Anyone who watches Club Deportivo Palestino playing, or sees one of its shirts in official photographs, may think that it is a Palestinian football club. In a way, that’s exactly what it is, and yet it is based in Chile, thousands of miles from occupied Palestine. It is Chile’s own version of Palestine solidarity — on a football pitch.
Chile has the largest Palestinian diaspora community in Latin America; the third or fourth largest in the world. There are 400,000 Palestinian Chileans now in their fourth or fifth generation; the sons and daughters of the pioneers who left the Middle East many years before the events that shredded their native land to pieces.