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FIFA Can No Longer Be Silent on Israel's Human Rights Atrocities in Gaza
It’s past time for football federations across the globe to stand up for freedom and legal rights. With tyranny on the rise globally, sport can help raise awareness that we need to draw the line on injustice.
Jun 26, 2025
Although you might not know it from reading mainstream media in the U.S., Gaza continues to be under siege. Israel has installed a blockade of humanitarian aid, weaponizing food for everyday Gazans who desperately need it, while the Gaza Humanitarian Organization—a shadowy, Israeli-backed organization that relies on private US security contractors—continues to slow-roll the delivery of food. Securing basic foodstuffs has become akin to “a perverted Squid Games” where all too often death is the outcome, according to Dr. Mark Braunner, a volunteer at Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
With U.S. media attention swiveling away from Gaza and toward Iran, this is an all-hands-on-deck moment. Enter a gaggle of leading legal experts and scholars who this week ramped up pressure on FIFA, the world’s governing body for soccer, demanding that its Governance Audit and Compliance Committee address a well-documented complaint against Israel for holding matches in settlements inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
FIFA has long demonstrated a conspicuous deference toward Israel. FIFA has consistently looked the other way when it comes to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, even when doing so means ignoring its own stated commitments to human rights.
It’s past time for football federations across the globe to stand up for freedom and legal rights. With tyranny on the rise globally, sport can help raise awareness that we need to draw the line on injustice.
Let’s be absolutely clear: Israel is carrying out human-rights atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, bombing hospitals, killing Palestinians as they attempt to collect aid, barring doctors from entering Gaza, green-lighting the most aggressive expansion of West Bank settlements in decades. It’s no wonder that Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently characterized Israeli actions as “war crimes.”
On the football front, the Israeli Football Association (IFA) has staged matches in occupied Palestinian territory. Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces have killed hundreds of Palestinian players and coaches while engaging in the systematic destruction of sport facilities, even converting Gaza’s storied Yarmouk stadium into a temporary interrogation site. These actions violate numerous FIFA Statutes.
FIFA’s response? One might say crickets, but crickets actually make noise. For more than a decade it has foot-dragged investigating good-faith claims against Israel. As Fair Square, the London-based rights group, asserted, “FIFA’s ongoing failure to enforce sanctions against the Israeli Football Association despite long-standing and irrefutable evidence that the IFA is in violation of FIFA Statutes is further evidence of the organisation’s ad hoc and selective enforcement of its rules.”
FIFA’s inaction is a grim example of what Henry Giroux calls “The violence of organized forgetting.”
FIFA’s free pass for Israel is deeply hypocritical. In February 2022, only a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, both FIFA and UEFA, Europe’s governing body for soccer, moved swiftly to suspend Russian football clubs and national teams from all competition. In a joint statement, FIFA and UEFA insisted that “Football is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine.” And yet, no such solidarity has been forthcoming for Palestinians.
The main reason FIFA and UEFA stood up in the face of Ukraine’s invasion was that numerous European countries refused to take the field against Russia in World Cup qualifying matches. Leaders from places Poland, Sweden, England and the Czech Republic insisted that the powerbrokers of soccer take principled action, forcing FIFA and UEFA’s hand. The president of France’s football association stated, “The world of sport, and in particular football, cannot remain neutral.”
This brings us back to Israel. It’s not too late for soccer barons to take action. And it turns out that UEFA is actually a key player. The Israeli Football Association was originally part of the Asian Football Confederation, given its geographical location in the Middle East. But after Indonesia, Sudan, and Turkey all refused to play 1958 World Cup qualifying matches against Israel, and other countries applied political pressure, the IFA was eventually expelled in 1974. This placed Israel in the soccer wilderness until, in the early 1990s, UEFA invited the Israeli national team to participate in its competitions. In 1994, Israel became a full member of UEFA.
After Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, UEFA halted all matches in Israel for the foreseeable future. This meant that Israel was forced to play recent World Cup qualifying “home” matches in Hungary.
Rights groups—from Human Rights Watch to Fair Square to the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner—insist that Israel has openly violated FIFA Statutes. Therefore, individual Football Associations from around the world need to stand up and press FIFA to follow its own rules.
Norwegian Football Federation President Lise Klaveness moved in the right direction recently when she stated, “None of us can remain indifferent to the disproportionate attacks that Israel has subjected the civilian population in Gaza to.” When Susan Shalabi, the vice president of the Palestinian Football Association, urged FIFA to take action against Israel at its recent meetings in Paraguay, the Norwegian Football Federation issued a statement that it “stands in solidarity with the Palestinian Football Association and supports their right to have this long-standing issue properly addressed by FIFA.” We need more of this sort of political courage.
Sport should not be allowed to supersede human rights. For too long, FIFA has executed behind-the-scenes maneuverings that have allowed it to avoid reckoning with Israel’s human-rights violations. As FIFA whistleblower Bonita Mersiades put it, “True reform demands more than new systems—it requires new values.” At the very least, football honchos and fans alike must align their stated values with principled actions.
