Soccer for Peace at Givat Haviva
July 16, 2007
The bright yellow shirts – adorned with a dove straddling a soccer ball – worn by fifty young Jewish and Arab boys wrapping up a five-day stay at Givat Haviva are visible from quite a distance, making them a group of young boys who are definitely seen before being heard!
Together with a Jewish and Arab team of soccer coaches, councilors and facilitators – the latter dealing with co-existence workshops and trained at Givat Haviva – the Soccer for Peace in the Middle East project is definitely in a league of its very own.
The brainchild of Jewish New Yorker, Soccer for Peace is a non-profit organization aiming to unite children through their common love of soccer in regions where conflict is rife. Founded in 2002 and for the first years dealing only with children in the Middle East, SFP has nowadays also expanded to war torn areas elsewhere in the world.
In Israel, together with the Maccabim Association – the educational and community services arm of famed soccer club Maccabi Tel Aviv – Soccer for Peace and the Kibbutz Barkai-Maccabi Tel Aviv Soccer Club in Wadi Ara have notched up yet another successful camp bringing 10-12 years old from Zichron Yaacov to Baka el-Gharbiya and almost every Jewish and Arab community in between, to spend five days of intensive play, on and off the soccer field, and educational workshops together.
“For the 10 year-olds this is their first introduction to the project, but most of the 11 and 12 year-olds have been coming to the Barkai Soccer Club for a while and so know one another from there,” said Chaim Nadler, a member of Kibbutz Barkai and director of the Barkai-Maccabi Tel Aviv Soccer Club – the length of a soccer pitch or two separating the grounds of the soccer club and those of Givat Haviva where the boys stayed for the duration of the camp.
It was Nadler’s love of the game that propelled him to set up the soccer club for kids in his kibbutz eight years ago. Since then hundreds of children who live in relative proximity to each other but whose paths would never have met across the Israeli Jewish-Arab divide have not only come together for soccer but they and some of their families have become firm friends.
“When the 10 year-olds come together there is a problem at the beginning with communication as the Arab children do not really know much Hebrew at that age, and of course the Jewish kids have no Arabic,” explains Nadler.
However, once they get to don their studded boots and get out on to the soccer field communication is no problem at all he comments with a broad smile as a hoard of yellow kitted young boys, each schlepping a heavy bag of equipment, leave the Givat Haviva dining-room for the buses to take them home after more than a successful project giving co-existence more than a sporting chance.