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ABSTRACT
This article explores FIFA’s attitude in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an institutional perspective from 1920, when a provisional mandate over Palestine was granted to the British government, which coincided with the structuring of football there, to the present time. FIFA’s working rules serve as a guideline for this study because they set out how the international football association interacts with national associations. Attempts at political interference are as old as the development of football in Palestine under the British Mandate. We examine these and the reaction of FIFA which has always claimed neutrality on political matters. It appears that, between 1920 and the creation of Israel, FIFA’s position was rather accounted for by an internal logic. Then, once Palestine was divided in two parts, one for Jews and one for Arabs, external events became the main explanatory factor. Ultimately, FIFA has made the preservation of the football pitch its priority. Barring exceptional circumstances, it intervenes in the political field only when this sanctuary is threatened.
KEYWORDS:
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Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson, Sport and Peace-building in Divided Societies: Playing with Enemies (London: Routledge, 2017).
2 Tamir Sorek, Arab Soccer in a Jewish State. The Integrative Enclave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jon Dart, ‘Sport and Peacebuilding in Israel/Palestine’, Journal of Global Sport Management, (2019), doi:10.1080/24704067.2019.1604073.
3 Glen M.E. Duerr, ‘Playing for Identity and Independence: The Issue of Palestinian Statehood and the Role of FIFA’, in Soccer in the Middle East. Sport in the Global Society - Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Alon Raab and Issam Khalidi (New York: Routledge, 2014), 35–48.
4 Jon Dart, ‘“Brand Israel”: Hasbara and Israeli sport’, Sports in Society 19, no. 10 (2016): 1402–18.
5 Yair Galily, ‘From terror to public diplomacy: Jibril Rajoub and the Palestinian Authorities’ uses of sport in fragmentary Israeli–Palestinian conflict’, Middle Eastern Studies 54, no. 4 (2018): 652–64.
6 John R Commons, Institutional Economics (New Brunswick: Transaction, [1934] 1990), 60–2, 70–1.
7 James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (eds), Explaining Institutional Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
8 Institutions generate ‘shared mental models’ (Douglass C. North, Chrysostomos Mantzavinos, and Syed Shariq, ‘Learning, Institutions, and Economic Performance Through Time’, Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 1 (2004): 75–84).
9 In the national daily press, L’Aurore, Le Figaro, L’Humanité and Le Petit Parisien all did not report on the Congress, nor did Le Matin, where Robert Guérin, one of founding fathers of FIFA, was a journalist. Le Petit Journal mentioned it briefly (‘Un congrès de footballeurs’, Le Petit Journal, May 21 (1904): 4). L’Auto, which was a daily sports newspaper, is slightly less concise (‘La deuxième Journée du Congrès International’, L’Auto, May 23 (1904): 7).
10 ‘Une équipe belge à Paris’, Le Petit Journal, May 24 (1904): 4; ‘Deux matchs internationaux’, L’Auto, May 23 (1904): 7.
11 FIFA. Statutes. Paris: FIFA, 1904.
12 For example, criteria had to be put in place to prevent players from moving from one national team to another (Ibid., 339–45). Before this time, the famous Alfredo di Stefano even played for three national teams. In 1948, since they were on strike, Argentina’s top league footballers decided to play in the Colombian professional league, which was in conflict with the country’s league. FIFA’s intervention prevented the crisis from spreading across the entire continent (Paul Dietschy, Histoire du football (Perrin: Paris, 2014), 306–8).
13 Ramón Spaaij, ‘Olympic rings of peace? The Olympic movement, peacemaking and intercultural understanding’, Sport in Society 15, no. 6 (2012): 761–2.
14 Arnd Krüger, ‘De Coubertin and the Olympic Games as Symbols of Peace’, in Sport and Politics, ed. Gerald Redmond, (Champaign: Human Kinetics, 1986), 197. In fact, peacebuilding through sport is based on arguments that have varied over time (Richard Giulianotti, ‘Sport, peacemaking and conflict resolution: a contextual analysis and modelling of the sport, development and peace sector’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 2 (2011): 207–28).
