Israel Matzav

Judean Rebels football team wears Israel Faithful orange and IDF green, but includes Arab players

We have a(n American) football league here in Israel. Last year, a seventh team was added to the league. The team is known as the Judean Rebels. They are based in Efrat, and although they currently play their home games at Robert Kraft Stadium in Jerusalem, a stadium donated by the Patriots' owner, they are hoping to build a full (American) football stadium with 5,000 seats in Efrat. They describe their colors as Israel Faithful Orange and IDF Green, but the team is made up of revenants ... and Arabs.

The Judean Rebels is the first West Bank franchise in Israel’s amateur American tackle football league, the Kraft Family IFL. Most of the players are Jewish Israelis, many of them West Bank settlers, but five are Palestinian.

“You put on your helmet and you cease to be a Palestinian or a settler and you’re just an offensive guard, or a defensive end,” said Shlomo Schachter, a 29-year-old former Oberlin College offensive lineman who sports the sidelocks and skullcap of strictly traditional Jews. Like many of the Rebels, he was raised in the United States and played football in school.

The players insist they put aside their politics the minute they put on their orange jerseys and helmets, but off-the-field realities inevitably creep in.

Musa Elayyan, a 20-yearold Palestinian hotel worker in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said he often struggles to make it to practice because of delays at Israeli military checkpoints.

And although Elayyan is reluctant to talk about his political views, he said he believes in a one-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians – a position that calls for combining Israel and the Palestinian territories into a single country. Israelis almost universally oppose this view since it would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

Schachter said he invited Elayyan and his brothers to play football last year because of their size. Elayyan played for his US high school team in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“I let them know beforehand that we’re Arabs,” said Elayyan, who only learned Arabic after moving with his family to Jerusalem in 2007.

“We didn’t want to make any problems.”

Schachter’s answer: “That’s great. Let’s play football.”

Read the whole thing.

That ought to muck up people's stereotypes for a while.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:15 PM