Gulf-Iranian proxy war spills onto the football pitch

A Saudi-led proxy war against Iran playing out in Syria and Iraq has expanded onto the football pitch with a last-minute decision by the Palestinian national team to cancel a friendly against Iran.

The cancelation - officially on technical grounds - came as Iran was about to meet two of its Gulf nemeses, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, in politically loaded matches during the Asian Cup in Australia. It also highlights internal divisions among the Palestinians as Hamas, the Islamist group in control of Gaza, seeks to patch up its differences with Iran.

Iranian suspicion that the Palestinian cancelation days before the friendly was scheduled to take place is rooted in close ties between the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank headed by President Mahmoud Abbas and conservative Gulf states as well as Abbas' deteriorating relations with Hamas. Iranian officials and football analysts doubt the cancelation had anything to do with football.

The officials and analysts noted that the Palestinian squad had recently trained and played matches in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, whose relations with Iran have long been strained. The two Gulf states, alongside Bahrain, believe that Iran has sought to fuel discontent in their countries and is responsible for the popular uprising in Bahrain that was brutally suppressed in 2011 as well as unrest in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich, predominantly Shiite Muslim Eastern Province.

Saudi Arabia, whose puritan Wahhabi interpretation of Islam is inherently anti-Shiite, has poured billions of dollars into becoming a dominant force in Muslim communities across the globe since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Saudi responses to the popular revolts that have swept the Arab world in recent years and sparked a...