FIFA, global soccer’s governing body, is facing growing calls to ban Israel’s teams from international competitions. The Palestinian Football Association has formally demanded action in response to the dire humanitarian situation created by Israel’s nine-month assault on Gaza, the ongoing disruption of Palestinian soccer imposed by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, and the fact that teams from Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements play in its domestic leagues in violation of FIFA rules. The international body has long evaded efforts within its councils to sanction Israel, but the pressure of disruptive protest action in and around the world’s football stadiums could force a change.
FIFA, global soccer’s governing body, is facing growing calls to ban Israel’s teams from international competitions. The Palestinian Football Association has formally demanded action in response to the dire humanitarian situation created by Israel’s nine-month assault on Gaza, the ongoing disruption of Palestinian soccer imposed by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, and the fact that teams from Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements play in its domestic leagues in violation of FIFA rules. The international body has long evaded efforts within its councils to sanction Israel, but the pressure of disruptive protest action in and around the world’s football stadiums could force a change.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino had artfully played for time by insisting his organization needed legal advice, despite the federation’s precedent of barring Russia within weeks of its invasion of Ukraine. FIFA has promised to convene its council to consider the issue by July 20, but it was put on notice on a breezy evening in Glasgow as Scotland’s women prepared to face Israel’s on May 31.
Scottish protesters harassed the Israeli squad from the moment it landed in Glasgow, posting social media videos of the players in IDF uniforms during their military service, demonstrating outside the team’s hotel, and preventing them training in the stadium. The Israeli players could hear the shouts of the protesters from outside the ground in the silent stadium.
“We had to scream the national anthem because the Scots didn’t play it on the stadium loudspeaker,” one Israeli player told Haaretz.
The Glasgow Euro 2025 qualifier match demonstrated that continuing to defer action on Israel could pose a growing risk of disruption for global soccer—and showed that fans possess a form of leverage that may be more effective than formal pleas to the FIFA council. Fear of disruption had prompted the authorities to stage the match behind closed doors, barring entry to fans. (Even then, hundreds of raucous protesters showed up outside the city’s iconic Hampden Park stadium, and one managed to delay the kickoff by sneaking inside and chaining himself to a goal post.)
Soccer in an empty stadium, as the COVID lockdown era reminded us, is a pale shadow of the spectacle that makes it the world’s premier (and most lucrative) TV viewing.
A sports boycott is no silver bullet to end Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza or its long-term denial of Palestinian rights. But a conditional ban on competing internationally in a sport with broad social popularity can destabilize the offending regime’s own sense of legitimacy by highlighting for ordinary citizens the abnormality of their reality in the eyes of the world.
The risk of disruption is clear in Israel’s scheduled matches against Mali, Paraguay, and Japan during the Paris Olympics and European Nations League fixtures that see the Israelis play in Belgium, Italy, and France in the fall.
The Scottish players’ refusal to shake hands with Israel’s also signals that many players are beginning to break the silence imposed by federations, leagues, and owners on making statements deemed political.
Dissident player expressions of support for the Palestinians aren’t new. At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Moroccan players celebrated their Cinderella run to the semifinals by brandishing Palestinian flags in a powerful symbolic rebuke to normalization of ties with Israel by their own and other Arab governments.
The Gaza offensive saw many more players step forward to express solidarity, some at great cost such as Dutch-Moroccan forward Anwar El Ghazi, whose contract was terminated by the German club Mainz (a move even the German courts have now deemed illegal) after he resisted pressure to back down from tweets supporting Palestinian freedom.
But the tide seems to be turning. The recent “All Eyes on Rafah” viral phenomenon was reposted by a number of the game’s biggest names, including Arsenal’s William Saliba, Barcelona’s João Cancelo, Paris St. Germain’s Ousmane Dembélé, Chelsea’s Nicolas Jackson, Atalanta’s Gianluca Scamacca, AC Milan’s Rafael Leão, Inter Milan’s Marcus Thuram, 2023 women’s Ballon D’Or winner Aitana Bonmatí, BBC broadcaster and England icon Gary Lineker, and many more.
With growing numbers of players uncomfortable or outraged at maintaining normal sporting relations with a country committing daily war crimes, sports federations are likely to face a growing headache.
Fans have power, also—they’re an essential part of the chemistry that makes soccer the premier global TV spectacle, and inside a stadium, they can’t easily be silenced or pacified. When the rapper Macklemore spoke out for Palestinian rights at a concert in Mönchengladbach, Germany, he was breaking the bizarre German taboo on plain speaking about Israel. “To atone for our past is by today standing up against apartheid, against occupation, against genocide—for free Palestine,” he declared, to rapturous applause from 19,000 people.
There’s a precedent of course: the global anti-apartheid sports boycott that had a significant psychological impact on the morale of the white social base of the South African regime.
In 1981, a mass protest campaign successfully disrupted the 1981 Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand, which led to South Africa’s banning from all international competition. Rugby had been the apartheid regime’s game of choice, in which its international prowess was an immense source of pride.
The conservative International Rugby Board—dominated by the federations of Britain and its former settler colonies—had resisted mounting pressure to exclude South Africa. But in 1981, the Halt All Racist Tours movement rallied tens of thousands of citizens to protest and disrupt matches, even physically forcing the cancellation of one of the early games.
