Nagham Abu Samrah was 24 years old Palestinian karate champion from Gaza. She had the potential to participate in the 2024 Paris Olympic games. Unfortunately, an Israeli attack on her home killed her sister and left her seriously wounded . Unconscionably, Israeli authorities delayed her permission to leave Gaza for treatment, and when she finally reached an Egyptian hospital, she died soon thereafter.
Sadly, Nagham was not the only Palestinian athlete to have been killed by Israel. In its letter to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) urging it to ban Israel from participating in Paris Olympics, The Palestinian Olympic Committee pointed out that since October 7, “Approximately 400 Palestinian athletes have been killed, and the destruction of sports facilities exacerbates the plight of athletes who are already under severe restrictions.”
Israel invaded and occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967, in violation of international law. No international body had ever awarded Gaza to Israel. It was under the stewardship of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and Egypt until a Palestinian state could be established, as had been pledged by the British Empire in the 1939 MacDonald White Paper. Israel “de-developed” the Gaza economy, cutting it off from its traditional markets, and illegally implanted Israeli settlers there. As Michael Jansen explained, the International Court of Justice ruled in mid-July, 2024, that Israel’s presence in Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank since 1967 has been illegal:
Deliberate attacks on Palestinian men and women athletes are not new. In 2014, two Palestinian soccer players, Jawhar Nasser Jawhar and Adam Abd al-Raouf Halabiya, were stopped by the Israeli army on their way home after training and shot in the feet. Attack dogs, unleashed on them, mauled their limbs. They were dragged and beaten until the attackers were sure they would never be able to play soccer again.
In fact, Israel’s war on Palestinian sports in general is much older than that. I remember as a child during the first uprising between the years 1987 and 1993 which involved stone-throwing, the Israeli authorities suspended the soccer league and, indeed, sport activities. Israel also used the local soccer stadium in Nablus city as a military camp.
As we all know, Palestinian athletes are not the only target of Israel. Well over 39,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in Gaza alone and more than 90,000 have been wounded since October 7, 2023. That this total war and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians (as most of them have been) could be justified as “fighting Hamas” is not plausible. It is a war on Gaza’s noncombatants, including its athletes.
It is profoundly troubling that Israel’s flag bearer in the Olympics, Peter Paltchik, is reported to have signed bombs targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Peter, who was born in Ukraine, is a settler colonialist who came from Europe to colonize the land of Palestine while cheering the savagery inflicted on the indigenous Palestinians by Israel.
Given all of the above, the normal response from the International Olympic Committee would have been to ban Israel from participating in the Olympics. Unfortunately, however, the opposite happened. While Nagham and hundreds of other Palestinian athletes were killed by Israel before being given the opportunity to participate in the Olympics, Israel is there in Paris, since the IOC ignored calls to ban Israel from participating. By doing that, the IOC let itself down before anyone else.
This stance shows that the IOC is unprincipled and morally bankrupt organization. Nearly two years ago, it banned Russia and Belarus from participating in the Olympics after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. Russia, is banned by the European Union also from participating in any continental or international competition including the FIFA World Cup and all the European UEFA competitions. Israel is not even in Europe, and is guilty of the same crimes of illegal invasion and occupation as Russia. This situation makes the FIFA, IOC and UEFA complicit with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Furthermore, the IOC banned Apartheid South Africa from participating in the Olympics between the years 1964 and 1992 due to its implementation of racist policies known as apartheid. Ironically, the International Court of Justice has found that Israel is guilty of the crime of Apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.Still, the IOC failed to treat Apartheid Israel in the same way it treated Apartheid South Africa — which was an ally of apartheid Israel. International sanctions on South Africa Apartheid regime were crucial to bringing the era of racial segregation and discrimination to an end.
The IOC and France missed an opportunity to pressure Israel to stop the bloodshed and to be on the right side of history. They chose not to do so at the expense of their reputation and credibility. They also ensured Israel’s status as a state that can act with full impunity.
The appropriate response for that would have been for the governments that declared their support for the Palestinians to send a strong message to the IOC and France by boycotting the Olympics or at least to show some other form of protest against allowing Israel to participate in the Olympics. But unfortunately, politics and foreign policies are more likely to be based on interests, not ethics. Some governments will only pay lip service to the Palestinian cause as long as it serves their interests — something that we the Palestinians seem to struggle to understand. This collective failure of the international community to act will only encourage Israel to continue uninterrupted with its daily murder of the Palestinians, the bulk of whom are women and children.
