World Footy News

The third instalment of the AFL’s International Cup featured a bit of a ‘left field’ inclusion - the Peres Peace Team, a combined Israeli-Palestinian side comprising 13 players from each background. Anyone who watched the ‘Tackling Peace’* documentary on Channel 10 back in 2009, was perhaps left pondering the chances of a revisit of the team. Without much fanfare then – it was a pleasant surprise when the AFL released its list of country’s considering and likely to attend IC2011, and there in the list was the Peace Team.

The original idea for the team owed much to Tanya Oziel**, who is the Executive Director of the Peres Centre for Peace in Australia, and also a Sydney mum whose son Chaim took up footy with the Maroubra Saints. The Peres Centre for Peace had and has been involved in Sports as a tool for ‘peace-building’. In Jan 2008, around 100 potential players were introduced to the game via DVD’s and the white board, by Feb a squad of 40 embarked on about 7 months of intensive training prior to heading to Australia for the late August start to the IC. The Peace Team would be the result of the combined efforts of the Peres Center of Peace and the Al Quds Association for Democracy and Dialogue. Training in itself was a major challenge, including that a team of players unfamiliar with the game had to be training in 2 languages, and without goal posts.

Roll on August/September 2008 and the International Cup debut against Great Britain, on a fine sunny afternoon at Royal Park in inner northern Melbourne. After 3 thrashings at the hands of much more experienced and hardened opponents in the Brits, PNG and Nauru, the Peace Team broke the duck with a win over China, followed by a final placing win over Finland. In between times, we didn’t hear much about the Peace Team. Was it a once off? The ‘Tackling Peace’ documentary was a key reminder of just how big a deal it was.

Then a couple of months back, in December 2010, the Jewish News reported that the Peace team was to be given a ‘second chance’. He reported Tanya Oziel as stating “We are again looking for 13 Israelis and 13 Palestinians to join the team. The most beautiful part is that the boys, who were strangers from two different sides of the conflict, still keep in touch and are friends now.”

Danny Brill, an oleh from Melbourne who has been living in Jerusalem, and was an assistant coach and member of the 2008 version of the Peace Team recently blogged about how, this time around, his attitudes have changed. I no longer believe that all Muslims should be removed from the State of Israel, I no longer believe that violence is the only solution, I no longer believe that there is no one who wants real peace on the other side, and I no longer believe that I am powerless to do anything about the current situation. After meeting, playing, defending and living with my team-mates 3 years ago, the questions I ask myself this time are very, very different. Instead of asking myself whether I fear for my life at training, I now ask myself whether I can learn Arabic within 6 months. I have replaced questions about my insecurity of being around “these people” with questions as to how I can learn more about a situation I know nothing about, and teach someone else about my own situation.

There’s no argument that the Peace team is anything but a useful and constructive project. It’s no token gesture and the 2008 side was a deserved peoples ‘favourite’, the noise around the game on the day and concentration of media was testimony to that. Jack Chrapot, a Melbourne lawyer, wrote in an online Jewish newsletter (J-Line) about some of the local outcomes in Melbourne after the Peace Team’s 2008 campaign. The concept of the Peace Team has also spawned a round robin competition involving many of our local communities in an Australian Federal Police initiative that aims to strengthen the ties between the Muslim and other communities including the Jewish community. It has the backing of the AFL Multicultural Program, Victoria Police, Maccabi Victoria and the Islamic Council of Victoria. The AJAX Football Club is helping put together the Jewish team and it is hoped that with games played on Sundays, it will attract some of Orthodox members of the community who otherwise cannot participate in the game. The competition will also involve Muslim teams and an Indigenous Australian team.

The 2011 Peace Team will travel first to Sydney this August and then on to Melbourne. In Sydney, matches will be played at Blacktown Olympic Park in the AFL's 'brave new world' - Sydney's West. Eddie McGuire got into hot water on radio recently with a throw away line about the ‘Land of the Falafel’. Hopefully the Peace Team will strike a chord in the West Sydney region in a similar vein to the Auburn Tigers . Australian Football after all has had to continually reinvent itself and it’s attitudes to be accessible to new arrivals from all over the world.

*“Tackling Peace,” by Australian director Marc Radomsky, originally aired on Network 10 in July 2009 and won the Provincia Di Milano Award for Outstanding Film, and the Mention D’Honneur in the Sport & Society category of Sports Film Awards held in Milan, Italy, 2010.

**Tanya Oziel was honoured as runner up in 2009 AFL Football Women of the Year Awards