For South Africans fighting apartheid it was an inspiring symbol of international solidarity—Nelson Mandela once recalled feeling it as a moment of “the sun coming out” when news reached him in prison on Robben Island of a Springbok match canceled because of protests in New Zealand. And for young people in white homes, it was the first inkling that the social system most white South Africans treated as normal was, in fact, intolerable to those they might deem peers elsewhere.
Referencing an earlier boycott campaign against a rugby tour of the U.K., South African writer Donald McRae wrote: “I was an eight-year-old boy living near Johannesburg when that tour ended and it was the first time I realised the outside world hated South Africa … it needed the sports protests and eventual boycotts to force boys like me to wonder what was wrong with our country.”
The New Zealand disruptions finally forced the IRB to act, banning South Africa from international competition later that year—a ban that remained in place until the apartheid regime had capitulated and set South Africa on the road to democracy, with the restoration of its place in international rugby also being deployed as a powerful incentive to the old regime’s base to embrace the transition to majority rule.
Attempts at disruption are likely to increase the headache facing soccer administrators scheduling matches involving Israel. South Africa showed that an effective sports boycott can take years of grassroots activism to muster, and years more to focus the minds of the targeted population on the need to change course. International sports federations had to be forced by the disruptive pressure of grassroots civil society activism to take action; their default was to ignore what they see as an unwelcome intrusion of “politics” into their business.
Although soccer may not be the source of national pride that rugby was for South Africa (Israel’s national teams and clubs simply aren’t top-tier competitors), involvement in European competitions has become key part of the normalcy experienced by millions of Israelis even as their state keeps their Palestinian neighbors shackled in a brutal apartheid regime.
As their country continues to conduct daily mass civilian killings in Gaza and deploy starvation as a weapon of war, Israeli fans can look forward to their national and club teams joining international competitions in the fall. Ordinary Israelis may be able to convince themselves that the protests on the streets and campuses of Western capitals represent a Hamas-aligned radical fringe, but if such pillars of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “civilized world” as FIFA and UEFA were to kick it out, the blow would penetrate the iron-dome of imagined legitimacy that sanctifies Israel’s brutality.
Legitimacy in Western eyes has always been a singular Israeli obsession. It is that eternal quest for reassurance that its status and actions are deemed legitimate among the community of Western nations of which it imagines itself part that makes Israel especially vulnerable, as apartheid South Africa was because of similar settler-colonial origins, to the withholding of that legitimacy.
This vulnerability may be even more pronounced in the soccer sphere, because of Israel’s accession to the European federation, UEFA, in 1994. Before that, Israel had played under the auspices of the Asian confederation—though it hadn’t actually played very much, because of a decades-long boycott by Arab and Muslim countries. Acceptance as part of UEFA allowed it to qualify for the World Cup and regional tournaments against European opponents, it also meant Israeli club teams competing in the Champions League and other UEFA competitions. Israel had finally been welcomed into the sport’s “civilized world.”
The impact of the more successful current BDS efforts—boycotts of Israeli consumer products or divestment by college endowments—hardly penetrate the consciousness of most ordinary Israelis. The bans and sanctions announced by the U.S. and European governments targeting a handful of the more militant leaders of Israel’s vast state-sponsored system of illegal settlements in the West Bank barely even register as the equivalent of a parking ticket. While a growing number of musicians are refusing to perform in Israel, enough still show up to avoid Israelis feeling a more pervasive sense of missing out.
That’s what happened to apartheid South Africa’s ruling community, in their game of choice, world rugby. Like so many of today’s Jewish Israelis, most white South Africans had precious little idea of how abnormal their system was in the eyes of global civil society.
The withdrawal of legitimacy symbolized by a boycott is most powerful when it happens suddenly, kicking away a prop of a regime’s self-image. FIFA seemed aware of this in 2014 when, in response to Russia annexing Crimea, it warned Moscow that including teams from occupied territory in its domestic league program—a direct violation of FIFA statutes—would result in Russia losing hosting rights for the 2018 World Cup. A move which temporarily slowed Russian incorporation of Crimean-based teams. And the 2022 invasion of Ukraine earned Russia a swift red card despite the disruptions caused to that year’s World Cup program.
Israel, of course, violates the same statute as Russia would have if it had allowed Crimean teams into its domestic league. According to FIFA’s own regulations, this should be an open and shut case. FIFA recognizes and has Palestine compete in its competitions; the Israeli Football Association includes teams from illegal settlements in the area recognized by FIFA as under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian FA (including Beitar Ma’ale Adumim, Hapoel Bik’at HaYarden and Beitar Ironi Ariel), but no action has been taken.
Lobbying FIFA from the top, of course, requires persuading institutions that are not exactly transparent or accountable, making it easier for Israel and its allies to leverage political and economic power in their favor to avoid sanction.
As the South African example shows, institutions won’t act until the consequences of not acting become too costly to absorb. Fan pressure forcing the Glasgow match to be played behind closed doors demonstrated the power to make clear to authorities that inviting Israel invites disruption, and the potential “chaos” FIFA cited as its reason for banning Russia.
The South African sports boycott was based on the principle that there could be no normal sport in (or with) an abnormal society. The impact of cutting Israel off from international competition will be to show millions of ordinary Israelis that the world does not accept the behavior of their state as normal or acceptable.