Mon 7 Oct 2024
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Fifa has been branded “a disgrace” for failing to rule on a legal bid from the Palestinian FA to impose sporting sanctions on Israel.
Proposals were put forward to world football’s governing body in March, asking them to consider banning Israeli clubs and the national team from Fifa competitions, and to act against Israeli league clubs based in occupied territories in the West Bank.
As the conflict in the Middle East escalates, meetings to discuss the legal challenge have repeatedly been pushed back – a move the head of Palestine’s FA legal department Dr Katarina Pijetlovic tells i is simply “kicking it into the long grass”.
With 20 July originally earmarked for an extraordinary Fifa meeting, that was then deferred to an unfixed date after 31 August – timing which coincided with the end of the Paris Olympics, in which Israel’s football team participated.
Fifa said the ruling was delayed “following requests for an extension from both parties”, but sources close to the Palestinian bid said only eight further days were agreed, rather than the three months that have now passed.
i understands a new date of 20 October was then mooted – though the topic would only then have been discussed as one item on the agenda of an existing Fifa meeting, rather than in its own sitting. But on Thursday, Fifa released a new statement saying they were “to investigate” the matter, raising more doubts over when a final decision will be made.
“They need to investigate what?” Forest Green Rovers owner and Palestinian rights campaigner Dale Vince told i.
“The 40,000 civilian deaths, the 100,000 injuries, the displacement of millions of people, the starvation, almost the outbreak of polio, the murder of aid workers, journalists? Come on. It’s all well-documented. The UN themselves are looking into a whole number of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Fifa are making themselves ridiculous by not having made a decision on this.”
i has seen a series of documents relating to the case, including a 58-page letter of legal arguments submitted to Fifa, which has been referred to an independent legal team of experts.
It accuses Israel of the “killing and shooting of Palestinian footballers, destroying stadia, routinely refusing to issue licenses for sporting infrastructure, and prohibiting free movement of players”. The Israeli FA, it says, has provided “moral, economic and practical support to the occupation of Palestine”.
However, in another confidential document seen by i, Fifa has received some expressions of concern about the “politicisation of the sport” if Israel are sanctioned, and the involvement of former militant Jibril Rajoub, now the head of the Palestinian FA. Shino Moshe Zuares, president of the Israeli FA, has accused Palestine of a “cynical, political and hostile attempt to harm Israeli football”.
Palestinian campaigners have also raised a myriad of other issues with Fifa, including anti-Arab chanting from fans in the Israeli league, which they say has gone unpunished.
Prior to this year, Palestine’s FA had already contacted Fifa eight times regarding Israeli clubs playing on Palestinian territory. In 2015, a Fifa committee was called to investigate the issue of Israeli league clubs playing matches in Palestinian territories. A report was completed in 2017 but no action was taken.
“They still host matches on Palestinian territory of the Israeli league,” Pijetlovic says.
“In those stadiums, Palestinians are not allowed to enter. It’s a true apartheid system being implemented, and nobody cares about that. Objectively this is an absolute travesty in terms of how discriminatory it is – those associations that were screaming when Russia invaded Ukraine, they are now completely apathetic.
“They [Fifa] are not applying their own statutes, they’re absolutely ignoring them and there’s no reason for it, saying ‘we are politically neutral and this is a territorial dispute, and this is not clear whose territory this is’, even though you have all these UN resolutions that are calling it occupied Palestinian territory.
“We have clear pronouncements by the International Court of Justice that Israel is implementing a brutal apartheid regime, that its occupation amounts to annexation. So it’s something that shouldn’t be allowed according to Fifa’s own human rights commitments.”
Legal arguments hope to draw on the precedent set by the sanctions placed on Russia, particularly regarding the incorporation of Crimean clubs into the Russian league following the 2014 invasion.
Palestine’s FA are also keen to focus on the fact that a number of Israeli international footballers are members of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). They say one report they have commissioned found eight instances of players expressing support for the war in Gaza on social media, with Pijetlovic saying one had “called to drop 200,000 tonnes of bombs and erase Gaza permanently”.
“Sporting sanctions are the least of what should be done that hasn’t been done,” Vince says.
“There are no sanctions on Israel. We’ve dreamed up the world’s most incredible sanctions regime for Russia, and really there’s not a lot of difference. Russia invaded Ukraine, this is what Israel have done in Palestine – the big difference is they’ve occupied Palestine for 17 years against international law but there are no sanctions on Israel. It comes back to that question of balance, where’s the consistency in the application of international law? There isn’t any.”
i has been told that a number of European FAs have privately expressed support for sanctions against Israel, with 12 associations from the West Asian Football Federation going a step further and publicly supporting Palestine’s challenge.
The independent panel judging the legal bid has received a document describing “the effects of the Israeli actions in Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem” as having “devastated Palestinian football”.
Earlier this year, a five-month investigation by i into the destruction of football in the Gaza strip found hundreds of players had been killed and scores of sporting facilities obliterated.
This week Fifa president Gianni Infantino said that the Fifa council had “implemented due diligence on this very sensitive matter”, adding that they had “followed the advice of the independent experts”. Fifa declined to comment further when approached by i.
Since the 7 October Hamas attacks and subsequent military invasion, more than 41,000 people in Gaza have been killed according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
“Mostly it [sanctions] would be a public opinion thing,” Vince adds.
“It’s like the banning of weapons exports that the Labour government instituted a couple of weeks ago – it was about 30 different types of weapons license out of maybe 130.
“Its impact on Israel’s ability to kill people will be non-existent but its PR impact is big – the first time we’ve done that out of step with the US. So the PR impact of a football ban would be where it had its most impact, this would be an international body saying in respect of what’s happening in Palestine, we can’t contemplate Israeli football teams taking part in international football competition.
“Really we need some consistency from Fifa, it’s an unarguable call from the Palestinian FA, and it’s a disgrace that it’s taken so long to just consistently apply the rules.”
Any final ruling could also be subject to further appeals from either of the national associations involved.
A spokesperson for the Israeli FA said: “Whoever fantasized about the suspension of Israeli football from the international arena or sanctions through lies and false accusations, has suffered a defeat.
“Again, we have acted over time in different channels, in a calculated and proactive manner in the face of the challenge of the Palestinian Association and its leader to distort reality, and the result today leaves no room for doubt.
“We respect the authors of the report submitted to the council members and the decision of the council members to consider transferring two issues to a legal examination, as long as there is any factual justification for it.
“Thanks to values that represent a glorious democracy and an independent and determined legal system of the Football Association, we have never violated and will not violate any of the Fifa/Uefa rules.”
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