Probably you already know what this is. Probably before you read a word of it, you decided what it was, where you stand on it, how you’re going to feel about it. The headline, there’s your first clue. Maybe you recognised the name of the writer and drew your own conclusions. And of course there’s the Guardian masthead at the top, the world’s leading bat‑signal for wet liberals, so already there’s a self‑selecting audience there.
Or maybe you came via a social media link that already told you what to expect. Necessary, vital, powerful. Great piece by so-and-so. A shocking antisemitic screed by an unashamed Jew-hater. Sides are taken. Feelings are felt. Minds are not changed.
So we mumble things. We despair quietly. We watch our words, stay silent, or simply look away. Because to do otherwise is to run a gauntlet of threats, smears and abuse, a very public excoriation whose very purpose is to distract, divide, dishearten. Is starvation bad? Ack, it’s complicated. What about the bombing of hospitals or residential areas? Ah, right can of worms you’ve opened there.
In the meantime almost two million people in Gaza are at risk of starving to death. In the meantime the Gazan ministry of health reported that 76 Palestinians were killed in 24 hours on Monday, but nobody seems to know who did it, or whose fault it was, or whether this is a welcome or unwelcome development. In the meantime the national security minister of Israel is promising the “voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens”.
But then in this particular space – the space where an unhinged ethnonationalist far-right government meets the soiled earth that used to constitute public discourse – nothing really means anything any more. Words can indicate anything you want. Actions have no consequences. The United Nations is bad, actually, and bombings are a form of defence, and newborn babies can be collateral damage, and the dead are not dead, because you cannot be human if you never existed in the first place. At which point, a little gauchely and with a deep reluctance: enter sport. Over the past 13 months, since the appalling attack on Israel by Hamas in October last year, sport has tried to present the smallest possible target amid the carnage that followed. The line is: there is no line. Occasionally a punishment beating would be handed out to an athlete who failed to hold this no-line line. Mainz sacked the winger Anwar El Ghazi for posting “stop the killing”. The Australia batter Usman Khawaja was banned from displaying the message “all lives are equal” on his shoes during a Test match. Otherwise, business as usual.
But recent events have threatened this fragile omertà, a darkness lurking just beyond the windows that can no longer be ignored or held at bay. A series of coordinated attacks on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans at a Europa League game against Ajax drew international condemnation and almost ended up bringing down the Dutch government. There were scuffles and empty seats at a Nations League game between France and Israel, which Emmanuel Macron attended as an act of solidarity. And last Monday, there was global outrage at the killing of two Gazan footballers, Eyad Abu-Khater and Hisham Al-Thaltini, in Israeli air strikes.
Obviously I’m joking about the last one. Nobody gave a shit about that. Or any of the 344 Palestinian footballers killed by Israel since last October, or the fact that teams from Israel’s West Bank settlements play in their domestic league in violation of Fifa rules, or that the Palestinian West Bank league has been suspended indefinitely.
In the face of this, inaction begins to feel like its own conscious choice. It’s six months since Fifa promised a prompt ruling on whether or not to impose sanctions on Israel’s national team for the actions of its government, and we’re still waiting. It’s four months since Israeli athletes competed at the Olympic Games after the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, declared: “We are not in the political business.” It’s two months since a major Israeli assault on Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, destroyed the town’s main football stadium.
I’ve been thinking a lot about hopelessness recently. Pretty much everyone I know is scarred and scared, bruised and hurting. And tired; so tired. Amid all this, the ruins of conventional politics, the desecration of our common ground, a stinging question: what hope can sport possibly have of making a difference? Can it ever be more than a cocoon, a means of escaping the real world rather than changing it? In other words: what are we all doing here?
A “Free Palestine” banner at Celtic Park or the Parc des Princes; the 60,000 empty seats at the Stade de France last Thursday; a few small words of solidarity from a global icons like Coco Gauff or Lewis Hamilton or Kyrie Irving: does this mean anything, beyond what it is? Can this ever be more than flickering lighter flames in the teeth of an unstoppable, genocidal gale?
Nobody knows. But we know, or we should know, right from wrong. Killing children is wrong. A government that declares some humans as more worthless than others is wrong. Presiding over a famine is wrong. How is this complicated? How is this the start of a debate, rather than the end of one? How is it remotely possible to frame this horrific extravaganza of violence as the benign option, and the resistance to it — even when it comes from Jews themselves — as some kind of sublimated hatred, rather than the simplest act of conscience there is?
To resist this Israeli regime is not incompatible with resisting a Saudi World Cup or a Russian Olympic team or a Taliban ban on women’s sport. Indeed this is one and the same resistance: a resistance to the doctrine of untouchable power, a resistance to violence and othering as the solution to our common problems. And even if sport is a blunt and pointless tool of social change, it must nonetheless be deployed. Because there remains – even in this warped, fucked fairground mirror of a world – a thing called right and a thing called wrong.
For the Palestinians sport has always been a form of expression, a place of wonder and play, a brief taste of freedom, a locus of international recognition, and so of course it cannot be allowed to live. Probably you’ve already decided what you think about this. But even one mind is worth changing, just as surely as one life is worth saving.
