Even a hardened cynic would have to see the value in Palestine joining the Olympic spirit. Four athletes now, and if peace prevails, maybe fourteen in 2012 and even more by 2016.
Here is story about the Palestine Olympic Team at the 2008 Beijing Olmpics in China.
Peace 2 All,
Yuya
Palestinian makes small splash
By Rosie DiManno, TheStar.com
BEIJING
Hamza Abdo is an athlete with a country but no passport.
The uniform on his back is donated. His ticket to Beijing was provided by a charitable arm of the International Olympic Committee. His competitive Games experience here will last – if a personal best – all of 25 seconds, one heat in the 50-metre men's freestyle swim.
The 17-year-old is Palestinian.
What decades of wrangling and disaccord have not been able to secure, the IOC has tacitly provided: sovereignty and statehood.
On Friday, a team of four athletes will march into the Bird's Nest Stadium behind the Palestinian flag. There is a national anthem, though it won't be heard at these Games because no Palestinian participant will be on top of the podium, or anywhere close to it.
And yet, Abdo says of his sojourn thus far as an Olympian, "This period has been the best time of my life."
He is a handsome, quick-witted youth, exhibiting all the fine qualities the Games are supposed to personify: hunger to excel, eagerness to challenge self and others, purity of purpose.
He is adamantly non-political.
But he is also an Arab boy from East Jerusalem, raised under the shadow of occupation, if not in the occupied territory that calls itself Palestine.
"The main target here is to prove that Palestine exists, to have a flag among all the other flags of the world," he said.
To some, it may seem offensive that Palestinians have been embraced as members of the Olympic family – their first delegation invited to Atlanta in 1996, athletes actually competing only since 2000 in Sydney. It was a radical faction of the PLO, Black September, that desecrated the Olympics in Munich in 1972, taking members of Israel's team hostage, 11 of them ultimately killed in what many recall as the first incident of international terrorism.
Abdo knows none of that. "What happened in Munich?" he asks, the genuine ignorance writ large on his face.
"We don't speak of Munich to our athletes," said Abdo's coach, Ibrahim Tawil, who is old enough to remember. "If the Israelis have a bad memory, I will say only that we have many more of them, from 1948."
There is no point in arguing the relativism of his statement. Tawil is of a generation that could not raise the Palestinian flag without fear of imprisonment.
Better simply to acknowledge and applaud the effort it took for Abdo and his teammates to get here, under the auspices of the Olympic Solidarity Committee. At least one member of the squad, 5,000-metre track entrant Nader Masri, is not even sure yet whether Israeli authorities will allow him to return, since he will have to cross back into occupied territory. Masri left six months ago to train. His wife has since given birth to their first child, a baby he's yet to see.
"At least, living in Jerusalem, we know we can get back in through Jordan," said Tawil. "How Nader's story will end, I cannot tell. It is a very miserable situation."
Abdo's story begins as a 4-year-old splashing in a small neighbourhood pool. He took to swimming like the proverbial fish to water. But he has remained a small fish in a small pond – a 17-metre pool, actually. That's the length of one lap in the YMCA facility where Abdo has trained for years.
There are no Olympic-sized pools in East Jerusalem. And funding is insufficient to rent the 50-metre pool in West Jerusalem more than a few times a week.
In Beijing for the last 35 days, Abdo has thrived under the tutelage of expert Chinese coaches, physiotherapists and nutritionists. But it's all that chlorinated water that most delights.
"It's like the difference between being in a pond and being in the sea."
Full article from:
17 year old Palestinian Hamza Abdo, swimmer in Beijing Olympics
more links:
Wikipedia Page on Palestine at the Olympics since 1996
Palestine at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing
Israel sends 43 athletes to Beijing, largest team ever
Palestinian refugees homeless 60 years late; Elon challenges UNWRA methodology
Jewish International group advises against Iran attack in Monthly Review magazine
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