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A Red Card Long Overdue: FIFA Must Ban Israel Now

March 22, 2025
Opinion

After four call-ups without a cap, promising 19-year-old midfielder Celine Haidar was finally set to make her senior debut for Lebanon’s women’s national team in October of last year, until the Israeli invasion cancelled the match.

 

One month later, while visiting the hometown she’d been forced to flee, Israel once again bombed her suburb, causing shrapnel to hit her in the head and critically damage her skull and brain. While she lay there in a coma, Israel then bombed the hospital she was in, too.

 

Unfortunately, Haidar’s story is hardly unique. In just the first 10 months of the most-broadcast genocide in human history, the rogue apartheid state of Israel launched over 17,000 attacks against five of its neighboring countries and systematically flattened most of what little Palestinian territory is still left unoccupied, killing an estimated 186,000 Palestinian people and intentionally starving the survivors.

 

 

As of January, Israel had murdered multiple FIFA referees and over 700 Palestinian athletes in the prior 15 months – at least half of the victims were footballers, and around 100 were children. High profile victims include the first Gazan to score 100 goals, the “Legend of Khan Younis,” Mohammed Barakat, and Assistant Manager of Palestine’s Olympic team, Hani Al-Masdar. The head of the Palestinian Football Association (PFA)’s medical department, Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, was taken hostage by Israeli forces and raped to death.

 

The Western-backed nuclear power has also bombed nearly 300 sporting facilities, including every single one of Palestine’s professional stadiums (one of which they later turned into a concentration camp), and even attacked the PFA’s headquarters.

 

Ruining far more than just footballing dreams, Israel has made Gaza home to the largest number of amputee children in modern history, many of whom had their limbs cut off in squalid conditions without anesthetics. Ensuring they can’t even play amputee football, Netanyahu’s far-right regime has also blocked the importation of crutches.

 

 

Yet somehow, this evening, just days after Israel’s latest ceasefire violation, in which they slaughtered over 400 more Palestinians in one of the single largest massacres since this genocide began, they will suit up to play Estonia in a game of football. Not just any game of football, but a UEFA qualification match for what is meant to be the most unifying and harmonious event in human history – the FIFA World Cup.

 

This injustice is even more shocking when contrasted with how FIFA and UEFA swiftly expelled Russia just four days after they launched their ground invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The precedent couldn’t be any clearer – this simply should not be allowed to pass.

 

Football’s governing bodies obviously can, in fact, stop a nation from sportswashing their crimes against humanity with our beautiful game. So why, when it comes to Israel, which is committing atrocities on a far larger scale and at record-breaking pace, is there such unjustifiably hypocritical inaction?

 

 

If the literal genocide somehow wasn’t enough to warrant dismissal, Israel is also simultaneously breaking FIFA’s laws against political interference, exploitation of occupied territory, and racial discrimination (Benjamin Netanyahu’s favorite club infamously refuses to sign Arab players, to give just one example).

 

Still, FIFA waited until May 2024 to announce a committee meeting meant to take place that July to merely discuss the topic. They’ve subsequently postponed this promised meeting multiple times, and it’s still yet to happen as of writing almost a year later.

 

Israel only participates in European competition (and is therefore able to enter World Cup qualification) in the first place because it was already justly expelled from the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) by a majority vote. Imagine the outrage if, after being kicked out by UEFA, Russia circumvented its ban by simply joining another continent’s federation.

 

Of course, FIFA has never been a spotless arbiter of justice – they infamously let Nazi Germany participate in the 1938 World Cup, and even let the fascist military dictatorship ruling Argentina in 1978 host that year’s final mere miles away from a torture camp full of political prisoners who could hear the match from their cells.

 

 

But football’s rule-makers no doubt got it right when they banned Germany following their second genocide in just 40 years, and joined the anti-apartheid movement by expelling South Africa a few decades after that. They’ve even done it for far less – Mexico was barred from the 1990 edition just for sneaking a few overage players onto one of their youth teams. In other words – if they wanted to, they would.

