On the evening of May 18, 2004, while Israeli troops stormed Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip in another attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising against the occupation, both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat found time for phone calls concerning seemingly trivial issues. Sharon phoned the manager of an Israeli soccer team to congratulate him on winning the Israeli State Cup, which made it eligible to represent Israel in the EUFA cup. Prime Minister Sharon emphasized his confidence that the team would represent Israel in an honorable manner in Europe. That same evening, President Arafat called the director of an Arab soccer team to congratulate him on his team's victory, telling him that the team brought pride to the Arab nation.

What makes the co-occurrence of these two events remarkable is the fact that Sharon and Arafat had called the same director, Mazen Ghnayem, and referred to the same team – Ittiḥad Abnaa Sakhnin – after the team became the first Arab team to win the Israeli State Cup. This dual congratulation, while apparently paradoxical, was possible due to the peculiar and multifaceted image of Sakhnin among both Jewish Israeli and Arab Palestinian publics.

Since 1976 Sakhnin has gradually emerged as a visible juncture of two separate significant processes with far-reaching implications on the collective identity of the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel and on local identity in Sakhnin.