The Diaspora
Palestinian Chileans built a football club that still funds schools in Palestine
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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On 8 August 1920, Palestinian immigrants in Santiago founded a football club and called it Palestino. It is still playing in Chile's top division, a hundred and six years later, in the red, green and black of the flag.
Chile holds the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world — about half a million people, part of an estimated 700,000 Latin Americans of Palestinian origin spread across fourteen countries. Club Deportivo Palestino is the institution that community built to be seen in public, and its home is the municipal stadium of La Cisterna, which holds 8,500.
The trophies are real ones. Palestino won Chile's championship in 1955 and again in 1978, took the Copa Chile in 1975, 1977 and 2018, and reached the semi-finals of the Copa Libertadores in 1979 — a South American last four, won by grandchildren of Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour.
The shirt that got the club fined#
In January 2014 the Chilean federation fined the club $1,300 and barred a shirt on which the number one was drawn as the map of historic Palestine. The club's answer went round the world: "For us, free Palestine will always be historical Palestine, nothing less."
Players walk out wearing keffiyehs. Since October 2023 the stands have carried watermelons, the fruit whose colours stand in for a banned flag.
What the club does beyond the ninety minutes is less famous and matters more. Palestino finances football schools in Palestine and has an agreement with the Aida Youth Centre in Bethlehem to supply kit and run joint sporting and social activities.
The war took part of that away. The club's training school in Gaza closed and the programmes it supports in the occupied West Bank were disrupted, France 24 reported — the distance between Santiago and Gaza measured not in kilometres but in a shut gate.
A club that has kept a name for a hundred and six years can wait for a school to reopen. Its members in Santiago will tell you the point of the name was never nostalgia; it was the sentence about the map.
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