Football and Palestinian liberation
Why global football offers a fertile and productive terrain for building an international anti-apartheid solidarity movement — and what South Africa showed about how to realize its potential
It’s not easy to find avenues for hope in the Palestinian struggle right now: The heroic armed resistance by young people in the West Bank refugee camps, choosing to die on their feet rather than live on their knees, reflects the grim reality of a second Nakba underway in the form of state-directed expansionist settler savagery under the violent protection of the Israeli military and the warding of the Biden Administration. Israel’s “democracy” protests are fundamentally about maintaining the personal freedoms enjoyed by the denizens of Tel Aviv nightlife, but the split over the independence of Israel’s courts doesn’t divide the apartheid consensus that unites the vast majority of Jewish Israelis. And the Palestinian Authority may fly the Palestinian flag, but it polices the occupied population on behalf the occupier.
But if the youth of Nablus and Jenin are not willing to passively accept their fate, what of the rest of global civil society seeking non-violent ways of supporting the Palestinian struggle for freedom and of raising the price paid by Israel’s apartheid regime for its violent settler-colonial project?
Lets talk about football. Not as a distraction, but as an opportunity.
Palestine wasn’t playing at the 2022 World Cup, and yet Palestinian colors were the most ubiquitous national symbol on view in the streets and stadiums in Doha. And social media captured so many instances of how the tournament offered Arab civil society the opportunity to challenge the choice by some regimes in the region to normalize ties with a regime that exemplifies Arab suffering and humiliation.
What we saw in Qatar — players and fans demonstrating solidarity with the Palestinian cause on a platform literally seen by hundreds of millions of people — underscores the power and potential of football as strategic opportunity for BDS.
The South African experience may be instructive here. The effort to build pressure on the apartheid regime through civil-society-led boycott action was perhaps the most effective campaign of its time, eventually generating sufficient pressure on reluctant international sports institutions to have South Africa banned from competing in the Olympics, in international football, cricket and rugby. And the high-profile nature of internationals sports resulted in the anti-apartheid message reaching far wider sections of civil society in the countries concerned, creating a climate for deeper sanctions that followed. It was a bottom-up effort, driven by citizen action, independently of governments and even of sports federations who preferred to turn a blind eye to apartheid until they were forced by popular pressure to change course.
Rugby, a game at which apartheid South Africa’s Springbok team excelled internationally, was a central point of pride, a pillar of identity even, of the regime’s support base. So, when a mass citizen campaign of civil disobedience forced the cancellation of a Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981, shutting the last and most important door on South African participation in international sport, the news inspired many of us involved in the fight against apartheid at home. It told us we were not alone; that while the white supremacist regime could count on the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, decent people everywhere supported our struggle.
The power of the psychological blow their ouster from world rugby had dealt to the regime is also underscored by the symbolic power of its reversal, when the ANC supported South Africa’s readmission to world rugby once the regime had begun negotiating a transition to democracy. Supporting reintegration into international sport then became part of the ANC’s strategy to assuage white fears about living under democratic majority rule.
So, why is the realm of sport and culture such an effective tool for international civil-society efforts to challenge apartheid regimes? After all, neither is literally a literal lifeline on which such regimes depend for survival. The answer lies in the fact that settler-colonial regimes have an exaggerated fear of isolation from the Western community of states in which they locate their own identity.
Disruptions sending a message that Israel is anything but a “normal” society carry an outsize psychological impact, whether (to quote some recent examples) in the form of
* musicians canceling tours of Israel
* a decision by Argentina’s national football team to call off a planned friendly in Israel
* the frenzied efforts by Israel and its partisans in the US, in Germany, in the UK and elsewhere to silence any political efforts to question Israeli apartheid or hold it accountable for its abuses.
