FIFA banned apartheid South Africa. It banned Russia for invading Ukraine. But about Israel, FIFA does nothing.
Celtics supporters hold Palestinian flags and stage a protest with the slogan “Free Palestine” during the UEFA Champions League football match between Borussia Dortmund and Celtic in Germany on October 1.(Ina Fassbender / Getty Images)
On October 1, fans of the Scottish soccer club Celtic FC waved Palestinian flags and released green smoke during their Champions League match against Borussia Dortmund in Germany. Celtic’s Green Brigade supporters group, long champions of the Palestinian cause, orchestrated a mini-protest for Gaza: Fourteen people, wearing keffiyeh balaclavas and white shirts that spelled out “Free Palestine,” lit flares in unison.
Two days later, FIFA, the world’s governing body for soccer, took the opposite approach: It refused to act on the Palestinian Football Association’s request to suspend Israel for violating international law in its ongoing attacks on Gaza, for discriminating against Arab players, and for including in its domestic league clubs that are located in Palestinian territory. Instead, FIFA issued an evasive statement in bureaucratese: “The FIFA Disciplinary Committee will be mandated to initiate an investigation into the alleged offense of discrimination raised by the Palestine Football Association.” Fully committing to the stonewalling, the group stated, “The FIFA Governance, Audit and Compliance Committee will be entrusted with the mission to investigate—and subsequently advise the FIFA Council on—the participation in Israeli competitions of Israeli football teams allegedly based in the territory of Palestine.”
In other words, FIFA kicked the can of ethics down the road.
Let’s be clear: FIFA’s double standard is glaring. In 2022, FIFA banned Russia just four days after the invasion of Ukraine. FIFA issued an unequivocal joint statement with UEFA, the overseers of European football: “Football is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine.” And yet, to date, the soccer honchos have extended no such sentiments of solidarity to the people of Gaza, where more than 41,000 people have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces. According to a statement by the Palestinian Football Association in July, 343 athletes have been killed since October 7, 2023, including 242 soccer players.
The statutes guiding FIFA are straightforward: “FIFA is committed to respecting all internationally recognised human rights and shall strive to promote the protection of these rights.” The group’s governing regulations also state, “Discrimination of any kind” is “strictly prohibited and punishable by suspension or expulsion.”
FIFA’s conspicuous inaction is similar to the International Olympic Committee’s approach to Israel’s participation in the Paris Olympics last summer. Russian athletes were forced to participate as “individual neutral athletes,” while Israeli Olympians were free to compete under their flag and with their national anthem.
In August, Palestinian Football Association President Jibril Rajoub told us that Israel should be barred from sports due to its extreme human rights violations. “It’s not a political issue for me. It’s a moral issue. It’s a legal issue. It’s an ethical issue,” he said.
Rajoub has long fought to exclude Israel from the World Cup and Olympics—or, as he phrased it, to issue them “a red card”—because of the country’s clear violations of both FIFA Statutes and the Olympic Charter. In May, Rajoub said, “FIFA cannot afford to remain indifferent to these violations or to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, just as it did not remain indifferent to numerous precedents.”
Rajoub is not alone. Human rights experts from the United Nations issued a statement demanding that FIFA respect international law, noting, “Over the years, at least eight [Israeli] football clubs have developed or have been identified as playing in Israeli colonial settlements of the occupied West Bank.” The experts added, “A ninth club, based inside Israel, plays some home games in a settlement.”
The human rights group Ekō carried out a detailed investigation that concluded that Israel should be banned from international football. It pinpointed specific historical moments when FIFA banned countries because of gross human rights violations: South Africa was banned in 1961 over apartheid, and Yugoslavia was not allowed to play after violence it meted out in the Balkans. For years Human Rights Watch has been documenting how Israeli soccer clubs have been staging matches in West Bank settlements, thereby contributing to human rights violations. “By holding games on stolen land, FIFA is tarnishing the beautiful game of football,” HRW asserted, way back in 2016.
In 2023, UEFA fined Celtic FC $19,000 after its justice-minded fans brandished Palestinian flags during a Champions League match, categorizing the flags as “provocative messages of an offensive nature.” And yet Celtic diehards have not relented, demonstrating more courage and commitment to principle than either FIFA or UEFA.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic—and civilians around the world—and shine a bright light on the truth.
The Nation’s experienced team of writers, editors, and fact-checkers understands the scale of what we’re up against and the urgency with which we have to act. That’s why we’re publishing critical reporting and analysis of the war on Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.
But this journalism is possible only with your support.
This March, The Nation needs to raise $50,000 to ensure that we have the resources for reporting and analysis that sets the record straight and empowers people of conscience to organize. Will you donate today?
Katarina Pijetlovic, the head of the Palestinian Football Association legal department, said to us, “This decision, while frustrating, was expected because it’s FIFA, and this is how they operate. There is a reason that when [FIFA President Gianni] Infantino was elected in 2016, Israel supported the decision. Now we know why they were so thrilled. Because of moments like this.”
It is precisely “moments like this” that make efforts to extract justice for Palestine through FIFA such a difficult road. The fight for a free Palestine is a fight ultimately for social justice against an apartheid settler state backed by the West. FIFA presents itself as a global, all-encompassing organization with room in its arms for all nations. But the reality is that wealthy, Western nations play the tune and Infantino dances.
Not even the mass civilian casualties in Palestine have caused Infantino and FIFA to act differently. To think that FIFA would live up to fundamental principles enshrined in its own rules is to live in a global fantasyland. In reality, these Western institutions—like FIFA—see life as cheap.
Jules BoykoffJules Boykoff is a professor of political science at Pacific University and the author of two books on the politics of soccer—Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine and Kicking, a memoir—as well as six books on the Olympics, most recently What Are the Olympics For?
Dave ZirinDave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL.