JMD on NBN: Nicholas Blincoe, More Nobel Than War
NICHOLAS BLINCOE
A Soccer History of
Israel-Palestine
BOLD TYPE BOOKS 2019
February 19,
2020 James M. Dorsey
Nicholas Blincoe’s More Noble Than
War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine (Bold Type
Books, 2019) is a beautifully narrated and written history of a century of
conflict between pre-state Jews and Palestinians and Israeli Jews and Israeli
Palestinians after the establishment of the state. It is a story that goes far
beyond the history of the conflict, the mirror images of developments in Jewish
and Palestinian society, and the internecine ideological infighting and power
struggles within the two communities. It paints in graphic detail the
incestuous and inseparable relationship between sports and politics and the
importance of soccer, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, in
identity and nation formation as well as nation building. It also demonstrates
in graphic detail how first Jews and then Palestinians exploited soccer to
first achieve international recognition of their struggles and then as nations
by dispatching teams to tour other countries and being granted membership in
world soccer body FIFA. In doing so, Israelis and Palestinians set an example
that decades later became a key pillar of the Algerian liberation struggle in
the 1950s and 1960s with the National Liberation Front (FLN)’s creation of its
own national soccer team that put its fight for independence on the world map.
The skeletal facts of Blincoe’s tale have long been known. The significance of
Blincoe’s contribution is that he puts flesh on the skeleton by weaving the
facts into a meticulously researched and reported, easily accessible narrative
in which he brings key players and ideological trends to life. It’s a tale that
is all fact but reads like a thriller.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of
Singapore’s Middle East Institute.
Listen to the podcast at: https://dcs-b.megaphone.fm/LIT4403670488.mp3?key=ad2e7300cfe9b3f4d918bfd05eaa8bd6
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