NO WORLD CUP FOR GENOCIDE

Sport has never been separate from politics. That is why apartheid South Africa’s exclusion from the Olympics and FIFA mattered: it denied a racist regime the ability to normalise itself on the world’s biggest stage. It was ordinary fans, athletes, and movements that forced federations to act, and Nelson Mandela later called the sports boycott one of the struggle’s most important weapons.

Half a century later, the same moral question confronts us once again. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. A Lancet study warns the real toll could reach 186,000 when starvation, disease, and health collapse are counted. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry says Israel is committing genocide. The International Court of Justice has ordered provisional measures. Yet the bombs keep falling, and aid is blocked.

To allow Israel to compete in the World Cup is not neutrality — it is complicity. The tournament is the most powerful stage of soft power globally. To stand aside is to give atrocity a cheering crowd. Calls from UN experts and campaigners to suspend Israel are not fringe demands. They are the logical continuation of a precedent set against apartheid South Africa. History will ask what sport did in the face of mass atrocity. Did FIFA and UEFA rise to the moment? Did fans and federations act with courage? Or did they let the spectacle go on, while Gaza burned in silence?