This week’s big international soccer match in Paris will be judged exclusively by what happens before and after the game, a 24-hour period in which sports will hold more significance for international relations than most Olympics can muster.
France’s national team is playing Israel’s Thursday evening at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis. French President Emmanuel Macron will be at the game, which will have fewer fans and far more police and security personnel than a typical French national game at the stadium. According to the Guardian, about a quarter of the stadium’s seats have been made available for the game on Thursday. About 5,000 police officers and 1,600 “security staff” will be in and around the stadium, as well as throughout the metro system in an attempt to head off anything like what we saw in Amsterdam.
Macron’s attendance, which is intended to “send a message of fraternity and solidarity after the intolerable acts of antisemitism that followed the match in Amsterdam,” is welcome. Israel’s national security council has warned Israelis against attending the game, however, and recommends that those who do show up wear clothing that doesn’t identify them as Jewish or Israeli.
That concern goes beyond Paris. Israeli authorities have picked up evidence that organized violence could be triggered in several European cities on Thursday. Presumably these would take the form of anti-Israel “protests” that went looking for trouble, which is what happened in Amsterdam before the game.
All of which raises wider questions about the attempts to exclude Israelis from international sports competitions. Although many tried to isolate the Amsterdam incident, it didn’t happen in a vacuum: Israel’s national team in the Union of European Football Association (UEFA) has been playing its home games in… Budapest. Maccabi Tel Aviv—the team that played in Amsterdam the night of the pogrom—plays its European home games in Hungary and Serbia. Its home games.
That UEFA policy has been in effect since soon after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre touched off the current war. In other words, fans of Israel’s national team and its premier club team must travel out of the country to attend any of their games. The violence in European stadiums threatens to create the soccer version of a hostage situation and make it impossible for Israeli fans to ever watch their team play.
And it’s not exactly up to Israel. Host cities will decide for themselves if their own fans and locals are too dangerous for soccer. Mostly likely, the threat itself is everywhere but the cities that can handle such threats will continue to host games. Paris is one such city, but its reduced attendance isn’t a great sign. In any event, here’s the test for similar cities around the world: Can you prevent your residents from burning the city to the ground over the presence of Jews playing soccer? Given the reports of follow-up violence in Amsterdam tonight, and the fact that the city’s police force aided the pogrom, that’s not a test everyone will pass. Maccabi’s upcoming game against a Turkish squad had to be moved out of Istanbul for security reasons. A September game between Israel and Belgium was played in Hungary because Brussels refused to host.
Of course, the attempts to ban Israelis around the world didn’t begin with Gaza. As the Associated Press explains: “Israel’s neighbors in the Middle East play in Asian competitions. Israel did too until the 1970s, when it was expelled from the Asian Football Confederation after several Arab and Muslim nations refused to play against it. Israel was invited to European qualifying for the 1982 World Cup and has been a member of UEFA since 1994.”
Playing in the European league has gone better than playing in the Asian league so far, as evidenced by the fact that European teams aren’t refusing to play the Israeli teams. But for how long will that hold? Some teams’ home cities, as mentioned above, are refusing to host such games already. It’s far from unthinkable that teams will start refusing to play Maccabi or Israel’s national team, especially if they can’t play in their home city (which is what happened with Belgium’s team).
Then there are the free-speech battles that the anti-Israel rioters are desperately trying to provoke, and almost certainly will. The model for the anti-Israel demonstrations, especially since Oct. 7, has been to roam around looking for a physical confrontation while calling explicitly for violence. Hungary simply has less freedom to protest across the board; that’s not a model that Western Europe should import. Yet, as evidenced by the events in Amsterdam, it’s harder than it looks to get a “pro-Palestinian” demonstration to stay on its route.
The easiest solution would be for anti-Zionist protesters to just, you know, not be violent. But considering how successful they’ve been at using the heckler’s veto to effectively ban matches with Israelis so far, we should expect continued escalation.
