The Palestinian War on Israel’s Olympic Team

The Palestinian Arab sports chief Jibril Rajoub once declared regarding Israel, “I swear that if we had a nuke, we’d have used it this very morning.” The next best option for Rajoub: attempting to boot Israel from the 2024 Paris Olympics.Rajoub serves as president of the Palestinian Olympic Committee and the Palestinian Football Association. He briefed the International Olympic Committee president on Monday regarding alleged Israeli crimes against Palestinians, in line with his call for Israel to be banned from the games. The IOC should suspend Rajoub and any member of the Palestinian delegation attempting to wield the traditionally unifying culture of sports as a weapon.The violent hostility of Rajoub to Israel goes back more than half a century. In 1970, he hurled a grenade at an Israeli military truck, earning a life sentence in an Israeli jail. Since being released in a prisoner exchange in 1985, he has endorsed resistance “in all its forms,” a euphemism for violence, praised stabbing attacks against Israelis in 2015, and justified Hamas’s October 7 massacre as a “natural reaction to oppression.”Rajoub has long used his role as Palestinian sports chief to attack Israel. At the London Games in 2012, he rejected a moment of silence for the Israelis murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics. He opposed an Israeli-Palestinian coexistence soccer match in 2014 and launched campaigns in 2015, 2017, and 2024 to eject Israel from soccer’s governing body, FIFA.The heavy-handed tactics of Rajoub’s earned him a one-year suspension in 2018 for what FIFA determined to be incitement to violence against Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi. Unrepentant, Rajoub clarified in January of this year that “sport is part of our resistance.”Attempts by Rajoub to ban Israel from the Olympics are part of a long history of sports discrimination against the Jewish state. Pressure from Arab and Muslim states led to Israel’s ejection from soccer’s Asian Football Confederation in 1974. Although less conspicuous, Israel continues to face similar indignities. Fortunately, sporting bodies have pushed back by enforcing fair play principles. In 2018, the International Judo Federation stripped the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia of hosting privileges for two international tournaments for failing to guarantee Israelis fair treatment.The following year, the judo federation suspended Iran indefinitely — reduced to four years by the Court of Arbitration for Sport — for pressuring players to avoid competing against Israelis. And last year, FIFA stripped Indonesia of its hosting rights for the under-20 World Cup due to Jakarta’s inability to guarantee Israel’s unhindered participation.Yet anti-Israel sports discrimination has intensified since October 7. Turkey arrested an Israeli soccer player in January following his post-goal celebration honoring October 7 victims. In February, Ireland’s women’s basketball team refused to shake hands with their Israeli opponents. And later that month, at a competition in Qatar, spectators drowned out an Israeli swimmer’s post-race interview with boos.As part of a growing trend, in January, South Africa stripped a Jewish player of his captaincy for its under-19 cricket team due to alleged safety concerns. The International Ice Hockey Federation, a Dutch climbing competition, and Belgium refused to allow Israelis to participate in various sporting competitions, citing security considerations. The hockey federation lifted the ban after a week, miraculously finding ways to ensure safety and security. By capitulating, though, these bodies have rewarded actors seeking to use death threats to discriminate against Israelis.Rajoub’s Olympics push follows a similar effort at FIFA. Seizing on anti-Israel animosity and following in Iran’s footsteps, during the 74th FIFA Congress at Bangkok, Rajoub called upon the body to suspend Israel. To justify Rajoub’s call for excluding the Jewish state, he falsely claimed that Israel is “indiscriminately bombing civilians” and inflicting an “apartheid colonial occupation.”Predictably, Rajoub neglected to mention that Hamas launched the current Gaza war with a brutal massacre, holds Israelis hostage, and continues to embed itself among Palestinian civilians, guaranteeing unnecessary deaths of non-combatants. By his logic, there is a much stronger case for excluding Palestinians from sports competitions.Rule 59 of the Olympic Charter specifies that violations of the Charter or the IOC Code of Ethics could warrant suspension. Rajoub has clearly violated Article 1.1 of the Code of Ethics by not respecting “friendship, solidarity and fair play” and Article 1.2 by not respecting the Olympic Movement’s “universality and political neutrality.” In the face of Rajoub’s hypocritical demands, sports authorities must do more than refuse to be complicit in attempts to discriminate against Israeli athletes. They need to suspend Palestinian leaders who attempt to hijack games in their attempt to eliminate Israel. Palestinian leadership must face consequences for using sports as part of its “resistance.” ________Noy Barel, a research intern at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, assisted in the authorship of this piece.

The Palestinian War on Israel’s Olympic Team

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