Why Israeli sports federation is not suspended after the Palestinian’s genocide? Which are the differences between the Israeli-Palestine conflict and the Russia-Ukraine one? And why is the Russian sports federation still suspended while the Israeli one is not?
Well, there are a lot of things to say and many dynamics to clarify.
Firstly, it’s important to explain why Israel, which geographically is part of the Asian continent, plays the National team qualifiers in Europe. In fact, Israeli football teams from 1991, participated in the UEFA Champions League and Europa League. The same situation can be seen in EuroBasket, Israel and Israeli basket teams still compete in the Euroleague and in the Eurocup.
At the beginning of the conflict between Israel and Palestine the Israeli national team regularly participated in the Asian League (AFC), with the other Arab teams.
However, the rejection for Israel from the Arab teams increased, so much so that over the years between 1954-1974 many Asian teams began to boycott the matches versus Israel. The boycott was organized so that Asian teams refused to play against Israel, an example can be the world cup qualifiers group in 1958, that Israel won without playing a single match.
The conclusion of Israel’s participation in the Asian league was in 1974, when Kuwait asked for expulsion of Israel and 17 countries voted for it.
So from 1991 Israel could take part in the European competition after a short and problematic participation in the Asian ones.
After this explanation, it’s clear that Europe since the start of the conflict has never penalized or rejected Israel, so much that in 1991 allowed it to participate in the European league. Without taking a political position, it’s clear that for many years Israel has been practicing an apartheid regime against the Palestinian population.
After the attack of October 7th 2023 made by the Palestinian terrorists of “Hamas”, Israeli president Netanyahu declared war to Palestinian terrorists and started a military escalation in order to eliminate Hamas.
As we well know, the Israeli bombings didn’t only hit terrorists, but also many civilians whose only fault was living in the Gaza strip. The continuous bombings have caused a real humanitarian crisis in Palestine and Israel’s actions were considered by many experts as violation of international law.
However, the goal of this article is not to delve into the events between Israel and Palestine, but rather to understand why the Israeli sport federation was not suspended.
Before understanding this, let’s go back to the Russian case.
Russia was suspended by the Olympic Committee because it annexed the local sports Committees of the 4 Ukrainian regions: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia occupied in September 2022 into its organization. Russia violated the Olympic truce and the Olympic Charter. The consequences for Russia are many, for example no international sports events will be organized in Russia and Belarus, Russian teams won’t participate at sports competitions, athletes with Russian or Belarusian passports must compete only as individual neutral athletes and athletes who actively support the war cannot compete.
The Russian Foreign Minister said that the International Committee is indifferent to Israel’s actions and it’s proving once again their partiality and ineptitude, which increasingly demonstrates its political leanings. He’s not entirely wrong, it’s clear that Israel has privileged relations with the International Committee, because it is part of UEFA and has a strong and developed Sport federation.
The main reason, even if it seems strange is that Israeli didn’t violate the Olympic truce and the Olympic
Charter. The International Olympic Committee didn’t consider the military escalation in Gaza a violation of Olympic truce and thought that Israeli athletes can’t be held responsible for the actions of their government. And here, we might ask ourselves why Russian athletes receive a different treatment… The question is hard to define, and also the answer to the question “Why is the Israeli sports federation not suspended ?'' is not entirely convincing.
Another important difference between the Russian case to add, is that Ukraine has a developed and strong Sport federation, which denounced the invasion of Russia and called for the exclusion of the Russian athletes. A strong voice came from Ukrainian athletes with an international visibility as the football player Oleksandr Zincenko.
On the other hand, the Palestinian sport federation isn’t very strong and important, and there aren’t famous Palestinian athletes that can promote a big message.
At the end the only clear thing, is that once again we see how international relations influence sports, and how the attitude of an international sport organization as IOC, that pretends to be politically neutral, can change depending on the actors on the field.
Luca Naldi
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