Sportswashing is associated with certain countries – why not Israel?

When we refer to sportswashing, the attempt by nation-states to sanitise their reputations and launder their crimes, there is a certain kind of country we’re usually thinking of. We have no problem linking the manifold abuses of Qatar or Saudi Arabia or China to their investment in sport. And yet there appears to be a certain squeamishness about referring to Israel in similar terms, even though its aims are even more explicitly stated, its crimes well documented by human rights groups.


The soft power objective of Israeli sport is for us to focus on a cycling team or a visit by Lionel Messi rather than Palestine

In the summer of 2020 a group of five cyclists from Ramallah were out on a ride when they were stopped by a group of Israeli settlers. According to Reuters, on discovering the cyclists were Palestinian, the settlers began hurling stones at them. Four escaped into a nearby field. One, Samer Kurdi, lost his footing and was repeatedly beaten with a metal rod, suffering serious injuries. It is not known if any arrests were made.


In many ways cycling is the ideal sportswashing partner: a sport with no real tradition of political activism, where cash-strapped teams are generally none too precious about where the money is coming from. But there is another dimension to this: for many cycling is synonymous with freedom, the open road, the intimate connection between humans and the land. For Palestinian cyclists, running a daily gauntlet of checkpoints, roadblocks, violence and economic hardship, the bike is its own quiet form of resistance. “It is our duty to keep our relationship with this land,” a Palestinian cyclist called Sohaib Samara told the Guardian in 2020. “If we stop moving around, the occupiers will steal more of it.”

And so for Israel sport serves a dual function: both positive reinforcement and tool of repression. In March 2018, a promising Palestinian cyclist called Alaa al-Dali attended a march in Gaza with his bike, wearing cycling kit, to protest against Israel’s refusal to allow him to travel abroad for international competition. According to a United Nations report, he was shot by an Israeli sniper in the leg, which then had to be amputated after his request to leave Gaza for treatment was denied by Israeli authorities. He now competes as a para-cyclist.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/bl...why-not-israel

During the recent Palestinian protests in Gaza against Israeli ethnic cleansing up to 100 Israeli snipers competed to shoot the protesters through the knees.
The protesters were in their own country and unarmed.

This should give you a pretty good idea of Israeli fascism in action.

When countries refuse to allow Israeli ' athletes ' in, or when Olympic entrants refuse to compete against Israelis it is because they already know what ' sportswashing ' is.
When artists in countries refuse to participate in events that have an Israeli sponsorship component it's because they already know what ' artwashing ' is.

For Americans who continue to support Israel's crimes against humanity- it's a fact that they don't know what ' brainwashing ' is.


This, of course, is not an anti-Jewish post. It's an anti Jewish fascist post.