 

Even on a smaller scale, FIFA president Gianni Infantino hasn’t so much as spoken out against the glaring inconsistencies at play. Players completely unconnected to the war in Ukraine are being banned from traveling to matches because they happen to have a Russian passport, while Israeli soldiers-turned-footballers get away with posting grotesque, racist calls for violence without consequence.

 

Unfortunately, this hypocritical complicity isn’t limited to just football’s governing bodies. FIFPRO, the global union for footballers, quickly evacuated Ukrainian players impacted by the conflict and backed those who refused to play against Russia. Yet they’ve offered no such support for their Palestinian members, nor have they spoken out as players are wrongfully terminated for expressing support for Palestine.

 

In fact, FIFPRO doesn’t appear to have even so much as publicly acknowledged its most in-need community since posting a tweet about Palestinian footballer Ahmad Atef Daragmah’s murder at the hands of Israeli forces back in 2022.

 

To put it bluntly, there’s a word for the systemic valuing of white European lives more than brown Arab ones, and that word is “racism.” It seems FIFA won’t kick that out, either (though they will, however, stand by as fans are kicked out of stadiums for merely holding a Palestinian flag).

 

 

Last month, amidst this vacuum of responsibility, the historically active Celtic faithful launched their own “Show ‘Israel’ The Red Card” campaign to demand a change. In an incredible display of global solidarity and grassroots organizing, it took less than two weeks for 72 other clubs across 25 nations in every confederation to join The Green Brigade in protest.

 

Though FIFA/UEFA continuously fail to acknowledge (or even actively fine!) their own base for boldly demonstrating their own purported values, this organic fan movement does seem to be worrying the perpetrators.

 

 

But if the powers that be won’t uphold basic human principles or even go to bat for the footballers who generate their revenue out on the pitch, then they should at least fulfil their obligation to protect the fans. They’re flagrantly failing at this too, leaving some government officials to take matters into their own hands and try to enact bans of their own to protect their communities.

 

Far beyond standard hooliganism, Israeli ultras are notoriously some of the most extreme and violent in all of football. This reached mainstream attention when Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv’s supporters, best known for shouting slurs at Arab players, making monkey noises at black players, and beating anti-Netanyahu Israelis with broken bottles, brought their hate crimes on the road to Amsterdam last November.

 

Fresh off of somehow facing no consequences for their crowd nearly killing a Greek fan a few months prior, Maccabi Tel Aviv was gearing up to face Ajax. The night before, a lynch mob consisting of literal war criminals backed by Mossad agents singing “Death to Arabs,” vandalized homes, assaulted taxis, and threatened a teenager for recording it. After locals stood up and fought back to protect their community, the Israelis weaponized disinformation to cry victim, but their gloating videos on the trip home laid bare this obvious projection.

 

 

In a baffling dereliction of duty, FIFA/UEFA still refused to ban Israel from participating in football even after this, allowing the violence to continue as their national team to play France just a few weeks later. Despite Les Bleus supporters boycotting the game, Israeli thugs, led by members of the militant hate group Betar, predictably still managed to start a brawl in the mostly-empty stadium.

 

This begs the question – what else could it possibly take for the complicit FIFA/UEFA to wake up? This indefensible complicity in normalizing such horrific atrocities is making our beautiful game turn uglier and uglier with each passing day, and we simply shouldn’t stand for it.

 

Those who fall back on the spineless refrain of “keep politics out of football” fail to acknowledge the reality that allowing a genocidal apartheid state to sportswash their crimes while their violent hooligans terrorize football fans across the world is an inherently political act. (Next time someone tries to feed you that line, ask if they’d have been fine with Germany doing the same in the 1940s.)

 

While mired in the controversy of the also-problematic Qatar hosting the 2022 World Cup, Infantino laughably claimed, “Today I feel Arabic… Today I feel disabled.” At the time, it was already a nakedly cynical attempt to performatively paper over the human rights abuses that that tournament had been built on top of.

 

In light of FIFA’s complete abandonment of the Palestinian people and their children who have had their legs blown off by Israel, it becomes all the more outrageous a lie.

 

By: Weston Pagano / @westonpagano

Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Andrew Milligan – PA Images

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