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Activism Caucus: Israel’s Lethal Involvement in Mega-Sporting Events: Heeding the Call for Boycott

Fri, November 18, 12:00 to 1:45pm, HYATT REGENCY AT COLORADO CONVENTION CTR, Floor: Level 4, Capitol 1

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

This panel will discuss the intersection of Israel, Palestine and sports in the era of the global campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). This panel will provide the historical and political context that detrimentally affects Palestinian athletes. Palestinian athletes live under a state of occupation whereby their training facilities are destroyed by Israeli bombs. Palestinians have coped with: the (administrative) detention of players; deaths of team mates and announcers, at the hands of the Israeli army; and the inability to move freely through Israeli militarized checkpoints in order to train and compete in matches. This has led to an international campaign featuring prominent footballers calling for FIFA to expel Israel from its fold or at least prevent them from hosting FIFA sanctioned tournaments. No sports league has had more pressure and had to respond more on this issue than FIFA. Moreover, the panel will also highlight the way in which surveillance infrastructure has been ushered into mega-sporting events as a means to securitize, militarize and sanction political suppression in the geographies that mega-sporting events are held, in the post 9-11 era. Israel has been at the center of this securitization and militarization project. This panel will explore the role the Israeli state and its military companies have played in exporting military technology, surveillance methodology, and security ideology to nations and governments that host mega-sporting events in various geographic sites. In particular the panel will focus on Brazil as it is the most recent site of hosting both FIFA (2014) and the Olympics (2016), and the Israeli role in militarizing Brazil under the guise of creating ``safe cities`` for mega-sporting events. This panel considers the important connections between the production and testing of weapons on Palestinians, and the exporting of this technology to kill and suppress resistance elsewhere (ie Brazil) in sites where mega-sporting events are held. The panel underscores the ways in which social movements are mobilizing to resist Israeli involvement in mega-sporting events (such as FIFA and the Olympics) and the role of BDS in building cross movement solidarity. The panel will elaborate upon the importance of the sporting boycott (of Israel) in relation to the historical boycotts that the international community engaged in to isolate apartheid South Africa.
The panel will conclude with a discussion on the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), and situates the formation and expansion of the movement within its local and global contexts. The paper contends that the indigenous Palestinian movements and forces that are behind PACBI, and the broader Palestinian movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), have created a powerful framework to rebuild international solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism and white supremacy. The paper analyzes the pedagogy and the praxis of academic boycott as decolonial resistance that exposes the ways Israeli universities are implicated in Zionist settler colonial and apartheid oppression of the Palestinian people, as it critiques and unmasks liberal conceptions of the ivory tower. The panel will reflect on the symbol and material forms of resistance involved in the academic boycott as way to expand conversations in ASA on how to take the academic boycott of Israel forward.

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