In Palestine, Joy is Resistance

Across the sport-for-development world, the idea of a safe space is central — a place where young people can play, learn, and belong. In Palestine, that idea carries a different weight. Safety here is not only emotional; it’s physical and political.

Since 2011, Palestine Sports for Life has been creating those safe spaces — using sport and life skills to reach marginalised communities across the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

“Creating a safe space here is sacred.If you want to play in the street, it’s not safe. In villages, it’s not safe. In refugee camps, it’s definitely not safe." 

“Creating a safe space here is sacred,” says co-founder Tamara Awartani. “If you want to play in the street, it’s not safe. In villages, it’s not safe. In refugee camps, it’s definitely not safe. You never really know what’s going to happen next. So, having that safe space is really important," says co-founder Tamara Awartani.

For Tamara, safety and opportunity were always inseparable. In 1990s Ramallah, it was her mother who made both possible, finding ways for her daughter to swim, ride and play basketball when most girls were expected to stay home.

“She drove me everywhere,” Tamara recalls. “Without my mother, I wouldn’t have accomplished anything. She’s my backbone. She used to drive me thirty minutes to riding lessons, and when that place was destroyed, she drove me to the next one an hour away. If she hadn’t been there, I would have given up — but she was so supportive of me, no matter the challenges in such a country.”

Those early experiences became the foundation for what Palestine Sports for Life would later stand for — creating pockets of safety that allow young people, especially girls, to move, play, and grow.

Tamara eventually left Palestine to study but, when she returned, little had changed. Women and girls were still largely absent from sport, and safe places to play remained rare. “I wanted to be part of doing a change,” she says. “When I came back, I saw the same limitations — so I started volunteering, coaching, and trying to build something new.”

That determination, shaped by her mother’s persistence and her own memories of what safety felt like, became the driving vision of an organisation now providing that same chance for thousands of others.

Starting something new in Palestine was never going to be easy.

“When we first began, everyone was against us. People told me, ‘You can’t do this —It’s not your place’"

“When we first began, everyone was against us,” Tamara says. “People told me, ‘You can’t do this —It’s not your place’ But I always said it’s not just about technical training. I didn’t want to teach sport only for sport’s sake. I wanted to teach what’s behind it — communication, perseverance, fairness, empathy.”

Funding was scarce, and there were no facilities to call their own. “I was using my IT salary to pay rent for the fields,” she says. “I just wanted to start something — anything — that gave kids a space to play.”

She brought together ten young coaches, most of them still at university, and one hundred children from different backgrounds — some who could afford small fees, others from refugee camps who joined for free. “I never wanted anyone to feel less or more,” she says. “It carried itself.”

But success soon drew difficulties. One day, after paying for the stadium, Tamara arrived to find a match already underway. “I had a hundred children waiting at the gate and had to tell them there was no training. They were crying. It broke my heart.”

The problems kept coming — last-minute cancellations, sudden rent hikes, pressure from those who saw the initiative as competition. “It felt like every time we started to grow, someone tried to stop us,” she says. “At one point, they even tripled the rent. I had to stop. I couldn’t sustain it.”

That moment forced a change in strategy. Instead of relying on rented pitches, Tamara turned to partnership — working with the Ministry of Education and the UN agency for refugees (UNRWA) to open up school grounds after hours. “We didn’t want to pay rent; we didn’t have the funds anyway,” she says. “But the ministry saw what we were doing and opened the spaces for us."

"That’s when everything shifted.”

Over time, the young coaches she trained became instructors, and the first generation of players became coaches themselves. “It created a pathway — from player to coach to instructor — and that’s what made it sustainable,” she says. “The lesson was clear: if you want to do community work, you have to find partners who believe in community, not in business.”

Today, those partnerships form the backbone of Palestine Sports for Life’s work. Through cooperation with the Ministry of Education, youth clubs, and the UN agency for refugees (UNRWA), the organisation opens schoolyards and community centres after hours, transforming them into spaces for play and learning.

“In some areas, movement itself isn’t safe,” says Tamara. “There are checkpoints, gates, and roads where you can be stopped or worse. So we make sure the space is close enough for children to walk, where parents know the coaches, where the community trusts what’s happening.”

