The Israeli national baseball team is set to participate in the US Major League Baseball’s World Baseball Classic 2026, taking place 5-17 March in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Miami and Houston in the United States, and Tokyo, Japan.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including more than 800 sportspeople, among them Mustafa Ahmad Abd Tafesh of the Palestine Baseball National Team, former national team player and director of the Palestinian Federation of Baseball and Softball (PFBS) Ashraf Awad Murad, Hilal Sports Club baseball player Mohannad Khalil Mahmoud Ayoub, 17-year-old baseball player Ahmad Ali Ahmad Al-Gharbawi, 14-year-old softball player Basant Khaled Zuhdi Joudeh and PFBS Competitions Committee member Esraa Abd Ahmad Tafesh. In addition, all Palestinian sporting facilities in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged by Israeli attacks.
The Israeli national baseball team is far from an apolitical sports club. The team started as a project of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a racist and colonial organization that plays a key role in Israel’s dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians.
The Israeli national baseball team is the public face of the Israel Association of Baseball (IAB), which includes multiple venues on stolen Palestinian land, including in the illegal settlements of Efrat and Hashmona’im. Israel’s illegal settlement regime constitutes a war crime according to international law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s entire military occupation of the Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, is illegal and that it is violating the legal prohibition against apartheid, a crime against humanity. The ICJ rulings trigger legal obligations not to recognize or facilitate Israel’s illegal occupation in any way.
The World Baseball and Softball Confederation (WBSC), the international governing body for the sport and of which the IAB is a member, is in breach of the ICJ ruling. WBSC is not incapable of sanctioning member associations. WBSC banned competitions in Russia and excluded Russian and Belarusian teams from all its competitions just days after Russia’s illegal aggression on Ukraine.
Displaying the usual hypocrisy on steroids Palestinians have come to expect from Western-dominated sporting bodies, WBSC has failed to take any action to sanction genocidal Israel despite decades of crimes against Palestinians. That WBSC continues to welcome the complicit Israeli team to the World Baseball Classic is a slap in the face of the families and teammates of the many Palestinian athletes killed, maimed, and arrested by apartheid Israel in its decades long attacks on Palestinian sports.
In the current era of Might-Makes-Right, it is more important than ever to ensure that the rule of law is consistently upheld.
We call on baseball players, teams, and fans around the world to join us in refusing to allow the sport to be used as cover for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. Pressure WBSC to exclude apartheid Israel from the World Baseball Classic and to suspend its membership from WSBC until it respects the fundamental UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.
It’s time for the umpire to yell, “Genocidal Israel, you’re out!”