{"id":168706,"date":"2025-09-25T18:56:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T18:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/168706\/"},"modified":"2025-09-25T18:56:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T18:56:10","slug":"fifa-banned-russia-from-international-football-now-it-must-do-the-same-for-israel-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/168706\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifa banned Russia from international football. Now it must do the same for Israel | Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Israel<\/a> takes the pitch against Norway on 11 October for their 2026 World Cup qualifier, the most important question will not be who wins, but whether Israel should be allowed to play at all.<\/p>\n

Fifa, the world\u2019s governing body for football, positions itself<\/a> as a human-rights advocate. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Fifa moved with lightning speed, banning<\/a> Russia from all competitions four days later. In a joint statement<\/a> with Uefa, Europe\u2019s football governing body, they asserted, \u201cFootball is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine.\u201d And yet, little solidarity has been afforded Palestinians. When it comes to Israel, Fifa and Uefa have foot-dragged.<\/p>\n

Pressure is ramping up on the barons of football to take action. After United Nations experts issued a statement<\/a> demanding that Israel be suspended from international football because of the genocide in Gaza, the Times reports<\/a> that Uefa may take up the issue as soon as next week.<\/p>\n

Football is politics by other means. Fifa and Uefa demonstrated as much with their ban on Russia. Fifa\u2019s guiding statutes give it the power to take a similar moral stance against the actions of Israel and to offer \u201cfull solidarity\u201d with Palestinians, especially since the Palestine Football Association<\/a> is a Fifa member. To sit silent is to signal brazen favoritism. Fifa and Uefa should suspend Israel from competition.<\/p>\n

Some may argue<\/a> that sports and politics shouldn\u2019t mix. But in a time of rising authoritarianism<\/a> across the globe, including in the United States<\/a> under Donald Trump, now is the time for international organizations to stand up for core moral principles. Today, selective ethics are freighted with extra danger: they enable demagoguery.<\/p>\n

Israel is orchestrating a staggering human tragedy in Gaza. It has dropped well over 100,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip, more tonnage<\/a> than struck Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during the second world war. More than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed<\/a>, most of them by Israel\u2019s military, with the Lancet calculating<\/a> a much higher death toll and a retired Israeli general noting<\/a> that more than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded. The Lancet says that on average, 35 children are killed<\/a> every day in Gaza. With Israel blocking most food aid, around a quarter of all Gaza residents were suffering from famine<\/a> in August. Hospitals are often hit, in violation<\/a> of international humanitarian law. Around 200 journalists have been killed<\/a>, with many of them apparently targeted by the Israel Defense Forces, a breach<\/a> of international law. Together, this constitutes genocide<\/a>, according to the International Association of Genocide Scholars. But for Israel\u2019s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, Gaza is just a \u201creal-estate bonanza<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

These horrors do not chime with Fifa\u2019s stated ideals. Its president, Gianni Infantino, has remained conspicuously silent on the subject of Israel and Gaza, even though Fifa\u2019s legal handbook<\/a> trumpets that the group \u201cis committed to respecting all internationally recognised human rights and shall strive to promote the protection of these rights.\u201d Sure, Infantino penned cut-and-paste condolence letters<\/a> to the football associations of Israel and Palestine in the wake of the horrific 7 October attack and the launch of Israel\u2019s military response, but he hasn\u2019t replicated anything resembling his statement<\/a> that Fifa \u201ccondemns the use of force by Russia in Ukraine.\u201d Neither far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir\u2019s stated support<\/a> for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, nor inflammatory statements<\/a> by a range of powerful Israeli politicians has moved Infantino to condemn Israel, let alone propose any concrete sanctions against the country, despite the fact that Fifa\u2019s statutes state<\/a> that \u201cDiscrimination of any kind against a country, private person or group of people on account of race, skin colour, ethnic, national or social origin, gender, disability, language, religion, political opinion \u2026 is strictly prohibited and punishable by suspension or expulsion.\u201d<\/p>\n

One could argue that denouncing war crimes is too much to expect from a sports organization. But even if we stick to the realm of sports, Israel appears to be violating Fifa rules. The organization\u2019s statutes state<\/a> clearly that \u201cMember associations and their clubs may not play on the territory of another member association without the latter\u2019s approval.\u201d And yet, according to Human Rights Watch<\/a>, the Israel Football Association is staging matches on \u201csettlements in the West Bank on land unlawfully taken from Palestinians.\u201d The United Nations has identified<\/a> at least eight Israeli football clubs that have either developed or played matches \u201cin Israeli colonial settlements of the occupied West Bank.\u201d In addition, the UN says many clubs in the Israel Football Association (IFA) \u201chave exhibited racism towards the Palestinian people and players over the years,\u201d a clear violation of Fifa\u2019s non-discrimination policies. The London-based human-rights group Fair Square determined<\/a> that there is \u201clongstanding and irrefutable evidence that the IFA is in violation of Fifa Statutes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last May at the Fifa Congress in Paraguay, Susan Shalabi, a vice-president of the Palestinian Football Association, implored<\/a> Fifa\u2019s Governance, Audit, and Compliance Committee to conclude two investigations<\/a> into Israel\u2019s actions in the West Bank. Despite an abundance of evidence, Fifa chose to kick the investigation down the road. By slow-rolling these inquiries, Fifa, whether intentionally or not, has adopted the same approach as Israel\u2019s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, calling for investigations into human-rights violations as a strategy of staving off accountability.<\/p>\n

Beyond staging matches in the West Bank, Israel has engaged in what scholars<\/a> are increasingly calling \u201cathleticide\u201d: killing Palestinian athletes, destroying<\/a> sports facilities, and transmogrifying<\/a> Gaza\u2019s storied Al Yarmouk Stadium into a temporary detention center. Last month, beloved Palestinian footballer Suleiman Obeid \u2013 known to many as the Palestinian Pele<\/a> \u2013 was killed by an Israeli drone strike. He is one of nearly 800<\/a> Palestinian athletes who have been killed by Israel since October 2023.<\/p>\n

Fifa and Uefa have the power to take action. Although admirable, the burden shouldn\u2019t be on star players like Liverpool\u2019s Mohamed Salah to ask tough questions<\/a> about the killing of Obeid or for Norway to donate<\/a> the profits from its qualifying match against Israel to Gaza relief. The full weight of football governing bodies is required.<\/p>\n

Although history does not provide us with crisp facsimiles, Fifa\u2019s handling of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine shows that the group can act on principle. Given the facts on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel should not be allowed to take the pitch for World Cup qualifying matches. Fifa and Uefa<\/a> need to expedite investigations into Israeli football malfeasance. By choosing to ignore their own rules, they disfigure them. When impunity thrives on moral sleepwalking, it leaves us precarious \u2013 and vulnerable to authoritarianism. Now is the time for Fifa and Uefa to stand in alignment with the principles they so vociferously proclaim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Israel takes the pitch against Norway on 11 October for their 2026 World Cup qualifier, the most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168707,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-168706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}