A Palestinian team in Chile offers football with a dose of protest

Arms raised high, banners denouncing Israel’s war on Gaza, crowds unite in song and wrapped in keffiyehs, the black-and-white chequered scarves that have become a badge of Palestinian identity.

It could be any pro-Palestinian rally protesting against the Israel-Hamas war if it is not for the fact that the thousands in the crowd are actually on the terraces of a football match in Chile’s capital Santiago.

Although the players darting across the field have names like Jose and Antonio who grew up in the Spanish-speaking South American nation, their fervour for the Palestinian cause and red, white, black and green-coloured jerseys, underscore how a storied Chilean football club serves as an entry point for the world’s largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East to connect with an ancestral home thousands of miles away.

“It’s more than just a club, it takes you into the history of the Palestinians,” says Bryan Carrasco, captain of Club Deportivo Palestino.

As the bloodiest war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages in the Gaza Strip, the club’s electric game atmosphere, viewing parties and pre-match political stunts have increasingly tapped into a sense of collective Palestinian grief in this new era of war and displacement.

“We’re united in the face of the war,” said Diego Khamis, director of the country’s Palestinian community. “It’s daily suffering.”

In a sport where authorities penalise athletes for flaunting political positions, particularly on such explosive issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Club Palestino is an unabashed exception that wears its pro-Palestinian politics on its sleeve — and on its torso, stadium seats and anywhere else it can find.

The club’s brazen gestures have caused offence before. Chile’s football federation fined the club in 2014 after the number “1” on the back of their shirts was shaped like a map of Palestine before Israel’s creation in 1948.

But players’ fierce pride in their Palestinian identity has otherwise caused little controversy in this country of 19 million, home to 500,000 ethnic Palestinians.

The scrappy football club went professional in 1947, becoming the pride of the Palestinian community.

Rocketing to Chile’s top division and clinching five official titles, its appeal soon stretched to the Middle East, where the descendants of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan still congregate in camps and cafes to catch Palestino matches.

The team’s political message also won supporters across Chile — a football-crazed country with a spirit of social activism and a former protest leader as president — and beyond.

Despite being a small club, with an average of only about 2,000 spectators per game, Deportivo Palestino is the third most followed Chilean club on Instagram, with more than 741,000 followers, only behind eternal rivals Universidad de Chile (791,000) and Colo-Colo (2.3 million).

Israel’s war has affected Palestino directly, forcing the club’s training school in Gaza to shut down and disrupting programmes it supports across the occupied West Bank.

But within Chile, it has breathed new life into players and fans. Before kickoff, the team now rushes the pitch clad in keffiyehs, brandishing antiwar banners and taking a knee.

In May, the team abandoned one little pre-match ritual of emerging on the field holding hands with child mascots. Instead, players extended their arms to the side, grasping at empty space.

It was a subtle gesture — a tribute to the “invisible children” killed in Gaza, the team later explained — that could have been lost entirely on common football fans.

This crowd, however, went wild.