15 The return to normalcy was not immediate (Paul Dietschy, Histoire du football, 156–9). After the Second World War, the defeated nations’ reintegration into international football happened quickly.
16 In the 1930s, for a while, FIFA was even more willing than the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to develop sporting contacts with the communist world (Paul Dietschy, Histoire du football, 267).
17 Peter Hough, ‘“Make Goals Not War”: The Contribution of International Football to World Peace’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 10 (2008): 1288.
18 Richard Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 22. For federations like Argentina and South Africa, it was natural to be affiliated to the Football Association (FA), the English federation (Chris Bolsmann, ‘Globalization’, in Studying Football, eds. Ellis Cashmore and Kevin Dixon (New York: Routledge, 2016), 33).
19 Pierre Lanfranchi, Christiane Eisenberg, Tony Mason and Alfred Wahl, 100 Years of Football: The FIFA Centennial Book (London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004), 68–73. The last remnant of this historical antagonism lies in the setting of the rules of the game by the International Football Association Board (IFAB). The British still have the equivalent of a veto right there.
20 FIFA. 17th Congress. Amsterdam: FIFA, 1928, 6–7; FIFA. Statutes. Paris: FIFA, 1904.
21 Peter J. Beck, ‘Going to War, Peaceful Co-existence or Virtual Membership? British Football and FIFA, 1928–46’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 17, no. 1 (2000): 113–34.
22 John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson, FIFA and the Contest for World Football: Who Rules the Peoples’ Game? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 19–20, 28.
23 There are numerous examples of grievances (Sérgio Settani Giglio, ‘Honour and Dignity: The Peru Case at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 34, no. 11 (2017): 1128–39).
24 The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), which was and still is the most powerful regional confederation was created in 1954.
25 John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson, FIFA and the Contest for World Football: Who Rules the Peoples’ Game?, 29–30.
26 Philippe Broda, ‘Europe versus emerging countries within FIFA: Using inflation as a conflict regulation mechanism’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 34, no. 15 (2017): 1617–34; Luis Escobedo and Tamir Bar-On, ‘FIFA seen from a postcolonial perspective’, Soccer in Society 20, no. 5 (2019): 39–60.
27 Pierre Lanfranchi, Christiane Eisenberg, Tony Mason and Alfred Wahl, 100 Years of Football: The FIFA Centennial Book, 176.
28 FIFA, ‘Your Career at FIFA’, Fifa.com, https://www.fifa.com/who-we-are/home-of-fifa/careers/ (accessed June 2, 2020).
29 FIFA. Statutes. Zurich: FIFA, 2019.
30 Pierre Lanfranchi, Christiane Eisenberg, Tony Mason and Alfred Wahl, 100 Years of Football: The FIFA Centennial Book, 74.
31 FIFA. Statutes. Zurich: FIFA, 2019, 6–7.
32 John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson, FIFA and the Contest for World Football: Who Rules the Peoples’ Game?, 43.
33 The fact that the statutes are a living document affected by political considerations supports this approach. Disagreements often boil down to a battle over the statutes, in which the President does not hesitate to take part – see the dispute between Hungary and Spain over Hungarian dissidents (Pierre Lanfranchi, Christiane Eisenberg, Tony Mason and Alfred Wahl, 100 Years of Football: The FIFA Centennial Book, 89–92). Indeed, all are aware of the centrality of the working rules.
34 The contrast is striking with the situation in South Africa. President Stanley Rous supported the national federation which practised apartheid while his successor, João Havelange, leaned in favour of the other African countries (Paul Darby, ‘Stanley Rous’s ‘own goal’: football politics, South Africa and the contest for the presidency in 1974’, Soccer in Society 9, no. 2 (2008): 259–72).
35 FIFA. 25th Congress. Luxembourg: FIFA, 1946, 8. This is translated from the French version. The English version does not mention this passage.
36 Georges Bensoussan, Une histoire intellectuelle et politique du sionisme (1860-1940) (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 499–503.
37 Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (Toronto: Knopf, 1976), 13–6, 26–7.
38 Philip S. Khoury, Urban notables and Arab nationalism. The politics of Damascus 1860–1920 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–7; Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1976), 71–92.
