In a few days, the chairman of the Palestinian Football association will head off to a regional meeting of Arab states to organize an effort to expel Israel from FIFA as well as the International Olympic Committee due to treatment of Palestinian footballers under occupation. Meantime, Dave Zirin, sports editor for The Nation, has followed up on his first damning expose with another riveting article on Israel’s targeting of Palestinian soccer players.
“A Red Line for FIFA? Israel, Violence and What’s Left of Palestinian Soccer” is a full throttle appeal for investigation. First advising US spokesperson Jen Psaki to follow up on the situation (as we noted here), Zirin then directs his focus on his own profession, sports journalists.
He reveals that the response to his last article was “overwhelmingly hostile”. Some of Zirin’s professional colleagues made accusations against him, doubting not only his reporting of the attacks, but the very concept that Palestinian athletes were ever targeted. And that doubt stemmed from the assumption his sources were (merely?) Palestinian. This is some radical racism:
The part of the response that was truly jarring however was the numerous private queries I received from prominent members of the media. I am choosing to keep their identities private because their correspondence to me was private and I will respect that. The queries contained no curiosity about Israel’s possible expulsion from FIFA. They all instead openly doubted that the shooting of the two young men had even taken place. Was I sure this really happened? When I pointed to my initial sources, the response by numerous people was, “Do you have any sources that are not Palestinian?” One person, writing for a major sports website, sent me numerous queries that I did not respond to, and then when the facts of the shooting appeared in the Israeli paper Haaretz, said to me, “Forget previous queries. I see news of the shooting on Haaretz. Never mind.” The assumption of mendacity affixed to Palestinian sources spoke volumes.
The other part of my story that people accused of being untrue was my theory that members of the Palestinian soccer community are being targeted for violence by the Israeli state. This was described to me as “laughable,” “ridiculous,” and one even said that they would reach out to The Nation directly to agitate for dismissal.
Yes it is certainly true that I don’t have a document signed by Benjamin Netanyahu calling for a systematic attack on the Palestinian national team. What I do have are names: real people, with real families, whose lives and deaths are testament to a story that needs to be told.
Heartbreakingly Zirin then lists, with description, individual members of Palestine’s national team killed by Israel; Ayman Alkurd, Wajeh Moshtahe, Shadi Sbakhe, all targeted in their homes over the course of seventy-two hours. Then the imprisoned; Omar Abu Rios, Muhammad Nimr, Zakaria Issa, Mahmoud Sarsak. He states that three were jailed in Israeli prisons without trial “over the last decade”.
Zirin reiterates a point he made earlier about the “international media outrage” that would ensue if these attacks were on members of other national teams, and pushes other sports journalists to start asking tough questions. It’s “our job” to do that, he says, and “Israel’s future in FIFA should depend on its answering.”
Personally, I’m not waiting on Israel’s answers. I’ve seen plenty of “comprehensive investigations” exonerating Israeli occupiers time and again. Whether it be war crimes in Gaza, a military sniper’s shooting children in the back like hunted birds, or just yesterday, the gunning down of Raed Zeiter, a 38-year-old Palestinian Jordanian magistrate court judge at the Allenby Bridge. Nothing ever comes of it!
Zirin is right, the press should be all over this, and attacks on athletes should be “a red line no country should be allowed to cross.” It’s going to take the international community mobilizing, pressuring FIFA and demanding action over this pattern of violence.
We should be thankful to Dave Zirin and The Nation for sticking with this in such a big way with such clarity. Hopefully other sports writers will follow. But we can make a difference too. Some are signing petitions (like this one to FIFA), others are mobilizing. Stay tuned.
(Hat tip Susie Kneedler)
Thanks, Annie for keeping us up to speed on this sports arena angle. Good job!
This is an important story, but the need for hard facts cannot be understated. What was reported about the two recent shootings, and the implication that there is deliberate targeting, are explosive and could go viral, if some critical social exchange threshold in a process that I don’t understand, is reached. But one of the most amazing tactics of the spin artists is to take a huge negative story that has been covered up, such as George W. Bush’s being AWOL for the Air National Guard, and destroying the story and the story-teller by setting up the reporter – remember Dan Rather? – with forgeries of the real documents. Zirin mentions a lot of players, and I agree they need to be looked into closely, and I find the possibility plausible given all else we know about Israel-Palestine. But we need ten different reporters digging out real facts and reporting them, not just the horrible implication (which without facts are indistinguishable from an Anti-Israeli slur), to where they become immovable. Who shot these two? What are their names? What do they say to the allegations? What does their commander say? What do five eye-witnesses say? Who killed or arrested the others? How are they connected? That’s a lot of players killed or injured, but it’s not very plausible that there’s a widespread program to destroy Palestinian national soccer by targeting their best players, without more evidence linking the perpetrators to each other or to a common leader or program, or initiative. It’s shocking, but it will be even more so if it’s true, but discredited through a “Karl Rove special.”
One could start by interviewing one of the coaches or long-time team member, or someone else who’s intelligent and been closely involved deeply, all along, who knows everybody, is perceptive, can sort his own knowledge between what he saw, what he hears, where, when and from whom.
Jason Stallman
sports editor
sports@nytimes.com
zircon is onto a Very Big story. The political implications are huge and it may be relatively easy to spin this single recent horrible incident away. But the pattern of targeting athletes may be more difficult to lie away if the sports media dares to open this door of the abuse of a people and conduct honest investigative journalism.
I am afraid that the sports industry will not go there. Too many entrenched interests to protect.
This is such egregious behavior and Zirin shows enough of a pattern that doubting reporters should pool/spend a couple $K and a week and go to Palestine and start asking questions themselves. See the scars. Judge the veracity of the victims for themselves.
Or even more mundanely, just travel with PNT members as they navigate the Occupation to routinely get to/from practices and games. Even those daily difficulties would be cause to question Israel’s commitment to free and open competition – and their own hypocritical claim to same.
Talent for this level is rare and even then it takes 20 years to develop a player to this level. Even if skeptics say that a player a year over the last decade (where my math takes me) is not enough of a pattern in the specific, as a program/team it’s half the team and a whole generation of development destroyed. That destroys any aspirations Palestine has to be competitive.
This story is so potentially explosive (i.e. career building) that the only way those reporters do not do that is because they don’t want to know and/or are afraid of the answers.