As many of you know, Israel is not included in the countries eligible to participate in the EU pro/challenger league.

The goal of this petition is to change that and let players from Israel including myself to play and have something to compete for.

Back when pro league was just announced, I saw that Israel is not included in the list, so I contacted ESL and Simms about changing this rule. Simms then replied to me and I quote "unfortunately we won't be doing this currently, you need to take into consideration the time difference but more importantly the connection between you and EU players. Sorry but currently there's no plans for this to happen". However, these reasons are really weak, and I'll explain why: First let's adress the fact where he says "you need to take into consideration the time difference", Israel is only two hours ahead of London and only one hour ahead of most European countries, infact Israel is in the same timezone as Romania which is a country that is eligible to participate in pro league. So from that we can see timezone is not an actual issue. Moving on to the next reason according to Simms why Israel can't participate in pro league: "the connection between you and EU players", *NEWS FLASH* Israel plays on *THE SAME* servers as all the european players and that's a fact! There are currently 4 servers across the middle east and Europe and they are all located in Western Europe. When I play matchmaking I always match europeans and the connection is just fine, because we play on the same servers and as the matter of fact Israel is one of the countries with the best Internet in the world. Not only that, but I experienced much less lagouts in the game than any other European player. So as you can see, connection is not an issue as well.

Some of you might say "but wait, Israel is not exactly a european country", wrong again, Israel participates in all of the European competitions, both in sport and in other fields. I have an example for you: UEFA champions league (football), The EURO's (football), EUROLEAGUE (basketball), EUROVISION (singing competition), Tennis tournaments across Europe, European championship in athletics, swimming and every other sport out there. You say eSports is counted as a sport, I showed you that Israel participates in all European sports competitions, therefore Halo shouldn't be any different.

Last thing, I wouldn't write all this if I didn't love Halo as much as I do and didn't have that much passion towards eSports and competing. All I'm asking from ESL is to let me play and I wrote strong reasons to why they should let me play.

If you got this far, please sign the petition and share it, help a fellow Halo competitior and together we can change it.