Israel, a colonial and apartheid state at the Olympic Games
Monday 29 July 2024, by Louisa D
On 19 July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its advisory opinion on the ‘legality’ of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967. Twenty years after the opinion on the Wall in 2004, the ICJ strongly condemned the colonisation of Palestine and the crimes committed by the occupier.
The conclusions of the opinion confirm what Palestinians and those who follow this colonial situation have been saying for years: that Israel’s occupation of the territories (Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem) since 1967 is illegal because it has become an annexation, and that the regime of general restrictions imposed on the Palestinians impedes their right to self-determination. This consensus on the illegality of the occupation, including within the international community, was affirmed during the pleadings of more than fifty states and organisations on 1 February 2024, the majority of which supported the rights of the Palestinian people. Only Israel’s historic allies (mainly the United States and the United Kingdom) took the opposite view.
A clear denunciation of the persecutions committed since 1967
In this sense, the opinion is indisputably clear for the entire international community, with legal obligations for Israel: withdrawal of all Israeli State presence from Palestinian territory, compensation for all damage caused by the occupation, including the right of return for refugees and the dismantling of all settlements. The international community thus has an obligation not to recognise the current situation and this illegal presence in occupied territory, which is the first step in the strategy of the BDS movement, which is now calling for divestment and sanctions.
Above all, the Court affirms for the first time that the system of discrimination imposed by Israel on the Palestinians constitutes the crime of apartheid or segregation.
This non-binding opinion is part of the Palestinian strategy of investing in international institutions in order to break the isolation to which the Palestinians were confined. This long-term strategy has borne fruit in the context of the ongoing proceedings for recognition of the genocide and the proceedings before the International Criminal Court, which is expected to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in the coming weeks.
Ten months of massacres and multiple fronts
All this may seem a pittance when nothing seems to be stopping the genocidal policy in Gaza, where 7% to 10% of Palestinians are thought to have died, where the polio virus has been detected and while Israel is increasing its strikes on Lebanon and, for the first time, on Yemen in retaliation for a Houthi attack on Tel Aviv.
However, the unequivocal classification of colonial crimes by the highest international court breaks the status quo strategy that Israel is trying to impose on the Palestinians because it is based on an illegal situation. Indirectly, it reaffirms the right of the occupied Palestinian people to resist the occupying power. It also calls into question the two-state solution: on 17 July, the Knesset passed a resolution against the creation of a Palestinian state, which it described as an ‘existential danger’ for Israel.
Although mobilisation in France has fallen drastically since the dissolution of the National Assembly, Palestine remains at the heart of the news. The Olympic Games provide an opportunity for a new dynamic, with the Israeli President scheduled to attend the opening ceremony. The end of colonisation will not come from a court decision, but by banning the genocidal state.
P.S.
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No Olympic truce for capitalism
Friday 26 July 2024, by Fabienne Dolet
On 26 July, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games were launched. In the presence of the President of Israel, the same man who a few months ago was writing on the shells to be fired into Gaza by the Israeli army. As head of state, he came to greet the athletes of the Israeli National Olympic Committee. As the head of a state that flouts international law!
Like many other states that also trample human rights underfoot... Like China with the Uighurs, like Iran, like Burma, which murders its opponents. Like Russia, whose athletes are treated differently.
Some get the honours, others don’t! That must be the Olympic spirit! We didn’t understand. For the duration of a spectacle, rigorously orchestrated and skilfully costed, we should therefore, as Macron urges us, call a ‘truce’.
And yet there is no truce for exploitation, social cleansing and generalised population control. No social truce either! The dancers have come to remind us of this. They have contracts that don’t respect labour law, and they can’t get decent pay... for lack of a budget. In fact, the CGT-Spectacle has called a strike.
When you remember that six preliminary investigations linked to the Olympics are underway for suspicions of ‘illegal taking of interests’, ‘favouritism’ and ‘influence peddling’ - the latest of which concerns the remuneration of Tony Estanguet, president of the Organising Committee for these Olympics - the show seems less meticulously prepared.
There was no truce for the society of the spectacle, for sport as a commodity, for the chilling hypocrisy of the International Olympic Committee, which asked the Russian and Belarusian athletes only to take part under a neutral banner because of the invasion of Ukraine, and checked that none of them had actively supported that invasion.
While many of the participants are formidable athletes, we cannot turn a blind eye to this hypocritical political instrumentalisation of variable geometry, which rightly denounces the invasion of Ukraine, but is silent on the genocidal war, the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and the possible participation of Israeli athletes in the execution of Palestinian children! A spectacle that Jupiter Macron never tires of, since he wants to do it again for the 2030 Winter Olympics...
P.S.
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