Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv Prepares to Play in Europa League Despite Calls for Ban Amid Gaza Genocide

Lublin (Quds News Network)- Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club is set to play Dynamo Kyiv in a UEFA Europa League match tonight despite calls from rights groups and fans for Israeli teams to be banned from European football competitions amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

In November, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans attacked pro-Palestinian protesters before and after a Europa League football match in Amsterdam. Videos shared on social media at the time showed them singing anti-Arab songs, vandalising a taxi and burning a Palestinian flag.

Dima Said, a spokesperson for the Palestine Football Association and former captain of Palestine’s women’s national football team, said FIFA’s decision to suspend Russia’s teams from all international football competitions after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 highlights the “double standards” shown towards Palestinian lives.

Before a Beitar Jerusalem game in Riga, Latvia, this month, she said that seeing Israeli football fans conduct anti-Palestinian chants without punishment around Europe is “as a Palestinian athlete … one of the hardest things to watch”.

“For me to see that those people who publicly support genocide, who publicly advocate for children to be killed is something that’s very harmful for me as a human being, first, but secondly, as a Palestinian, it should not be allowed,” she said.

Calls for UEFA to suspend Israel from international competitions have intensified recently amid the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. Fans and human rights groups have accused UEFA of enabling Israel to sportwash its crimes.

Euro-Med Monitor said Israel has killed 664 Palestinian athletes since the start of the genocide in the Gaza Strip in October 2023.

Athletes have been killed or, like most of Gaza’s population, forced to devote their time and effort to finding shelter and food, amid ongoing Israeli military attacks, repeated displacement, and starvation and blockade policies that have left the entire population food insecure and claimed the lives of approximately 220 people to date, the monitor added.

In July alone, the Israeli forces killed 40 athletes and scouts, the vast majority in the Gaza Strip, according to the Palestine Olympic Committee.

Israel has also targeted all aspects of life in the Gaza Strip, including the sports sector. According to the Palestinian Football Association, the Israeli forces have destroyed 264 sports facilities, 184 completely and 81 partially.

Sports activities in the Gaza Strip have been completely suspended since October 2023 due to the widespread and systematic targeting of sports infrastructure, which has been almost entirely destroyed.

The monitor said the global influence of football associations, particularly FIFA and UEFA, “places a double responsibility on them to uphold human rights principles and exclude national associations whose member states are implicated in serious crimes.”

International and continental sports federations refuse to suspend Israel’s membership, in a “blatant violation of the values and principles they claim to uphold,” Euro-Med Monitor said.

This “reflects a selective, double-standard application of the rules governing the participation of states, clubs, and individuals in international and continental competitions, whether official or friendly.”

The normalisation by sports federations of the participation of representatives of a “state committing genocide is not only a legal violation but also an unprecedented moral failure.”

Allowing Israeli athletes to perform before audiences of hundreds of millions “misleads the public and enables Israel to use sporting events as a powerful tool to influence global opinion.”

In many cases, Israeli athletes themselves are implicated in grave violations against Palestinian civilians, the monitor noted, with consistent estimates indicating that about 30 members of the Israeli delegation to the 2024 Paris Olympics served in the Israeli military or publicly supported the genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The monitor pointed out to Israel’s policy of compulsory conscription that makes it “reasonable to believe that most people of active athletic age served as reserve soldiers and may have participated in crimes committed during the genocide in the Gaza Strip, particularly given the army’s extensive and long-standing reliance on reserve forces to destroy civilians and infrastructure in the enclave.”

FIFA swiftly suspended Russia and its football clubs from official activities following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with UEFA following suit by banning Russian teams from European championships and prohibiting matches on Russian soil. The International Olympic Committee also acted, citing allegations of human rights violations, aggression against the sovereignty of an independent state, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.