With authoritarianism on the march globally, now is the time to fix the limit on human-rights abuses, using sports as a way to immobilize the jackboots. As Nelson Mandela put it, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”
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Trump’s South Africa Executive Order Reflects the Global History of White Supremacy
The right wing in the United States as well as Great Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, has held a fascination for apartheid and has regretted its abolition.
Feb 23, 2025
On February 7, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order “to address serious human rights violations occurring in South Africa.” The order charged “blatant discrimination” against “ethnic minority descendants of settler groups,” and mandated “a plan to resettle disfavored minorities in South Africa discriminated against because of their race as refugees.” His actions echo a long history of right-wing support in the United States for racism in Southern Africa, including mobilization of support for white Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Analysts in South Africa quickly pointed out the many factual errors in Trump’s diatribe. Even Afrikaners, who he alleges are persecuted, are unlikely to accept being refugees since South Africa is their home country. The post-apartheid constitution of 1997, echoing the African National Congress’ Freedom Charter of 1955, clearly states that South Africa belongs to “all who live in it.” But Trump’s misunderstanding is an example of the transnational scope of white racist nostalgia.
An essential component of opposing the MAGA offensive against human rights in the United States has been new understandings of U.S. history, as reflected in the 1619 Project and a host of other publications. Most often, however, this discussion has focused on the United States in isolation. Scholars such as Ana Lucia Araújo, in Humans in Shackles, and Howard French, in Born of Blackness, have pioneered wider global histories. But however influential this trend is among historians, it has not been matched by attention in the media or public debate.
The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest.
In the global history of white supremacy, the close relationship between the United States and South Africa stands out for centuries of interaction between the two settler colonies, with both ideological and material links from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Significant links between Black resistance movements in the two countries also date back at least to the early 20th century. But until the end of official apartheid in the 1990s, the closest bonds were between white America and white South Africa.
In a short history of the Boer War written by eight-year-old future CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1901, and published by his grandfather, Dulles noted that the Boers landed at the Cape in 1652, “finding no people but a few Indians,” and that “it was not right for the British to come in because the Boers had the first right to the land.” For Dulles, as for other U.S. policymakers until almost the end of the 20th century, it was axiomatic that only whites had rights.
The parallels between these two settler colonies were significant. Robert F. Kennedy, speaking to university students in Cape Town in June 1966, put it like this:
I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-17th century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.
The parallels were matched by a long history of interaction. The concept for the African reserves (later Bantustans) in South Africa was modeled on American Indian reservations. As noted by historian John W. Cell, Americans and South Africans debated how to shape “segregation” in urbanizing societies in the mid-20th century. The Carnegie Corporation of New York financed both the classic study of the situation of “poor whites° in South Africa and Gunnar Myrdal´s The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy.
In the early 20th century, mining engineer Herbert Hoover (later U.S. president) was the founder and director of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, which shipped some 50.000 Chinese laborers to South Africa to work in South African mines. The scheme was abandoned in 1911. Mention of it was recently deleted from Wikipedia, most likely in 2018.
Both countries were united during the Cold War through anti-communism. South African officials studied McCarthyist legislation in the United States and applied it at home through the Suppression of Communism Act. In both countries, “anti-communism” became a way to defy demands for civil rights. Although white racism in South Africa became the focus of international condemnation after the official adoption of apartheid in 1948, the United States and other Western countries systematically opposed sanctions against South Africa for decades until the rise of the international anti-apartheid movement resulted in the congressional override of President Ronald Reagan’s veto to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.
That success came after decades of campaigning in the United States and around the world, with heightened international attention coming in response to resistance in South Africa itself. The Treason Trial from 1956 to 1961, in which Nelson Mandela and 135 other leaders of the African National Congress were charged, evoked widespread anti-apartheid actions in the United Kingdom and other countries. The Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and the Soweto Youth Uprising in 1976 precipitated even larger waves of protest, fueled by new media options. Resistance reached a new peak after the formation of the United Democratic Front in 1983.
Following the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, and the first non-racial election that brought him into office, there was worldwide celebration at the end of political apartheid. In later years, it became clear that only a minority of Black South Africans had joined the elite at the top of a still sharply unequal society. Disillusionment and discontent over high rates of unemployment and poverty arose among the majority of Black South Africans.
But that is a very different sentiment than the nostalgia for the old apartheid order among white South Africans who left the country as well as many who stayed in South Africa.
The right wing in the United States as well as Great Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, has held a fascination for apartheid and has regretted its abolition. The global anti-apartheid movement unleashed unprecedented demands by citizens to rein in corporate activity that supported apartheid. In the same way that climate activists studied divestment, so too have conservative lobbying groups studied how to block divestment groups. The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest. Trump’s Executive Order can only be understood in that context.
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Peace Is Just as Possible as War
On International Peace Day this September 21, imagine an unstoppable wave of peace actions sweeping across our country.