39 The surface area of the Mandatory Palestine is approximately 26,000 km2. Yet, many of these leagues were local (Ibid., 82–6). This suggests that the quality of the means of transport was low at that time.
40 Tamir Sorek, Arab Soccer in a Jewish State. The Integrative Enclave, 16.
41 Haim Kaufman and Yair Galily, ‘The early development of Hebrew football in Eretz Israel, 1910–1928’, Soccer & Society 9, no. 1 (2007): 82–6.
42 FIFA. Statutes. Paris: FIFA, 1928, 30. It is implied here that the English Football Association was acting in accordance with the expectations of its government. It is true that FIFA’s member associations are supposed to be independent, but the cases of political meddling that have led to threats of suspension from FIFA are usually related to financial or personal matters (Borja Garcia-Garcia and Henk-Erik Meier, ‘Protecting private transnational authority against public intervention: FIFA's power over national governments’, Public Administration 9, no. 4 (2015): 890–906). On international policy issues, alignment is the rule.
43 Peter J. Beck, ‘Going to war, peaceful co-existence or virtual membership? British football and fifa, 1928–46’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 17, no. 1 (2000): 113–34.
44 These withdrawals concerned both the candidates for hosting the event and the participating teams. The remote destination, the fortnight’s journey in particular, had deterred many European countries. The creation of the World Cup was such a step into the unknown that, even before Uruguay was nominated, a delegate asked whether participation was ‘compulsory’ for members (FIFA. 18th Congress. Barcelona: FIFA, 1929, 10).
45 Henry Laurens, La question de Palestine (Paris: Fayard, 2002), volume 2; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2000), 121–2.
46 Tamir Sorek, Arab Soccer in a Jewish State. The Integrative Enclave, 9.
47 Haggai Harif and Yair Galily, ‘Sport and Politics in Palestine, 1918-48. Football as a Mirror Reflecting the Relations between Jews and Britons’, Soccer & Society 4, no. 1 (2003): 47.
48 Khalidi, One Hundred Years of Football in Palestine (Amman: Al Shourouk, 2013), 76; Sorek, Arab Soccer in a Jewish State. The Integrative Enclave, 19.
49 Khalidi, One Hundred Years of Football in Palestine, 25.
50 Nicholas Blincoe draws up an inventory of the decisions of the PFA, following protests or appeals, which may appear questionable or absurd in the competitions it has organised (Nicholas Blincoe, More Noble than War. A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine (New York: BoldType Books, 2019), 96, 156–8). The idea is to suggest a kind of incompetence.
51 The British government had already been confronted with the political dimension of football. The agitation of the Al Ahly football club supporters had been central in the unrest that preceded the Egyptian Revolution in 1919 (James M. Dorsey, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 4). In a more symbolic way, the victory of Mohun Bagan’s barefoot Indians against an English regiment in the 1911 IFA Shield final had been a major impression (Dwaipayan Sen, ‘Wiping the Stain Off the Field of Plassey: Mohun Bagan in 1911’, Soccer & Society 7, nos. 2–3 (2007): 2008–32).
52 Henry Laurens, La question de Palestine (2002), volume 2; Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 227–36.
53 Khalidi, One Hundred Years of Football in Palestine, 36.
54 Ibid., 42.
55 Non-FIFA entities wishing to participate to international matches have now joined in the CONfederation of Independent Football Association (CONIFA).
56 Khalidi, One Hundred Years of Football in Palestine, 51.
57 Paul A. David, ‘Why are institutions the “carriers of history”? Path dependence and the evolution of conventions, organizations and institutions’, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 5, no. 2 (1994): 205–20; Georg Schreyögg and Jorg Sydow, ‘Understanding Institutional and Organizational Path Dependencies’, in The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, eds. Georg Schreyögg and Jorg Sydow (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3–12.
58 Chris Bolsmann, ‘White football in South Africa: empire, apartheid and change, 1892–1977’, Soccer & Society 10, nos. 1–2 (2000): 29–45. In fact, President Stanley Rous, who was not neutral as already said, relied on this weight of precedent.
59 FIFA. 25th Congress. Luxembourg: FIFA, 1946, 9 - according to the French version. The English version does not mention that point.
