Events move so fast in Israel/Palestine that before you can report on them in your blog they are already buried by a dozens new and pressing events and issues. But I do want to share an especially moving moment in this interminable conflict before it goes the way of all ephimeralia. 

On a cold Thursday night, June 8th, just before the World Cup began, the world premiere of Goal Dreams, a film about the brave preparations of the Palestinian football team for the World Cup, was screened by ICAHD on the Wall (Israel's "Separation Barrier"), an endless line of 26 foot concrete slabs running through the campus of al-Quds University in the West Bank town of Abu Dis.

The film by Maya Sanbar, a Palestinian-Lebanese, and her partner in Cinema Capital Jeffrey Saunders, a Jewish-American, follows the efforts of a group of Palestinian businesspeople who fund a national Palestinian soccer team to compete in the World Cup. "We don't have a state," says one of the players, "but we do have a country. I was trembling when I saw the Palestinian flag being raised. I felt I had done something great for my country that day."

" In fact, Sanbar makes a very interesting observation: "Sport is the only context in which you can officially refer to 'Palestine'," she says. "In football and in the Olympics, you have the word 'Palestine', but even in the United Nations, it's referred to as the 'Palestinian Authority'."

Albert Riedl, an Austrian coach was hired and the effort began to assemble a national team. Palestinian players, some of whom never set foot in Palestine, were recruited from a host of countries -- Kuwait, Lebanon, the US (where they find Palestinian-American player and former NYU soccer star Morad Fareed), Germany and Chile. There, it turns out, is a football club called Palestino that was founded in Santiago in 1920 and today serves the more than 100,000-strong Palestinian community in Chile. Two Palestino players play in Chile's premier league).

And, of course, from Palestine itself. Five players are invited to the training camp in Egypt, and we witness the hell they endured trying to get permits from the Israeli authorities and then to get across the usually-closed border (one two players make it, and almost too late to be integrated into the team). (One of Palestine's most talented players, midfielder Tarek al-Quto was killed in the West Bank during the Intifada.) We see the Palestinian Diaspora meeting Palestinian nationals on the pitch, and witness the many problems on the field caused by not even having a common language.

One can only feel admiration (and sadness) for their tenacious but obviously doomed efforts -- though they didn't do badly at all: Sometimes playing in an almost empty stadium in Qatar, they beat Taiwan 8-0 and drew 1-1 with Iraq before losing 3-0 to Uzbekistan.

On the cold wind-swept hillside where we projected the film, Palestinian youth huddled together with some adults, a few Israelis and a fair number of foreign journalists. The vice-chairman of the Palestinianian Football Association spoke and I said a few words. I noted, standing in a barren spot between a struggling Palestinian university and the Wall, that as much as Israel and the Jewish community go ballistic when boycotts or sanctions are suggested, when Israel virtually eliminates Palestinian sport and desecrates campuses with Walls, no one says a word. In the end, having watched the film, I was moved to say what often wells up in me when I see common people coping with checkpoints, with unimaginable suffering and constant harrassment, with a 40-year Occupation that threatens  to become a full-fledged apartheid regime in the next few months (in which, horror of horrors, my people are cast as the Afrikaners) -- and that is, kol hakavod to Palestinians who maintain their humanity, their sanity, the very fabric of their lives under inhumane conditions, who even insist that their country be represented with all the others on the football pitch.

The film "Goal Dreams" is excellent, a very unusual look at Palestinian life under Occupation and moving. The film-makers can be contacted through their website: http://cinemacapital.com/who.html

I wanted to share that evening, that moment, when Palestinans and Israelis simply sat together and watched a film on the Wall.