The current global order makes serious economic pressure on Israel an unlikely prospect for the immediate future. Even efforts to press companies to withdraw from Israel or occupied territories (think Ben & Jerry’s) or to promote divestment from companies doing business there (e.g. U.S. Presbyterian Church) have more of a psychological impact than an economic one. That’s not a weakness: It’s this psychological impact that actually does the most damage to the settler-colonial power.
The psychological relationship between the social base of the Zionist project and the West – i.e. the colonial and neocolonial powers – is a point of significant vulnerability, just as it was for apartheid South Africa. The settler-colonial project is premised on a sense, among its supporters, on the sense that they are part of the West; an outpost of those powers in a “tough neighborhood” etc. Hence the racist dismissal (in colonial cultural tradition of a supremacist sense of superiority vs. “inferiority”) of the colonized, and also the ability to both rationalize internally and also to demand understanding and support for the Zionist project’s violence against Palestinians. (“Necessary” violence against the colonized is something the US and Europeans are expected to understand, given their own traditions of the same.) The narrative of the apartheid regime addressing the West is always “we’re just like you, represent the same things, shared values, and face the same challenges on the frontline of your own war against communism (SA case)/terrorism (Israel case) etc.”
Because of that, any sense of rebuke, much less the threat of being cast outside of the realm of acceptability in the West, carries an outsize impact and often provokes hysterical responses from the apartheid regime. This much was true in South Africa, where things like the rugby, cricket and Olympic boycotts had an outsize influence on the self-confidence and morale of the regime.
Because the settler-colonial sense of comfort at belonging to the West is such a potentially fragile and even febrile space, it’s one in which the single gesture or episode can also have an outsize influence. (The Soda Stream/Superbowl ad controversy ten years ago also demonstrated that the Israelis don’t understand how their shrill responses to BDS actually amplifies the reach, power and significance of those gestures. Like, you’d think that pressuring a deeply unpopular US Congress to adopt a resolution insisting that Israel is very definitely NOT AN APARTHEID STATE might have some unintended effects?)
So, if Israel is vulnerable to football BDS pressure, why have such efforts until now failed?
That’s a fair question, particularly in light of the speed with which FIFA and UEFA moved to ban Russia from international and pan-European club competition within weeks of its invasion of Ukraine. After all, Israel has been engaged for decades in an illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, an occupation that systematically violates a number of FIFA statutes that require its suspension but continues to be ignored by the international body.
First, a note of context: Until 1994 (i.e. a year after Oslo) Israel was designated by FIFA to fall under the jurisdiction of the Asian football confederation, and had limited involvement in international football because of Arab and Muslim countries refusing to play against the Zionist entity. Whether or not this was simply coincidence, Israel was moved into the European federation (UEFA) at the same time as it began the Oslo peace process — whether intended as such or not, it functioned as a kind of Oslo dividend that opened its way to play World Cup and Euro qualifiers, and also for its club teams to compete in the Champions League and other such competitions. The setter-colonial community’s football had now found its “proper” home among the old colonial powers.
Thinking dialectically, though, we might see that this also produces a greater degree of vulnerability — because sanctions pressures are most effective when an established prop of support for a regime is suddenly removed.
Because FIFA has a one-country-one-vote structure, the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement countries in the 1960s (and the power play by Brazilian Joao Havelange to leverage African support to become FIFA president) helped get South Africa banned from the international game, though rugby was far more important to the regime’s base than football.
When Russia, after its 2014 annexation, had attempted to include Crimean teams into its domestic leagues, it was warned that doing so would jeopardize Russia’s hosting of the 2018 World Cup — that’s because a specific FIFA statute prohibits the inclusion of teams from outside of a territorial jurisdiction in a domestic league without the permission of the territory’s football authority. Israel, of course, was violating the same statute by allowing settlement teams in its domestic leagues. The occupation also systematically breached FIFA statutes by the impact it had on Palestinian football, bearing in mind that the Palestinian FA is recognized as a national entity by FIFA.
