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| 1934–1940 | ||
|---|---|---|
 | ||
| Nickname(s) | Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) | |
| Association | Palestine Football Association (PFA) | |
| Head coach | Shimon Ratner (1934 WCQ) Egon Pollak (1938 WCQ) Arthur Baar (1940 Friendly) | |
| Captain | Avraham Reznik (1934–1938) Pinhas Fiedler (1934) Gdalyahu Fuchs (1938) Werner Kaspi (1940) | |
| Most caps | Gdalyahu Fuchs (4) | |
| Top scorer | Werner Kaspi (2) | |
| Home stadium | Palms Ground Maccabi Ground Maccabiah Stadium | |
| FIFA code | PAL | |
| ||
| First international | ||
 Egypt 7–1 Mandatory Palestine  (Cairo, Egypt; 16 March 1934) | ||
| Last international | ||
Mandatory Palestine 5–1 Lebanon  (Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine; 27 April 1940) | ||
| Biggest win | ||
| Mandatory Palestine 5–1 Lebanon (Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine; 27 April 1940) | ||
| Biggest defeat | ||
| Egypt 7–1 Mandatory Palestine (Cairo, Egypt; 16 March 1934) | ||
The Mandatory Palestine national football team, also known as the Eretz Israel national football team (Hebrew: נבחרת ארץ ישראל בכדורגל, romanized: Nivheret Eretz Yisrael Bekhadurgel, lit. 'Land of Israel national football team'), represented the British Mandate of Palestine in international football competitions, and was managed by the Palestine Football Association (Hebrew: התאחדות ארץ ישראלית למשחק כדור-רגל, romanized: Hitachduth Eretz Yisraelit Lekhadur Regel, lit. 'The Land of Israel Association of Football').[a]
The team was founded in 1928 by Yosef Yekutieli, leader of the Jewish sports organisation Maccabi World Union, under the newly formed "Palestine Football Association", so-named in order to qualify for membership of FIFA (which required teams to be representative of the population of their country). It achieved FIFA membership in 1929, despite in practice being an almost exclusively Jewish organisation at a time when Jews represented a minority of the country's population. In 1934 all Arabs involved in the organisation left, as they considered they were being used as a "fig leaf".[2]
The team used to play in the Maccabiah Stadium, Maccabi Ground and Palms Ground, all three located in Tel Aviv. Mandatory Palestine played five official games (four FIFA World Cup qualifiers, and one friendly), before it officially became the national team of Israel in 1948.
- ^ Henshaw 1979, p. 387.
- ^ Mendel, Yoni (1 May 2015). "The Palestinian soccer league: A microcosm of a national struggle". +972 Magazine. Archived from the original on 8 March 2021. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
The result was the birth of the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) and the launch of the local league. It was not particularly equitable: Nine Jewish clubs and one British club (that of the British police) participated in the champions league, while the Arab clubs played only in the secondary league. Neither was the representation in the federation exceptionally fair: among the 15 members of the federation, 14 were Jewish and only one, the Jerusalemite referee Ibrahim Nusseibeh, was Arab. The inaugural meeting of the PFA, in 1928, was the first and last meeting which Nusseibeh attended. In 1934, in keeping with the prevailing segragationist trends in the country, the Arab football clubs decided they refuse to continue being the fig leaf within the framework of an overwhelmingly Jewish league, and left. A parallel, exclusively Arab football league was established a year later.
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