{"id":306158,"date":"2026-02-23T15:24:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T15:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/306158\/"},"modified":"2026-02-23T15:24:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T15:24:14","slug":"palestinians-call-to-exclude-genocidal-israel-from-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/306158\/","title":{"rendered":"Palestinians Call to Exclude Genocidal Israel from Baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Israeli national baseball team is set to participate in the US Major League Baseball\u2019s World Baseball Classic 2026<\/a>, taking place 5-17 March in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Miami and Houston in the United States, and Tokyo, Japan.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s\u00a0genocide\u00a0in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including more than 800 sportspeople,\u00a0among them<\/a>\u00a0Mustafa Ahmad Abd Tafesh\u00a0of the Palestine Baseball National Team, former national team player and director of the Palestinian Federation of Baseball and Softball (PFBS)\u00a0Ashraf Awad Murad, Hilal Sports Club baseball player\u00a0Mohannad Khalil Mahmoud Ayoub,\u00a017-year-old baseball player\u00a0Ahmad Ali Ahmad Al-Gharbawi,\u00a014-year-old softball player\u00a0Basant Khaled Zuhdi Joudeh\u00a0and PFBS Competitions Committee member\u00a0Esraa Abd Ahmad Tafesh. In addition, all Palestinian sporting facilities in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged by Israeli attacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Israeli national baseball team is far from an apolitical sports club. The team started as a project<\/a> of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a racist and colonial organization that plays a\u00a0key role<\/a> in Israel\u2019s dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians.<\/p>\n

The Israeli national baseball team is the public face of the Israel Association of Baseball (IAB), which includes multiple\u00a0venues<\/a> on stolen Palestinian land, including in the\u00a0illegal settlements of Efrat and Hashmona\u2019im.\u00a0Israel\u2019s illegal settlement regime constitutes a\u00a0war crime\u00a0according to international law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in July 2024 that Israel\u2019s entire military occupation of the Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, is illegal and that it is violating the legal prohibition against apartheid,\u00a0a crime against humanity.\u00a0The ICJ rulings trigger legal obligations not to recognize or facilitate Israel\u2019s illegal occupation in any way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u00a0banned<\/a> competitions in Russia and excluded Russian and Belarusian teams from all its competitions just days after Russia\u2019s illegal aggression on Ukraine.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In the current era of Might-Makes-Right, it is more important than ever to ensure that the rule of law is\u00a0consistently\u00a0upheld.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time for the umpire to yell, \u201cGenocidal Israel, you\u2019re out!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Israeli national baseball team is set to participate in the US Major League Baseball\u2019s World Baseball Classic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":306159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-306158","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}