Sep 01, 2023
I am heartened each time I come across a study affirming that waging war is not an innate part of human nature, that we humans are just as likely to be peaceful as we are to be violent. To quote the revered anthropologist Margaret Mead, “warfare is only an invention—not a biological necessity.”
And why do I cherish findings by historians, anthropologists, psychologists, and others that we are not doomed inevitably to human conflict; that, in the words of President John F. Kennedy “our problems are man-made—therefore, they can be solved by man.”
In my lifetime, there has been barely a year that my government has not been at war overtly or covertly. By some calculations the United States has been involved in more than 100 wars since 1776—early on with Native Americans to steal their land, claim their natural resources, and imprison them on reservations. Between 1945 and 1989 the U.S. attempted to change other (many democratic) countries’ governments overtly and covertly 72 times. More than 4.5 million people have died in the more than two decades of post-9/11 U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Libya.
Recent landmark research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan of movements from 1900 through 2006 to overthrow dictatorships, expel foreign occupations, or achieve self-determination reveal that nonviolent resistance campaigns were more than twice as successful as violent insurrections with the same goals.
But war is relatively new in the more than 200,000-year history of us homo sapiens: Evidence of war dates back to 10-12,000 years ago, especially with the emergence of more settled communities. Further, societies that were once extremely warlike are now peaceful: the countries of Scandinavia, for example, and the tribes of the Iroquois from around 1600. Ireland, Austria, and Switzerland are neutral Western European countries, not members of NATO; and Costa Rica has eliminated its military in a hemispheric region where conflict has been rife. All undercut the notion of war being a deeply ingrained, inevitable biological behavior
Moreover, experts who have studied the history of violent and non-violent responses to conflict have found that violence is not the most effective nor successful way to resolve country-level disputes. Recent landmark research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan of movements from 1900 through 2006 to overthrow dictatorships, expel foreign occupations, or achieve self-determination reveal that nonviolent resistance campaigns were more than twice as successful as violent insurrections with the same goals. Elsewhere Chenoweth found that when women have leadership roles, they are “more likely to maintain nonviolent discipline… in resistance campaigns against repressive regimes.”
Especially uplifting, too, are the multitudinous creative individuals and movements in recent decades at work for peace in their countries. In 2005, 1,000 outstanding women peacemakers from 150 countries were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Why 1,000 women? Because “creating peace requires a culture of peace practiced by millions in our daily life,” explained their Nobel prize sponsors. Their slogan, “I am not a wall that divides—I am a crack in that wall” conjures up the lyrics of singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen: “There are cracks in everything/that’s how the light gets in.”
A final piece of wisdom about the necessity of sustaining peace following violent conflict comes from Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, who brought Christian and Muslim women together in her West African country to end Liberia’s brutal 14-year-long civil war in 2003. According to Gbowee, “Stopping a war does not bring lasting peace.” Peace persists through peacebuilding, using community organizing and expressing dissent; teaching peace and nonviolence; and prioritizing the basic issues of women’s, racial and social equality, and environmental protection.
Few of us have imagined forgiveness as a crucial element of peace that can enable peace to endure. In 1995, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, who had spent 27 years as a political prisoner before emerging as South Africa’s first Black president, called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that offered amnesty to “those responsible for atrocities during the long nightmare of white-minority rule,” provided they publicly confess all the brutalities they had committed and request amnesty. The Commission intended to refrain from revenge and to reconcile the peoples of a deeply unjust, deeply racist society in order to inaugurate social healing that would last. Knowing that forgiveness would not assure perfect justice for all, Desmond Tutu realistically stated that simply punishing their oppressors with prison sentences may have resulted in a civil war ending with “a South Africa lying in ashes.”
There were shortcomings, though. Some of the worst unrepentant war criminals escaped prosecution; some citizens grievously harmed by apartheid citizens felt that amnesty was too easily given; and the country is still ridden with vast inequities. Elsewhere, others believe that peace without accountability for violence is a peace without justice, including Gbowee and other advocating for a war crimes court to ensure accountability for Liberian war criminals.
On International Peace Day this September 21, imagine an unstoppable wave of peace actions sweeping across our country, like that of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. That day Congress closed so its members could attend environmental teach-ins; 20 million citizens and politicians (one-fifth of the population) came out for marches, rallies, and concerts; and 10 million children participated in peace teach-ins in their schools. A surge of environmental legislation and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by President Richard Nixon followed in the next years.
May we be part of finding our country’s lost path to peace: by peace education and active bystander programs in every school; by interracial and interfaith collaborations; by reparations for the historical injustices of slavery and theft of land from Native Americans; by ensuring women’s full equality, including restoring women’s reproductive rights; by beating warheads into windmills through shifting our government’s priorities from militarism to renewable technologies; and by demanding that our lawmakers have a real democratic debate on war, peace, and the military budget.
As Eleanor Roosevelt asked, “When will our conscience grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”
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