Issam Khalidi
As we browse Israeli sports historians' research, we are not surprised to find that they present Palestine as a place devoid of Palestinians. If such histories mention the Palestinians, they invariably depict them as lacking any cultural or social aspect. According to them, Zionists populated the region and brought civilization to it; that their efforts brought sports to primitive people who had never experienced them before. Efforts to distort reality and rewrite history are not new. In fact, up until 1948, Arab sports clubs in Palestine numbered about sixty-five clubs, of which fifty-five were members of the (Arab) Palestinian Sports Federation.