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- [00:00]
Podcast Host (iHeart Podcast Intro)
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human mom.
- [00:05]
Child or Listener Asking Questions
Can you tell me a story?
- [00:06]
Storyteller or Advertiser (Carvana Ad)
Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.
- [00:09]
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Was she brave?
- [00:10]
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She was tired, mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
- [00:16]
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Did you have to fight a dragon?
- [00:18]
Storyteller or Advertiser (Carvana Ad)
Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
- [00:21]
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Was it scary?
- [00:22]
Storyteller or Advertiser (Carvana Ad)
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
- [00:25]
Child or Listener Asking Questions
Did the car have a sunroof?
- [00:26]
Storyteller or Advertiser (Carvana Ad)
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- [00:41]
Dana Al Kurd
Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Al Kurd, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today, I want to talk about football, soccer, whatever, and I'll just start by saying, obviously, FIFA is a terrible, terrible organization. And while there are many heartwarming events in this World cup, the World cup gets me, gets a lot of us. Despite everything, there have also been egregious incidents against players and referees and fans from the global south. Take, for example, what happened to the Somali referee who wasn't allowed to come into the US to do his job. He was kept hours and hours in the airport before being unceremoniously returned to Somalia. Similarly, the head of the Palestine Football association was denied a visa into the United States, not allowed to come to the World cup on US Soil. This is in spite of the fact that FIFA invited association heads from around the world to attend. And he did attend the opening game in Mexico City, or one of the worst incidents, if you can call it that, the way that the Iranian team has been treated. They weren't allowed to stay in the US despite the games they were playing in. This country were constantly made to fly back to Mexico after every game. Clearly, they were put at a severe disadvantage because. Because they weren't allowed to rest and recuperate like the other teams. And listen, I'm not going to say it is a conspiracy, but having not one, but three goals discounted by VAR eventually leading to their elimination from the tournament just adds insult to injury. But like I said, of course there are many heartwarming stories. For me as a Palestinian, it's been great to see how much Palestine keeps popping up, despite the fact that the environment in the United States is much more hostile on this issue than Qatar, the last World cup, people are still talking about Palestine and advocating for Palestine. Thousands of Bosnian supporters, for example, turned Toronto into a sea of blue as they marched toward the Stadium for the Canada match, chanting Free Palestine. And they did that in a number of places. Inglewood, Seattle. They also chanted Palestine within the stadiums in multiple games. At that Canada game, activists also unfurled a Kick Israel out of FIFA banner. And it makes sense, really, when you understand the experience of Bosnians with genocide themselves not too long ago. Similarly, Moroccan fans held Palestinian flags or wore Morocco jerseys with the word Palestine on it. And this showed up on TV at the very opening match in Mexico City. Pro Palestine demonstrators gathered to form a giant human Palestinian flag. And South Korean fans brought Palestinian flags to the tournament, honoring a promise they made during their qualifying when their fans had chanted, we'll take Palestine to the World cup with us in Gaza, Palestinians are watching the games, too. Spain is the favorite team these days because of the government's position on the Israeli Palestinian conflict and because of superstar player Lamin Yamal, who has been unapologetically pro Palestine. Obviously, the genocide that has unfolded in Gaza and the war and killing that continues in the Middle east, in both occupied territories and in Lebanon are part of the reason why this issue seems to be ever present. But it didn't start with the genocide. The story of Palestine at the World cup is more layered than that. And the 2022 World cup in Qatar was a good demonstration of why Palestine keeps popping up and what Palestine represents to fans, especially Arab ones then and everyone now. I know it might seem strange to be talking about this now a few years after the fact, but I've been thinking about it a lot, especially given everything that has unfolded since. And I think the World cup moment is one of those events that gets more interesting, not less, as time passes back then as it does now, it's showing us something important, not just about Palestine, but about the limits of what governments can actually control when it comes to what their own people believe. So let's get into it. Palestine did not qualify for the 2022 World Cup. The Palestinian national football team was nowhere near Doha in an official capacity. And yet Arabs from across the region and across the world began referring to Palestine then as the 33rd team. Because Palestine was everywhere at the 2022 World Cup. There were Palestinian flags draped over shoulders in stadiums. Crowds erupted into chants of Multani, the Palestinian anthem. After Arab teams won, one Tunisian fan ran onto the pitch mid match with a Palestinian flag. And when Morocco pulled off their historic upset against Spain, so it's the first African and Arab team to ever reach the semifinals of a World Cup, Moroccan players ran to the crowd and held up the Palestinian flag. This was significant. Morocco had just signed the Abraham Accords with Israel only two years prior to this game, and their players didn't seem to care. Israeli journalists who traveled to Qatar to cover the tournament reported being coldly received, followed, and in some cases physically shut out of interviews by crowds of Arab fans. Some of these reporters were caught on camera claiming to be from other countries like France or Switzerland. In order to get people to talk to them, some of them masked their logos from their stations. Israeli media at the time expressed something between confusion and outrage. One reporter remarked, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he basically said