60 Henry Laurens, La question de Palestine (2007), volume 3; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2000), 184–258.
61 Amir Ben Porat, ‘Nation Building, Soccer and the Military in Israël’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 17, no. 4 (2000): 123.
62 The continuity between the two associations is confirmed by the date of the IFA’s affiliation to FIFA in 1929. See FIFA, ‘Israel. The Israel Football Association’, Fifa.com, https://www.fifa.com/associations/association/isr/about (accessed March 31, 2020).
63 FIFA. 26th Congress. London: FIFA, 1948, 8.
64 Mohammed Torki Bani Salameh and Khalid Issa El-Edwan, ‘The identity crisis in Jordan: historical pathways and contemporary debates’, Nationalities Papers 44, no. 6 (2016): 989–90; Henry Laurens, La question de Palestine (2007), volume 3; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2000), 246–58.
65 Philip Robins, A History of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 146.
66 Ibid., 70–3, 117–9, 129–35.
67 It is noteworthy that he had been installed in this post by the Jordanian Minister of Sports, Ibrahim Nusseibeh, who was a Palestinian Arab. The same Nusseibeh had been active in the founding of the PFA in 1928 before opting for the APSF.
68 Dag Tuastad, ‘“A Threat to National Unity” – Football in Jordan: Ethnic Divisive or a Political Tool for the Regime?’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 31, no. 14 (2014): 1774–88.
69 A’all-Palestine government’, not recognised by Jordan, had even been tolerated for a few years in the Gaza Strip by Egypt, but its freedom of action had been very modest (Avi Shlaim, ‘The Rise and Fall of the All-Palestine Government in Gaza’, Journal of Palestine Studies 20, no. 1 (1990): 37–52).
70 Khalidi, One Hundred Years of Football in Palestine, 106.
71 This union was dissolved in 1961, but Egypt kept the name until 1971.
72 Other resolutions have since reiterated this idea – mainly resolutions 338, 1397 and 1515. Recently, at FIFA, the Palestinian delegation relied instead on resolution 2334, which, while recalling the principles of a peace agreement, insists on condemning the Israeli colonisation in the West Bank (FIFA. 67th Congress. Manama: FIFA, 2017, 17).
73 Henry Laurens, La question de Palestine (2011), volume 4; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, 302–46.
74 Khalidi, One Hundred Years of Football in Palestine, 174.
75 Broda, ‘Europe versus emerging countries within FIFA: Using inflation as a conflict regulation mechanism’, 1632.
76 Henry Laurens, La question de Palestine (2015), volume 5; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, 595–651.
77 These elements are more clearly presented at the 2015 Congress (FIFA. 65th Congress. Zurich: FIFA, 2015, 29–30). The request is mainly based on Article 3 on “non-discrimination” and Article 75 on “contacts” (FIFA. Statutes. Zurich: FIFA, 2015).
78 FIFA. Circular 1385. Zurich: FIFA, 2013.
79 FIFA. ‘Governance’, Media Release. Zurich: FIFA, December 19, 2014.
80 FIFA. 67th Congress, 3–20.
81 UEFA. UEFA Emergency Panel decision on Crimean clubs. Nyon: UEFA, August 22, 2014. The discomfort of the decision is obvious. Infantino, then UEFA President, promised ‘financial compensations’ and a commitment ‘to financing the development of football in Crimea with the emphasis on youth football and infrastructure’ (Le Monde, ‘L'UEFA interdit aux clubs de Crimée de participer au championnat russe’, Lemonde.fr, (2014) December 4: https://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2014/12/04/l-uefa-interdit-aux-clubs-de-crimee-de-participer-au-championnat-russe_4534743_3214.html).
82 It is also his promise to help the Palestinians. These stadiums ‘break down barriers at Peace to Prosperity event’ (FIFA. ‘Governance’, Media Release. Zurich: FIFA, June 26, 2019).
83 Court of Arbitration for Sport. Media Release. Lausanne: CAS, July 18, 2019.
84 John R. Commons, Institutional Economics, 697–8.
85 Jon Dart, ‘Sport and Peacebuilding in Israel/Palestine’, 18–21.