What may have saved Israel from expulsion by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (the Federation of International Soccer Association) late last month was the unexpected arrest of a number of the organization’s highest officials for corruption, undisclosed and illegal payments, kickbacks, and bribes.
The arrests threw FIFA into turmoil, which no doubt resulted in the decision to table the debate that may well have led to the first-ever suspension of a member state from the organization – which has been functioning for 111 years and contains 209 federations, each including dozens to hundreds of clubs – for reasons not directly linked to the sport itself.
The reasons the Palestinians gave for requesting the expulsion were (1) the Israeli policy of searching Palestinian athletes and their sports equipment passing through Israel’s borders and (2) the location of five Israeli teams in the West Bank. There is a possibility the farcical motion would not have passed, but the very fact of its acceptance for consideration suggests a deep anti-Israel bias.
It’s important to note that the searching of individuals and equipment at transit points into Israel are normal security checks designed to prevent the smuggling of explosives, and that the five West Bank teams did not participate in international tournaments and in fact are sports clubs of the type that most normative schools allow to operate.
The Palestinians’ soccer ploy was stymied, but the month of May did produce a resolution regarding Israel by another international body – a resolution that should cause every normal person to shudder to the very core of his soul: At the UN World Health Organization’s annual assembly, Israel was the only country in the world singled out as a violator of “health rights” in the course of the year.
The World Health Organization, by a vote of 104 to 4, also called for “health-related technical assistance for the Syrian population in the Occupied Syrian Golan.” Countries like Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Iran (not to mention about a dozen nations in Africa and Asian Nepal and Afghanistan where hundreds of children were kidnapped from their families to be forcibly trained in the art of suicide bombing, or Pakistan, where 132 children were murdered in their classrooms by Taliban terrorists) evidently have no such problems.
All this while, according to easily available documentation, Israeli hospitals accepted without question or payment over a thousand Syrian civilians and soldiers wounded in Syria’s civil war who sought succor on the Israeli side of the border because none is available on their side.
It is clear: Israel is ready to help even its enemies who are in need, but its enemies are not ready to concede even a speck of goodness to Israel.
Of course, sport and health are only symptoms. They are not the only areas in which Israel is put on the carpet and crudely chastised.
Painful concessions are expected from Israel in the political, strategic, and security areas. At the same time, there is virtually no pressure on the Palestinians to acknowledge the rightful existence of a Jewish state on what was the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland 1,400 years before the conquering Arab hordes reached the border of the Holy Land for the first time.
In Europe, many countries have had to adjust to new realities resulting from a substantial Arab and Muslim influx. Holland serves as a good example: high school textbooks there now state that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, declared statehood after “Jewish militias carried out murder in Arab villages and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled and settled in refugee camps across the border.” That lie is stated as solid fact to pacify the recent immigrants. Arab atrocities are not mentioned.