For Palestinians, May 15 marked “The Nakba,” loosely translated as “the catastrophe.” This is the day to memorialize the 1948 mass displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, laying the groundwork for the founding of the state of Israel.
It is cruelly fitting that during this time of remembrance, another kind of Palestinian silencing was taking place, this one in the world of sports, at the behest of FIFA, the world governing body for soccer.
At a meeting of the 199-person FIFA congress in Bahrain, the Palestinian Football Association was denied a vote – after years of delays – to expel six Israeli Football League clubs that play on illegal settlements in the West Bank. These teams, from stadiums to their offices, have been built on land that has been officially recognized by both FIFA, the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Secretary General of the United Nations as Palestinian territory.
The presence of these clubs, in addition to being a rather brazen effort to use soccer as a tool to solidify illegal settlements, also mocks FIFA rules, which state that no federation can play in the territories of another without permission. To put it mildly, the Palestinian Federation has granted no such permission. There is also very recent precedent for FIFA to act in favor of those occupied. In 2014, FIFA’s European body blocked Russia from incorporating teams from Crimea into its national league, following Russia’s annexation earlier that year.
Yet for Palestinians, the FIFA bylaws did not deliver justice – only more delays. FIFA President Gianni “Johnny Baby” Infantino intervened and the vote was tabled and relegated to a much more conservative subcommittee of 31 FIFA members that can take until March 2018 before deciding.
The vote-block by Infantino was particularly brutal because it came after a FIFA monitoring committee, following years of delays and an international activist campaign, finally produced a draft that would have empowered the 199-person FIFA Congress to vote up or down on giving the settlement teams six months to disband. If they refused, the entire Israel Football Association would have been kicked out of FIFA and denied a place in World Cup qualifiers or any international competitions.
Adding insult to injury, Infantino’s power move came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called to personally request this delay, a political intervention into the affairs of FIFA, which – according to FIFA’s own bylaws – could be grounds for suspension of the entire Israeli federation.
In a document dated April 24 and obtained by The Nation, the Israeli Football Association listed their critiques of the process to determine the illegality of the six clubs. Their document refers to the teams as existing not on settlements but in “Israeli communities in the West Bank” that are under “Israeli jurisdiction.” Such a document reveals contempt for both the United Nations and FIFA’s own bylaws.
(1) comment
A rather shallow and one-sided assessment of a complicated situation that has nothing to do with soccer and everything to do with exploiting FIFA to bring the diplomatic/political battle to the sports field.
Palestinian soccer association head Jibril Rajoub is most definitely not interested in using sport for what it's supposed to be...a bridge to build positive relations between peoples. In fact, the Palestinians refuse to play soccer with Israelis and boycott the game at every turn, other than allowing a kids team to show up once a year at a "peace" event to put on a show to pretend a facada of good sportsmanship.
Forget the sob stories about "naqba" shmaqba. This story is about the abuse of sports to fight political battles and Rajoub and the Palestinians should be given a red-card for bad sportsmanship. Rajoub is infamous as well for his comment a couple of years ago on Lebanese tv where he said he would have liked to use nuclear weapons against Israel.
So the head of the Palestinian soccer association is on record saying he'd not only like to commit mass murder and wipe out a couple of million Israelis, but he also doesn't give a damn about killing his fellow Palestinians with radioactive fallout. This is the guy who is whining to FIFA.
The Palestinian soccer leagues and teams function every day. Sure, there are some issues because this is, after all, still a war zone. But nobody is telling Palestinians they can't play soccer. This issue is a purely political one and should never have been allowed to reach the FIFA congress in the first place. Where's the mention of Tokyo Sexwale's investigation commission or Sexwale's own comments that the situation was not just complex, he called it extremely complicated.
I'd yellow card this "reporter" as well for not bothering to get the Israeli view of the issue...something than any journalism 101 grad should know. The FIFA meetings were this month, yet he only quotes a report from April, nor does he mention the bottom line: sports issues should be decided on the sports field. Political issues should be settled by the parties in face-to-face negotiations, something the Palestinians continue to be unwilling to do.
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