that the hostility wasn't just coming from governments, as they had assumed. It was coming from ordinary people. And this surprised them, but it shouldn't have. Now. None of this was purely spontaneous. That's the part of the story I find most interesting and the part that gets maybe the least attention. Months before the World cup began, a Qatari activist group called Qatari Youth Opposed to Normalization Q A Y o n started planning. They were founded in 2011, and by 2022, led predominantly by Qatari women, they had been working for over a decade to push back against Qatar's slow drift towards normalizing ties with Israel, which is something the Qatari government had been entertaining, largely under pressure from the United States and from its Gulf neighbors. And in a country where over 80% of people oppose normalization with Israel, this organization, Qatar Youth, had a base, but they had to work carefully because you can't have unsanctioned civil society organizations. There's all sorts of restrictions on independent activism, extremely severe in Qatar. But they saw the World cup as a window, an opportunity to turn what already existed, which was deep, widespread popular solidarity with Palestine, into. Into something visible, coordinated and impossible to ignore. So they got to work. They persuaded Qatar's national team captain to wear a keffiyeh patterned armband before the opening match. And then there was this hashtag, the Captain's armbandis Palestinian, which started trending on Arabic Twitter. They reached out to Qatari influencers and prominent journalists who amplified the campaign across social media. And they called on local businesses to display signs that they were compliant with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. They also ran a kind of counterintelligence operation against Israeli media, because they were the ones that began identifying Israeli journalists and their logos on social media, flagging them, so that Arab fans at the tournament knew who to avoid. And this is how those videos of Israeli broadcasters being turned away kept appearing online. They also organized fans to chant for Palestine at the 48th minute of every match. That's not random. That's a reference to 1948 and to the Nakba, where close to a million Palestinians were expelled from their homes with the founding of the Israeli state. Key members of Qatari youth said the goal was to turn Arab fans from sympathizers into participants. And they were honest about something else too. This only worked because the ground was already ready. As they put it, the campaign would not have succeeded had it not been for people's own proactive support of the Palestinian cause. And that's worth sitting with for a moment. The organizing mattered, the strategy mattered. But the reason it spread so quickly so far is that there was already a fire there. Qatar youth just lit the match.
- [08:21]
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- [08:53]
Dana Al Kurd
Now, to understand why people were so upset, you have to understand the Abraham Accords. I've talked about it on this podcast before. The normalization agreements brokered by the Trump administration in 2020 between Israel and the UAE, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and later Sudan and Morocco. These deals were sold as historic breakthroughs as a new era of peace. And in terms of official diplomatic relations, they were breakthroughs. They were historic. But there was a problem. Nobody asked the people, and these accords didn't solve anything. Now, Arab public opinion surveys have consistently shown that the vast majority of Arabs oppose normalization with Israel absent a resolution to the question of Palestinian statehood and the ongoing occupation. And in the most recent polling before the accords, it was something like 88% of Arabs across 13 countries that rejected normalization with Israel, and nearly two thirds of those cited the occupation of Palestinian land as their reason. Only 7% cited something like religious objections. The fear had always been that if you normalize relations with Israel, without a resolution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, Israel would not have any reason to try and resolve the conflict or address the grievances of Palestinians. That Israel perhaps would become more aggressive if the guardrails were off. So what the Abraham Accords actually did, from the perspective of ordinary Arabs, was deepen the sense that their governments wouldn't listen to them, were willing to sell them out. Sell out the Palestinians for economic and security arrangements that disproportionately benefited ruling classes anyway and the US Israeli security architecture. I've written about this academically and what I found is a kind of paradox at the heart of these so called peace deals. Peace initiatives that don't address the root causes of conflict don't actually create peace. They create a different kind of violence, a structural violence, because they maintain the root causes of conflict and they enable authoritarian practices by governments. So Israel shares a lot of tools, surveillance technology, propaganda frameworks, security cooperation, both material and discursive tools. And these have a way of turning up in the hands of governments repressing their own citizens. Now, I'm not saying the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain needed encouragement to repress their own citizens, but it's just another added layer, another way that the red lines shift and new ways that these governments can attack their own citizens and their own activists. For example, Emirate activists involved in anti normalization activities after the accords became targets of surveillance operations. And people who spoke out about the deals faced travel bans. In Bahrain, civil society organizations were newly restricted. The quote, unquote peace came with a repressive apparatus baked in. Which is exactly why when thousands of Arabs gathered in Doha's public squares to watch the World cup, the energy around Palestine wasn't some just like emotional sentiment. And it wasn't a relic, it was fresh. It was the anger of people who had just watched their governments make deals they never asked for and deals that were used to oppress them and not solve the Palestinian issue. There is a concept that academics and activists have used called sports normalization. The idea is that sports, because they're presented as apolitical or maybe as entertainment, as a space above politics, they can be used as a soft avenue for normalizing relationships that would be otherwise