A joint Israeli-Palestinian team will compete in the 2008 world championship of Australian Rules football.
The team, formed by the Israel-based Peres Center for Peace, will compete in the Third International Cup, which celebrates the 150th anniversary of the distinctive Australian sport that is a cross between Gaelic football, American football and rugby.
At a meeting last week in Melbourne of Jewish philanthropists, Australian Football League chiefs and team representatives, Jewish billionaire Richard Pratt pledged some $53,000 of the estimated $265,000 required to bring the team to Australia next August. Pratt is the president of the Carlton Football Club.
Corporate sponsors and the league raised another $100,000.
Money aside, the initiative is laden with challenges, said the executive director of the Australian arm of the Peres Center for Peace, Tanya Oziel, who has been the driving force behind the project.
Bringing Palestinian players through Israeli checkpoints to enable them to train with the Israelis will be challenging but not impossible, she said. Perhaps more problematic is the fact that most of the players have never touched an Australian Rules football, let alone played the game.
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner referred to terrorist attacks on Jewish targets in Argentina as she took office as the country’s president.
“We have been part of the global terrorism,” Kirchner, the first woman elected president of Argentina, said during her one-hour address, referring to attacks in 1992 and 1994. “We cannot be part of the global violation of human rights.â€
Israeli Internal Affairs Minister Meir Shitrit and the International Monetary Fund president, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, along with several foreign authorities, were present at the National Congress ceremony.
Kirchner succeeds her husband, Nestor Kirchner. The presidents of the Jewish AMIA central institution and DAIA Jewish political umbrella said they expect the good relations between the government and the Jewish community to continue, following the past four years of Nestor Kirchner’s presidency.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
