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An unlikely AFL ‘Peace Team’ comprising Palestinians and Israelis is in Australia for an international amateur tournament.
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Sixteen teams from Europe, Asia, Oceania, Africa and the Americas will contest the third Australian Football International Cup, which starts on August 27 and culminates in the grand final on September 6 at the MCG.
Games will be held in Melbourne, Geelong and Warrnambool.
Members of the Shimon Peres Centre for Peace approached the AFL late last year and the code recently dispatched two of its best known ambassadors, Ron Barassi and Robert DiPierdomenico, to Israel to help prepare the Peace team for the upcoming tournament.
“Their journey has been amazing, some of these guys have got to travel four hours through three check points just to get to one hour’s training,” said DiPierdomenico, who will be the Peace team’s match day coach. .
“The commitment has been amazing.”
He said the Peace team had beaten a group of Australian ex-patriots in one game, but that was on a soccer field and today at the SCG was the first time they had seen a ground with proper Australian Rules goal posts.
“We know that sports can overcome the barriers of religion, gender and also of conflicted areas such as ours,” said Gal Peles, the director of sport for the Peres Center of Peace.
“We are familiar with the AFL only for the last year or so. We learn this totally new game and we met totally new stars and celebrities such as `Dipper’.
“It’s a great honour for us to be here.”
The difficulty of training one team in two languages (Hebrew and Arabic) added to the overall challenge of creating a Palestinian-Israeli AFL team.
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