Israeli, Palestinian youngsters cultivate friendship in soccer field

Source: Xinhua | 04-24-2009 10:33

By Claire Ben-Ari, Deng Yushan

KIRYAT GAT, Israel, April 23 (Xinhua) -- Throbbing vitality and tense excitement permeated the grassy soccer field in the central Israeli city of Kiryat Gat on Thursday, as Israeli and Palestinian youngsters joined each other and competed in the finals of a peace-oriented soccer tournament.

Following rounds of preliminaries in the past few months, some 300 boys and girls out of over 1,500 made it to the final round of the Mini-World Cup, a 7-year-old annual event jointly staged by the Peres Center for Peace and its Palestinian partner the Al-Quds Association for Democracy and Dialogue.

The young participants were split into eight teams of mixed nationalities, with each fictitiously representing a country, and played against rivals at the same age level and of the same gender.

As Israeli jet fighters howled in the sky, the young players leaped out of the perceivable antagonism between the two peoples engendered by the decades-old conflict and plunged into the games highlighting friendship and team spirit.

They dashed, jumped and shot in the field, and constant peals of cheers from the audience, including foreign ambassadors and Israeli public figures, filled the municipal stadium, which was decorated with Chinese flags, as the Chinese embassy in Israel sponsored the event this year as well as last year.