, and not just from arab nations.
Then FIFA president Sepp Blatter persuaded Rajoub to withdraw the motion in what was a dramatic back and forth between Palestine, Israel and FIFA’s chair. Since then, and under president Gianni Infantino, the Palestinians have found little FIFA support for their cause or resolution to their local issues of movement of players within the West Bank. They even had the microphone removed from their legal representative at one FIFA Congress by Infantino.
A new motion requesting an Israeli ban in the post-Qatar 2022 football geo-politics would likely find similar support from the Arab nations, and create a problem for a deeply conflicted Infantino who famously declared he felt Arab in his remarkable pre-Qatar 2022 press conference.
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