Around seventy percent of PS4L’s participants are girls and women — a deliberate focus shaped by Tamara’s own experience of exclusion. “I know what it feels like to not have that opportunity,” she says. “I wanted girls to have the access I didn’t have.”

In conservative communities, that begins with trust. “We always train female coaches from within the area,” she explains. “It means the parents know them, they know their families. Sometimes the parents come and watch the sessions. That makes all the difference.”

In Tulkarem, a traditionally conservative town in the north of the West Bank, one such space has become a lifeline for displaced girls from nearby refugee camps. Many of them have lost homes or family members in recent months. “That centre is more than a place to play,” says Tamara. “It’s where they can reflect, release, and connect with others who are going through the same thing. It’s a kind of home — especially for those who no longer have one.”

“Sports give us a way to reach them that’s natural, not forced.”

The sessions go beyond football. Alongside life skills and leadership, they include lessons on gender rights, education, and trauma support — all delivered through play. “We do financial education, social–emotional learning, even mindfulness,” says Tamara. “Sports give us a way to reach them that’s natural, not forced.”

For many girls, those sessions are the only moments in their week that feel free. Some continue practising on rooftops after training ends — proof, Tamara says, that safety can spark something larger than protection. “Once they feel safe enough to move,” she says, “they find their own ways to keep going.”

If safety is the foundation of Palestine Sports for Life’s work, joy is what keeps it alive. In a country where daily life is shaped by restriction and fear, joy itself becomes an act of resistance.

“It’s extremely difficult to find joy here,” Tamara says. “But joy is resilience. It’s everything you need.”

She recalls sessions in Gaza where children play football as the sound of planes hums overhead. “Even if they hear the planes, they don’t let it take away that moment of happiness,” she says. “It’s their human right.”

“We as Palestinians just want to live, we don’t have a problem with anyone. We respect human values — that’s all we ask in return.”

For Tamara, joy is not escapism — it’s survival. “We as Palestinians just want to live,” she says. “We don’t have a problem with anyone. We respect human values — that’s all we ask in return.”

Through play, her team tries to make that right tangible. In Gaza, PS4L runs recreational and psychosocial sessions for children and families living amid the ruins. For many, it’s the only hour in the week that feels normal. “It gives them a bit of hope,” Tamara says. “Just an hour to feel happy, to move, to laugh — even if the world outside hasn’t changed.”

That fragile, fleeting happiness is what the organisation fights hardest to protect. In every smile or goal, Tamara sees the same truth: joy, here, is not a luxury. It’s proof of life.

The impact of that philosophy is clearest in the people who have grown within it.

One of them is Aya, who joined PS4L as a teenager in 2017 and five years later represented Palestine at the Street Child World Cup in Qatar — her first time leaving the West Bank. Since then, she has begun studying physical education and now coaches younger girls in the same community centre where she once trained.

Another is Inas, a wheelchair basketball coach in Gaza who has been part of PS4L since 2016. She continues to lead sessions for children and women, adapting constantly to whatever the moment demands. “Her belief in sport as a source of strength never wavers,” says Tamara.

For Tamara, they embody what Palestine Sports for Life has become: a community of people passing knowledge and trust from one generation to the next. “It’s never me alone,” she says. “I’m just the one who glues everyone together. The coaches, the partners, the team — they’re the reason this keeps moving.”

For Tamara, the future of Palestine Sports for Life is not measured in numbers or visibility, but in movement — in people’s ability to gather, play, and stay connected. “I just want us to live in peace,” she says. “To move freely. To see each other freely. To not wake up wondering what will happen in the next minute.”

That vision, she insists, is not abstract. It begins in every playground opened after hours, every coach trusted by a local parent, every girl who learns to run without hesitation. Through each of them, the idea of safety — once her mother’s act of protection — continues to expand.

“Sports give us a way to build something together,” she says. “It’s not only about talent. It’s about life.”

In a place where safety can never be assumed, creating the conditions for play is a radical kind of hope. Palestine Sports for Life exists to make that hope tangible — one field, one coach, one small, sacred space at a time