Palestinians to support Sweden

GAZA CITY: As England prepare to play Sweden in a crunch World Cup quarter-final Saturday, the Scandinavians will find strong support in a perhaps unlikely location: the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

In busy cafes where young men pack in to watch games while smoking shisha, the support for Sweden may be almost as strong as their dislike for England after a century of historical hurt.

Closed off by an Israeli blockade for the past decade, politics seeps into nearly every conversation in the strip, even when it comes to football.

And in this game, for many Palestinians, there is a clear good and bad guy.

“Of course I will support Sweden,” said 37-year-old Hisham Ahmed.

“I can’t imagine a Palestinian supporting England, which created the Balfour Agreement, or not supporting the country that stood before the world and recognised our state.”

In 1917, the British government declared its support for the creation of a Jewish state in historic Palestine in a document called the Balfour Declaration.

Sweden has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinians and was the first European Union country to recognise Palestine as a state.