So, those calling for Israel’s suspension from FIFA seemed primed to win the issue in 2014/5. And yet, Israel and its allies and partners – most important among them the Palestinian Authority – managed to block the move. FIFA declared the matter closed saying that it didn’t take political stands. (Well, not until the NATO powers demanded that they do so, anyway.)
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this effort failed, because it was a top-down exercise relying on institutions that are anything but democratic. Lobbying the game’s power centers meant engaging on a terrain on which Israel (via its diplomatic and economic/technological ability to cajole and bribe elites in Africa and elsewhere) and the US (by virtue of the fact that FIFA’s advertisers are mostly American) had the overwhelming advantage. Most of global football’s “civil society”, i.e. the players and fans at the heart of the game and who give it life (and drive its revenue) were literally unaware of, much less engaged in the institution-level effort to hold Israel accountable, and it was relatively easy for FIFA to shut it down.
Doing it better
Rather than an institutional focus which relies on legalistic strategies (that have failed to date) and which bypasses the opportunity for movement-building in favor of seeking a “result” that has so far proved elusive, there’s more to be gained from a protracted effort involving mass, global organization among fans and players to slowly build pressure for individual actions, building up towards a move to suspend Israel. And the issue, taken outside of legalistic approaches, isn’t simply whether Israel is violating FIFA rules via allowing settlement teams in its leagues, but a more general focus on apartheid and its human rights violations.
The fact that FIFA recognizes the Palestinian FA, led by former PA security chief Jibril Rajoub, as the voice of Palestine also underscores the importance of taking this effort outside of the FIFA processes and building a grassroots movement to pressure FIFA and its affiliates from outside.
Some grassroots, or at least, bottom-up efforts to do the same have had mixed results, e.g.:
-- a BDS “Red Card Israel” campaign;
-- the fans of Paris St. Germain and Glasgow Celtic flying the Palestinian flag and banners (video link) supporting Palestinian struggle in defiance of official attempts to bar such efforts
-- a player-led effort to boycott the 2013 Euro Under-21 tournament held in Israel, that failed to materialize but nonetheless highlighted the potential for collective action by players
-- the decision by Argentina’s players to refuse to play in a friendly in Israel organized by their FA as part of their 2018 World Cup preparations, driven by players’ refusal
-- a decision by Uruguay’s FA to call off a similar match in 2022 in response to calls from Palestinian football clubs to stay away
-- Local protest in Bali against Israel participating in the FIFA U-20 World Cup in Indonesia, which resulted in FIFA removing the tournament from Indonesia
-- the current Puma boycott being organized by the BDS movement
But the potential for this to grow as a movement is clear.
The Muscle
The power of football’s “civil society” – i.e. the players and fans who can influence how the game is organized, independently and sometimes even in conflict with the interests of the bureaucrats and national and business interests at the heart of the game – is based on their value to the monetizable spectacle that is global football. Obviously, the game can’t be played without players, and if top players withhold their participation from an event, the fans are well aware. Even more than that, the spectacle that makes the TV rights so valuable is based on the chemistry of the interaction between the fans in the stadium and the game on the field. Any football fan will tell you that watching a televised game played in an empty stadium is a dull experience, and wouldn’t be worth much as a saleable spectacle. And this principle came into play when the most powerful clubs in the global game sought to create a European Superleague that would have subverted the norms of the game in order to protect the business interests of owners — and they were forced to retreat from these plans by a harsh reaction from fans. Fans have power. And so do players, as the Argentina dressing room proved when they prevented a game in Israel. Or the Iran national team did in Doha by expressing support for protesters during the recent World Cup. And the players of Morocco whose amazing World Cup run was accompanied by repeated demonstrations of support for Palestine which seemed at odds with their government’s embrace of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel’s apartheid regime.
Players and fans both have significant muscle to act independently of, and even to pressure authorities to change course. But as in the case of South Africa, that potential won’t be realized without systematic, global campaign organization.
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