Using football to explain Israel

What better way to explain Israel to Latin Americans than through football?

But this game was different in one key respect: they had to play with 5 footballs.

I gave them a minute in their teams to discuss strategy, then they played until it disolved into chaos (about 45 seconds!) When I brought them back into the classroom I asked who won. Not surprisingly, that generated a huge argument over who made how many goals with which balls. I asked how many balls had to go in to count as a goal, so do you win if you get 2/5 balls in or do you have to get in all 5? That stumped them. Then I asked if each player focussed on one ball or if they all focussed on all of them. They said at first they tried to focus on one but then they got mixed up and didn't know where to look.

 I said "Welcome to Israel, kids."

Then I assigned an issue to each football and showed how it got batted around between the different factions (the Palestinians, Iran, the settlers on the West Bank, the ultra-religious Jews, and the United States)