I am part of the Identity group and I will be focusing on sports along with a few others. There are two specific parts that I am interested in. The first has to do with the children; they can be said to be the future of the conflict and lead the direction that it goes. I believe that having Arab and Israeli children play sports together is an outlet to forgetting about the whole overarching theme of politics. If kids are interacting with each other at a young age, it could help them develop relationships for the future and make it easier to compromise.
The other part of sports that I would be interested looking into is the professional side. I know that soccer is very big in Europe and the Middle East...are there club teams that have both Arab and Israeli players on them? If so, how do they coexist? Have there been any problems with this? There are a lot of questions to be answered and I look forward to seeing how sports has impacted the conflict in both a positive, and negative way.
After reading your post, another couple of things you may want to look at is the Israeli basketball league. I do not believe that it is currently integrated, but looking at the backlash against it and why more hasn't been done would be very interesting. Also, recently I read in a news article that there was a lot of controversy with the fans of one soccer team for being very racist. There should be a lot of information on that. Other than that, there has been a big focus of Israel in the olympics, specifically the history of their players being targets for terrorists. I am excited to see your presentation!
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