You could feel for Basketball Ireland chief executive John Feehan this week. The former head of the Six Nations and Lions rugby franchises found himself stuck between a rock and a hard place over Ireland’s EuroBasket qualifier against Israel, a match that many felt should have been boycotted. In case you missed it, after a toxic build up to the game Ireland were beaten 87-57 behind closed doors yesterday in Latvia.
Staged photographs of Israeli players posing with armed members of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in Tel Aviv in the build-up did not help relations. And a provocative anti-Irish slur from an Israeli player, Dor Saar, that Ireland “are quite antisemitic” took the pre-match trash talk to a whole new level of disagreeable. And all to the backdrop of the ongoing carnage in Gaza.
Still, despite having sympathy for Feehan’s predicament, it didn’t mean you had to agree with the decision to play or everything he said, one of his points being that pulling out of the game would be a “gesture that will have no impact”.
The chief executive’s job is to defend basketball’s position and his duty of care is to the sport. But history has shown that gestures can make an impact. The five Irish players who decided not to travel have already done just that.
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Attention has already been drawn to what the photographed IDF soldiers on the basketball court are doing in Gaza. The players’s withdrawal will influence people, generate talking points and has already caused disruption. Their conscientious decision raises awareness and invites people to become engaged.
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Throughout time, personal sacrifice and individual risk-taking on points of principle have sparked larger movements. Just Stop Oil spokesman James Skeet calls it “agenda seeding”.
Skeet said the group intentionally target sporting events revered by the public. The protest on a snooker table at last year’s world championships which was engulfed in a cloud of orange dust went around the world, annoying many but highlighting governmental hypocrisy on climate. Wimbledon was another target last July.
“What we’re attempting to do is force the issue to the forefront of public consciousness, and up the media agenda,” said Skeet. “If you haven’t got millions of eyeballs, you’re not in the ballpark of achieving significant societal change.”
Protesters have also attracted unexpected supporters. Coco Gauff sympathised with a small group who disrupted her semifinal US Open tennis match last year against Karolína Muchová. Play was suspended for more than 45 minutes when one of them glued his feet to the floor in the stands. In a news conference afterwards, the best-known American tennis player surprised many.
“I wasn’t pissed at the protesters,” she said. “I know the stadium was, because it just interrupted entertainment. I always speak about preaching what you feel and what you believe in. It was done in a peaceful way, so I can’t get too mad at it.”
It is not an unreasonable view that Basketball Ireland should have been stronger and played the conscientious objector card when the international body Fiba warned them about fines of up to €180,000 and threated to cast them into international basketball wilderness for five years. Then they might have asked if similar threats were made to Israel when they boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Instead, five Irish players withdrew as Israeli players took refuge in patriotism, one weaponising it to sling accusations of anti-semitism, a common position over the last few months as attention is deflected away from the thousands of dead children in Gaza.
To have withdrawn should not have been a tough decision, not when the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted overwhelmingly in favour of a resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire and The International Court of Justice ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide against Palestinians and do more to help civilians.
Gestures have an impact. They are the small events that serve as catalysts. They are vital to change. Ordinary people cannot determine the outcome of world events. Gestures are all most people have got.
