In-betweenness and crumbled hopes in Palestine: the global in the local of the occupied territories

State, sport and resistance: A case of Palestinian sports clubs in the West Bank

“…The ideal of building a sovereign state has shaped the very character and logics of the Palestinian national movement and the realization of this goal has been widely understood as a solution to Palestinian problems (Kelly, 2006). While in the 1970s and 1980s building independent Palestinian structures was a form of resistance to direct Israeli occupation and preparation for future, hoped-for sovereignty, the Oslo Accords launched a formal state-building process (Bornstein, 2009). The article investigates this transition from the perspective of local clubs that were actively engaged in building the Palestinian social and political structures in the 1970s and 1980s, and since the mid-1990s became subjects of the PA's efforts to consolidate its state-like powers.…”

“…Based on data gathered during one year of fieldwork in the West Bank, I analyse how these intersections have been imagined, practised and negotiated in the realm of local sports clubs. In particular, I focus on the transition between the years of direct Israeli occupation (1967–1994), when the clubs emerged as important sites of state-building as a form of resistance, to the process of building a semi-autonomous Palestinian state following the Oslo Accords of 1994 (see Bornstein, 2009). I look at how the transition impacted both the social and political character of the clubs, as well as how it changed the means and actors of state-building through sport, and analyse how local sport activists made sense of these changes.…”