Around 600,000 people of Palestinian descent currently live in Chile. This diaspora started a long time ago, in the 19th century, when people started fleeing Palestine during the Crimean War, and continued throughout the 1900's as more migrants left their homeland for South America during World War I and the 1948 Palestine war, the famous nakba . These migrants, who were mostly Christians, did not have an easy integration in Chilean society: in the early 1900's some nationalists and xenophobes did not hide their dissent for the wave of incoming immigration, often denigrating them on local newspapers. As with most diasporas around the world, Palestinian immigrants in Chile were not wealthy nor properly educated, and their community remained marginalized in small areas of the cities. Football became an opportunity to glue the community together, and so Palestino Football Club was founded in 1920 when the Palestinians started representing themselves in the Chilean amateur leagues...
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