‘We can!’ – women’s football in the Occupied West Bank

Abstract

In this article, I will highlight and discuss the following issues: How do players experience football as a way of normalising crisis during occupation? How do players experience the sense of honour when playing for Palestine? 17 footballers from one of the best clubs in the West Bank, 'Sareyyet Ramalla' (Ramallah Sport Club) are interviewed. The article invites each of the players to be a public actor in the context of fragments of her life. The troubled status of their nation forms a backdrop to their personal sense of national identity in a global male-dominated game. Pierre Bourdieu's arbitrary two-sexed model of gender relations and power plays also a role in this article.