Anti-Israel video game has players 'free Palestine', fight IDF

• Published date: 29 September 2021
• Author: AARON REICH
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Titled Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the game is developed by Nidal Nijm, a Brazilian resident of Palestinian origin.

The game promises to let players take the role of Palestinian "freedom fighters" and break what it calls "the cliché of portraying Arabs as Terrorists."

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"You will play in missions across Palestine with many objectives to accomplish, epic battles, powerful guns, vehicles to drive, and more," the game's page on Steam notes.

The game is currently slated for a December 2021 release. A free playable demo is available for download.

The game's story follows Ahmad al-Falastini, who was "unjustly tortured and jailed" by the IDF for five years, as noted on the Fursan Al-Aqsa website. Now free from prison, Falastini is out for revenge and to "free Palestine" by joining the titular Fursan Al-Aqsa, a new Palestinian resistance movement that operates similarly to the terrorist organizations in the region.

NIJM HIMSELF has been working on this game alone for around 10 years. In it, one can see an alternating third- and first-person perspective, a variety of environments, with Falastini shouting during combat "Allahu Akbar" – "God is Great."

Fursan Al-Aqsa will also have a multiplayer mode. Rather than having an emphasis on online play, the multiplayer will be split-screen, which, in Nijm's own words, is "to revive the golden era of 90s shooters."

Though user reviews are not yet available, those who have played the demo have given it positive reviews.

A native of Brazil, Nijm's father was a former Palestinian Fatah fighter, he explained.

"My father is a former Fatah fighter. He immigrated to Brazil after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982," he explained. "I have no connection to any political or military party, group or organization, I just lived with my father, his whole history of struggle and the resistance of the Palestinian people. And it was my father who encouraged me to get into video games since I was a little boy, and he told me to study and learn so that one day I could produce a video game about the Palestinian Resistance."

But for Nijm, the game is also about changing perspectives.

"Since I was little I've always seen that here in the West, in movies and video games, Arabs were...