World Cup darling Morocco’s Cinderella run inspires Arab pride while waving the Palestinian flag

DOHA, Qatar — The horns began tooting, and the joyous voices began ringing around 8 p.m. on a residential block of Al Aziziya, a multicultural Qatari neighborhood more than 3,000 miles from the 2022 World Cup’s celebratory epicenter.

Morocco, the tournament darling, had just beaten Portugal in a landmark quarterfinal on Saturday. As tension broke into glee at Al Thumama Stadium and parties began in Rabat and Casablanca, they also erupted throughout Doha and across an entire soccer-mad region and among groups of oft-marginalized people all around the globe.

Morocco’s semifinal run, the first by an Arab or African team in World Cup history, as a +25000 pre-tournament underdog, has been far more than a source of Moroccan delight.

“We are making our people, a continent and the Arab world happy,” head coach Walid Regragui said via interpreter after Saturday’s stunning victory. “We are making the whole world happy.”

The Moroccan players have sparked euphoria in New York, London and Paris but, most of all, across North Africa and the Middle East, in places such as Gaza that some Westerners associate primarily with conflict. They’ve inspired a region brimming with vibrant people who’ve been oppressed by governments and economic instability and who are often overlooked and underrepresented in the planet’s most popular sport.

At the region’s first World Cup, Morocco has reignited a Pan-Arab pride that many believed had been fractured by politics or simply gone dormant. And they, the 26 players who’ve come to represent billions of people — Africans, Muslims, immigrants and more — have raised a platform for a multipronged rallying cry.

“I support all Muslim countries. We're all a brotherhood,” a Muslim fan named Shakib, who traveled to Qatar from California, told Yahoo Sports a few days after roaring Morocco on to a Round of 16 victory over Spain.

As he spoke, draped around his neck was one prong, the brotherhood’s unofficial colors, the emblem that has come to signify the pride coalescing around this Moroccan team: the Palestinian flag.

It is everywhere here in Qatar, from Moroccan team photos to the upper deck of Lusail Stadium during a game between Argentina and the Netherlands. It has been waved by fans and politicians, by players and protesters.

“I want to make the statement,” Shakib said, “that people should be aware of what's going on in Palestine.” He believes Western media has ignored the Palestinian plight or painted the Israeli occupation as a both-sides conflict. The World Cup, he said, is the perfect opportunity to amplify the Palestinian cause.

Morocco, ironically, was one of five Muslim-majority countries that signed a 2020 agreement to normalize relations with Israel. But surveys showed — — and still show that the so-called Abraham Accords were wildly unpopular among Moroccans. They were political maneuvers that obscured an on-the-ground reality, a reality this World Cup has spotlighted: Many Muslims and Arabs still deeply care for Palestinians.

They have descended on Doha to savor the first World Cup in their midst but also to make this known. They have carried the Palestinian flag through streets and into stadiums or sported it on T-shirts, armbands and keffiyehs, the traditional headdress. When they’ve encountered Israeli journalists, especially those on live TV, they’ve made their opinions as explicit as could be.

“There’s nothing called Israel. It’s only Palestine, and you just took the land from them,” one fan told an Israeli reporter in a contentious exchange. “Bro, there is nothing called Israel. Israel does not exist.”

They have also broken into song in public spaces and even at stadiums.

Hours after five Palestinians were killed in the occupied West Bank, fans at Qatar’s final match chanted in Arabic: “With spirit and blood, we will redeem you, O Palestine.”

Arab teams have centered the Palestinian cause as well, featuring the flag in celebrations. Perhaps emboldened by playing and living on quasi-home soil, with prayer calls wafting over the city and mosques around every corner, in a country where support for the Palestinians and disdain for Israel are wholly uncontroversial, these inherently political statements have proliferated unchallenged. (Critics of FIFA and Qatar, meanwhile, point out that other statements in support of Iranian women and LGBTQ rights have been suppressed, an apparent double standard.)

Some 1,100 miles away, Palestinians have been touched by the support and have latched on to the Moroccan cause in return. “I swear it’s as if it’s Palestinians that were playing,” one fan told the Associated Press from a massive watch party in Gaza. “All of us are Morocco.”

All of this will be one legacy of Morocco's run, which will either continue or conclude against France on Wednesday (2 p.m. ET, FOX/Telemundo).

It has enabled unfettered public gatherings in a region largely restricted by authoritarian rule.

It has proven that there is shared humanity and common ground among people whose governments often insist on strife.

And the colonial backdrop has not been forgotten. Morocco's victories against Belgium, Spain and Portugal have felt like “a revolutionary rebuttal,” as author and Wayne State University professor Khaled Beydoun tweeted. Because for so long, as he wrote, so many Arabs and Muslims walking in a colonized Western world have felt that their “very identity spells ‘other’ or ‘lesser.’”

Here, perhaps more so than ever before at the World Cup, Morocco has been accommodated and welcomed and, most of all, associated with tenacious and talented soccer. The wins have, in turn, granted global visibility for Islam. The players’ celebrations, never complete without an on-pitch bow of prayer, have been meaningful, especially to Muslims who practice their religion in predominantly Christian spaces.

The run has also united Africa, a massive and culturally disparate land mass of 1.4 billion people. The significance to the continent and to the Arab world have, clearly, been able to coexist.

And that dual significance has fueled a team of dreamers.

“I think that there was an energy — Africans and the Arab world gave us this energy,” Regragui, the Moroccan coach, said after the quarterfinal. “At that moment, everybody wanted this team to win.”