WE live in strange and contradictory times. At last week’s Labour Party conference we saw a motion condemning the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian flags waved above the heads of conference delegates, showing public support for the beleaguered people of Palestine. The exuberance in the conference hall unlocked now predictable reactions across the media, embroiling the Labour Party even deeper in rows over anti-Semitism.

By the strange rules of vexillology, had the flags been waved at a Scottish football ground hosting a European match, the flag-bearers would risk arrest and the home club would be slapped with a fine. When Scotland’s stuttering national football team drew Israel in the inaugural Nations League my first reaction was: why us?

Nearly 3000 fans, backed by the Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, signed a petition calling for Scotland to withdraw from the fixture and demanding the suspension of the Israeli Football Association from Fifa. That was never likely to happen.

Scotland is obliged to fulfil the fixtures and would not risk censure and possibly expulsion from Uefa if it refused to play. Nor would the SFA turn its back on the television revenues that will flow from the lucrative double-header.

The SFA has a woeful history of avoiding anything that seems politically sensitive and buries its head in the face of complexity. I doubt it devoted 20 minutes considering the morality of the matches.

Israel’s national football team is a long -standing anomaly within world football. Until 1974, Israel was a member of the Asian Football Confederation, but was expelled when Arab and Muslim nations boycotted matches. In a bizarre geopolitical fudge, Israel briefly played in tournaments overseen by the Oceania Football Federation (OFF), joining an association that included New Zealand and Papua New Guinea – before eventually being accommodated in Uefa, the European football federation.

Paradoxically, Israel’s near pariah status hides a remarkable alternative story. In sharp contrast to the hostility that greets their national team, Israel is at the forefront of media innovation, and has pioneered a range of new digital inventions that are transforming how we view and value football.

Billions of dollars from American investors on the Nasdaq stock market are powering money into Israeli media innovation. SPIN, a “Sports Innovation Accelerator” programme has been launched in partnership with Maccabi Haifa Football Club. Its focus is on innovation in fan engagement, performance and analytics, wearable technology, big data and smart stadiums.

No Scottish club, and certainly not our moribund national body, is remotely close to this level of creative development.

Sadly, when the Israeli FA visit Hampden Park it will not be a story of goodies and baddies but a meeting of tech visionaries and dinosaurs.

That said, it would be grossly unfair to draw immediate comparisons with Israel and Scotland. Ironically, decades of war have been kind to Israel’s culture of innovation. The country has benefitted from a militarised economy, intense national security and power funding from the USA. Israel is an extraordinary seed-bed for start-ups and digital innovation. Scotland, which has its own successes to admire, is not in the same league.

One Israeli company, Pixellot, offers an affordable alternative to traditional outside broadcast production, using ultra-high resolution unmanned video systems. The pricing makes high-quality match coverage affordable for non-league clubs, women’s football and minority sports. Pixellot’s success and corporate strategy directly contradicts the much parroted argument that VAR technology or “video refereeing” is too expensive for Scottish football to adopt.

Another company, Minute Media, is Israel’s largest sports media company. Founded in 2011, it has attracted 80 million unique users across its platform and showcases content generated by 5000 engaged sports fans.

Scotland has a passionate fan culture but it is still defined online by web forums and blogs: the cave drawings of what online football fan culture could be. We do not have a platform where 5000 fans showcase football media.

A third company, WSC Sports Technologies, is selling video technologies which are able to analyze sports broadcasts in real time, identifying every component of a game, generating customised highlights of every player, team and crucial moment.

Again, prices are within the range of well-run amateur clubs and fan groups. By contrast, we have a small cadre of fans who sit at home freeze-framing BT Sports looking for a perceived injustice and then rushing to Twitter to hound the miscreants.

BUT innovative future technologies cannot be allowed to air-brush the parlous state of football in the occupied territories. Palestine is also a registered member of Fifa’s so-called family of nations. But Fifa has been slow to intervene as football culture in Palestine has been brutalised, fragmented and driven into penury. The list of horrific attacks on Palestinian footballers and travelling boys clubs is an international disgrace.

Because of military control over travel visas, players from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip can rarely meet up to join their national squad and as a consequence most Palestinian teams are comprised of diaspora players.

Palestine’s second-top goalscorer, Ziyad al-Kord – Kenny Dalglish currently holds the equivalent honour for Scotland – has been banned from travelling and is seen as a security threat.

When he returned from a World Cup qualifier al-Kord found his house in the Gaza Strip had been demolished by the Israeli military. In the 2008 troubles, three prominent Palestinian footballers were killed in Operation Cast Lead, and more recently Mohammed Khalil, who played for a local football club in the Gaza Strip, was shot by an Israeli soldier. He needs replacement knee surgery and will never play again.

Perhaps the deepest damage has been done to the idea of a settled Palestinian football league.

The Gaza Strip Premier League, which is one of Palestine’s two top divisions, has been staggered since 1984. Shabab Khan Yunis are the reigning champions but history suggests they will never make it to 10-in-a-row: the league has been abandoned or forced into submission on six separate occasions. It is a statistic that disgraces world football.

To pour oil on already troubled waters, Jerusalem’s top team, Beitar, who will send several players to Hampden to face Scotland, have welcomed the recent announcement by America naming Jerusalem the capital of Israel. They have re-branded in honour of the US president – they are now known as Beitar Trump.

All of this complexity awaits us, but we have nurtured a football culture that is not always comfortable with complexity. When Scotland take to the field to play Israel a whole battery of issues should be front of mind – the role of innovation and new technology, fan engagement online, the moral obligations of international football, the real-world experiences of less fortunate football societies and the right of football fans and wider society to protest about injustices.

I suspect that very few of these issues will be given an intelligent airing and we will once again reduce ourselves to flag-waving, dumb symbolism and crude whataboutery.

I want Scotland to win with grace and, dare I whisper it, with style. But I cannot pretend that the fixture fills me with hope. It is a thorny political fixture and one that few nations truly welcome, and I fear that the figureheads of our game lack the vision, leadership and moral authority to be anything more than dull supplicants watching from the comfy seats.