The Palestinian Sports Club, a football team, plays in a white, green, and red uniform. Palestinian flags fly in its stadium and its socio-sporting club has an outdoor swimming pool in the shape of pre-1948 Palestine. But this football team doesn’t play in Palestine, or even in the Middle East. Better known as Palestino, they play in Chile’s most productive soccer league, Chile’s Primera División.
Chile is home to the largest Palestinian population outside the Middle East. This Palestinian diaspora, which currently numbers just under 500,000 people, has helped shape nearly a century of Chilean policy toward Palestine. At the center of this community, Palestine has not only served as a meeting point for the diaspora, but also as a tool for cultural exchange and diplomacy.
The first wave of Palestinian immigrants to Chile began in the 1850s, when others fled the Crimean War. A second wave of refugees arrived before World War I. Beginning in 1909, the Ottoman Empire extended conscription to young Christians and Jews. Many fled compulsory military service, while families whose children were forced to serve lost their breadwinners and fell into poverty, choosing to leave Palestine.
The last great era of immigration from Palestine to Chile took place after the Nakba in 1948, when 700,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes. Most of the migrants arrived at the port of Buenos Aires before crossing into Argentina and entering Chile through the Andes on the backs of mules.
These new Chilean-Palestinians have faced fierce racism. Palestinians in Chile were pejoratively called Turks (Turks), along with all those who had fled the Ottoman Empire. While successive generations of Chilean-Palestinians prospered economically, they continued to face prejudice. – even from other diaspora communities in Chile.
As Chile’s Palestinian diaspora grew in number and wealth, it created a series of networked institutions, adding Palestinian. The team was founded in 1916 in Santiago, the capital of Chile, as an amateur team. But it wasn’t until 1952 that Palestino turned professional. The club’s existing stadium, La Cisterna, opened in 1988 and continues to be a cultural hub for the Palestinian network.
Palestino is not the only professional football club in Chile founded through diaspora communities. Audux Italiano was founded by Italians in 1910 and Club Unión Espoñola was founded by Spaniards in 1897. Since 1933, all 3 clubs have participated in annual derthrough matches known as the Clásico de Colonias (Classic of the Colonies).
However, Palestino has exerted such political influence in Chile and his home country.
Shaping Chilean Politics
This Palestinian diaspora has shaped Chilean policy towards Palestine, uniting the left and right wings of Chilean politics. In 1947, Chile abstained from the UN vote on the partition of Palestine. And under the leadership of conservative President Sebastián Piñera, Chile identified the state of Palestine in 2011.
In 2019, his second term, Piñera was criticized in Israel for visiting the Jewish holy site, the Temple Mount, with a group of Palestinian officials. In 2022, Chile’s current leftist president, Gabriel Boric, announced plans to open a Chilean embassy in Palestine. .
Palestine himself has also helped forge relationships with generations of Palestinian politicians and football fans. In 2003, Yasser Arafat, then president of the State of Palestine, sent a letter from the Gaza Strip to the club when it was on the verge of bankruptcy.
And in 2015, before Palestino’s qualification for the Copa Libertadores (South America’s premier continental competition), the current president of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, wrote to the club. He would write to the club in 2018, ahead of Chile’s annual meeting. cup, the Copa Chile.
Palestino has also extended its support to the club’s collaborators in Palestine. Since 2010, the football club’s biggest sponsor has been the Bank of Palestine, as part of the bank’s efforts for its relations with the Palestinian diaspora. As part of those efforts, the Bank of Palestine sponsored a tour of the West Bank for the team’s lower divisions in 2013.
In 2019, two matches against the famous Argentine team Club Atlético River Plate, Palestino installed giant screens in the West Bank city of Ramallah so that Palestinian enthusiasts could simply watch the match.
However, the history of Palestine has not been without controversy. In 2014, the club was fined through the Chilean Football Federation after its kit for the new season included a map of pre-1948 Palestine instead of the team’s numbers. Chile’s Jewish network and the Israeli government complained, and Palestino eventually got rid of the cards in his kit.
But Palestine continues to be company and unwavering in its aid to the Palestinian state and, more than anything, the Chilean state endures it.
There is an old Chilean saying that says that each and every one of the towns in the country will have to have 3 things: a priest, a policeman and a Palestinian. This hard and historic network has marked not only the sporting history but also the politics of Chile and Palestine. .
While the war in Gaza continues, Palestinian football matches have a character of solidarity, mourning and birthday party of the Chilean-Palestinian identity.
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