politically controversial. Israel has long pursued this strategy. The logic is if Israel and Arab athletes compete together, then this image of coexistence replaces the political reality of occupation. You don't need any kind of solution or diplomatic agreement. You just need enough footage of an Israeli in Moroccan shaking hands on the pitch to make people feel like things are moving in a good direction. Qatar youth were very explicit about targeting this. They hosted panels on sports normalization. They released a statement pointing out that Western political boycotts of Russia extended to sporting events after the invasion of Ukraine. And nobody then complained that sports were being mixed up with politics. And to them the inconsistency was glaring. That mixing sports with politics was apparently fine when it was about sanctioning Russia, you know, admittedly very appropriately, but somehow inappropriate when it came to Palestinian rights. And this double standard, I've encountered it constantly in my work. The insistence that the Palestinian cause is uniquely problematic, uniquely in need of being kept out of polite conversation or unreasonable. This insistence falls apart the moment you compare it to any other conflict where the west has chosen a side. Now the World cup made that visible in real time. When the Palestinian flag showed up in a stadium in Doha, it wasn't just a symbol of solidarity, it was an argument. It said, this issue is not resolved. We have not moved on. It doesn't matter what the Abraham Accords said or how many photo ops, it's going to make any of this go away. Now I want to dwell for a minute on Morocco. Full disclosure, that's the team I support. I hope they go as far as possible. But Morocco is an interesting case and I think it illuminates something about the limits of top down normalization. Like I said, the Moroccan government signed the Abraham Accords and the deal actually included US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, which Morocco has long occupied itself, a case of a people's right to self determination being traded away in this diplomatic agreement situation. So it was a completely cynical arrangement all around. And yet when Morocco beat Spain, reached the semifinals, their players held up the Palestinian flag. When Morocco beat Portugal and the streets of Rabat and Casablanca erupted, the Palestinian flag was there too. And fans in Doha who had traveled from across North Africa and the Middle east were wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, chanting for Palestine. Now, the Moroccan government's deal with Israel did not transfer to the Moroccan people. And this is the key insight from the World cup, the one that I keep coming back to, that governments can sign papers, but they can't really sign on behalf of public sentiment. And these countries are not democratic. So any kind of push to do something like this seems like a betrayal to their own citizens. And they can't normalize what has not been normalized in the hearts and minds of their own citizens. There is a kind of arrogance in the Abraham Accords framework. The assumption is that if you get the right signatures, if you get the right photo op on the White House lawn, that the conflict can be ignored and that the Palestinian cause can recede. But the World cup was a direct refutation of that assumption. Now, I've been thinking about all of this in the context of everything that has happened since the genocide in Gaza. The daily images, the death tolls, the wholesale destruction of Gazan society, and the ongoing question of what normalization means now and whether any of those Abraham Accords frameworks can survive what the world has watched happen now, I do think it will survive. These governments do not care about what happened in Gaza. But what it shows is that the fears around the Abraham Accords were completely founded. Ignoring the Israeli Palestinian conflict would lead to an escalation in the violence. I think the World cup moment was a Preview back in 2022. It told us something about where popular Arab opinion actually was, not where governments claimed it was and not where Western media assumed it was, but where it actually was. And it showed us that organized strategic activism can channel that sentiment to something visible and politically costly for the forces of normalization. Now, Qatar Youth Opposed to Normalization, was a small group and they were operating under real restrictions in a country that doesn't allow independent civil society. And they still managed to turn a global sporting event into one of the most visible expressions of Palestinian solidarity in years. And that matters not because a football tournament, a soccer tournament, is going to solve anything. It doesn't. Palestinian families don't get their homes back because people flew a flag in a stadium. But movements build over time and through moments of visibility, through the accumulation of pressure, and through the refusal to let the issue disappear into a manufactured consensus that was never real to begin with. And today, in 2026, this is not specific to Arab publics. Even Western publics have seen their governments ignore genocide, have seen their rights recede as their government's ally to protect genocide in a variety of ways. Now, I'll end with something a little more personal. When I watched those World cup crowds back in 2022, when I saw all these different Arabs, Moroccans and Tunisians and Saudis, people from countries that have varying and complicated relationships with this issue, all waving the Palestinian flag, I felt a kind of hope. And it's not naive. It's not the hope that this will be resolved soon or easily, but the hope that says Palestinians are not alone and the cause is not forgotten. And the silence that has been imposed on this question, attempted silence, top down, for so long, is not the consent it pretends to be. Governments can sign accords, but they can't erase what people know and they cannot sign away what people feel when they watch a team lose and a flag goes up in a stadium and thousands of people start chanting, Palestine keeps showing up uninvited at every table that tries to exclude it. And I think it will keep doing that. Thank you so much for listening to it. Could happen here. I'm Dan Alker It Could Happen Here
- [17:39]
Cool Zone Media Announcer
is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.
- [17:57]
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- [18:24]
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- [18:26]
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