Agencies-Gaza post
One of Chile’s soccer club leaves Palestinian map on uniform
The Palestine Football Club of Chile debuted its new uniform, which features a front shirt that depicts the entire geography of Israel as Palestine.
Small maps of Israel are also incorporated into the player numbers on the backs of their uniform shirts.
The new uniforms, which were worn on Sunday in a game versus Universidad de Concepcion, are a replacement for the previous ones, which had a map on the back of the player’s shirt for the number one.
The squad was punished for wearing outdated uniforms on January 20 by the National Association of Professional Football of Chile, or ANFP, Chile’s top soccer league.
The ANFP also mandated that the squad modify its uniforms to add numerals after it wore the jerseys for three games this month.
The ANFP stated that it was against “any type of political, religious, sexual, ethnic, socioeconomic, or racial discrimination” when it penalized the Palestine squad.
On the soccer club’s official Facebook page, there is a picture of the new outfit. The post of that picture attracted 327 likes and 73 comments in the first few hours it was live, with nearly half of them expressing a desire to purchase both the new shirt and the old one.
“Another indication that the leaders of the Palestinian community in Chile have very extreme ideologies is the Palestinian Soccer Club’s decision to preserve the map of Israel on their uniform while declaring that the entire country is Palestinian territory.
Additionally, Maximiliano Grass, director of the Chile-Israel Council, the Zionist Federation of Chile, told JTA that it is founded on the rejection of any connection between the Jewish People and the territory of Israel.
In fact, even when they were unable to use the old shirt any longer, they used media attention to sell more than 7,000 of them all over the world. With this mindset, it is quite unlikely that we will be able to restart productive communication with the local Palestinian community anytime soon, he continued.
The shirts made their debut on January 4 in Palestine’s victory over Chile’s Everton team in the season’s opening game.
The Palestine squad won its most recent game against Universidad de Concepcion and is now tied for first place in the league with the Colo-Colo club.
In 1920, Palestinian immigrants to Chile started the club. The largest Palestinian community outside of the Middle East is reportedly found in Chile. According to sources, at least 300,000 Chileans are of Palestinian heritage.
