‘Snipers Stop Play’: The Israeli Defence Force and the Shooting of Palestinian Footballers

This chapter discusses the extent to which the Israeli state is using violence to deliberately suppress Palestinian football and curtail the emergence of a successful league structure and national football team. As US sport journalist Dave Zirin has suggested, if members of Spain’s World Cup team had been jailed, shot or killed by another country or the prospective youth players for Brazil were shot in the feet by the military of another nation huge international media outrage would ensue. Imagine if. However, these events have received little attention on the sports page or beyond.

The chapter begins with an outline of the origins of the Israel/Palestine conflict. This is followed by a brief summary of Palestinian football. The chapter then explores the claim that the Israeli military, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), has deliberately targeted Palestinian footballers in an attempt to curtail the development of Palestinian men’s soccer.