Should Israel be banned from international sport and the Eurovision Song Contest?

I think, in general, sporting boycotts and bans are bad ideas, simply because of the practical consideration that such a large percentage of the world’s population live under authoritarian regimes or in countries waging unjust wars, and international sport would thus cease to function in any meaningful sense if a ‘whiter than white’ approach was attempted. Nevertheless, sporting boycotts are credited with possibly hastening the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and I do believe that was a justified exception to the general rule because you couldn’t separate the sport from the apartheid – if you played South Africa at rugby or cricket you were legitimising an all-white team that clearly didn’t represent the country’s population. In the early years, apartheid sometimes even had a restrictive effect on who was picked to play against South Africa, as in the Basil D’Oliveira controversy, which was plainly an unacceptable and unsustainable state of affairs.

Apartheid in modern Israel / Palestine is often compared to apartheid in South Africa, so are the parallels exact enough to justify a similar exception that should see Israel cast out of international sport and the Eurovision Song Contest? The case can be argued either way. The similarities are obvious enough – Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are denied their own state, self-government is confined to small, non-contiguous Bantustan-like parcels of land that are designed to ensure a real sovereign state remains non-viable, and yet Palestinians in those territories are denied citizenship and voting rights in the only state that does exist. But there is one key difference with apartheid-era South Africa, which is that there are substantial numbers of Palestinians in Israel proper who do have citizenship and voting rights and who are allowed to mingle with the Jewish population, and can represent Israel at sporting events, etc. The tactic is thus not to keep Palestinians out of Israeli life altogether, but to arbitrarily restrict the numbers who are granted rights so that they cannot ever become a ‘problem’.

Personally I think Israel should be suspended from this year’s Eurovision – if Russia’s actions last year warranted suspension, it’s hard to see how Israel’s actions over recent months fall short of the same threshold. But if that actually happened, the contest would probably be in jeopardy because Germany would walk out and take its money away. As the ICJ case demonstrated, Germany has this weird notion that it has the exclusive right to adjudicate upon what constitutes a genocide for the very reason that it was the perpetrator of the worst one in global history.

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