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The Man Using Sports to Fight Israeli War Crimes [1]
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Date: 2024-08-13 09:00:00+00:00
World / The Man Using Sports to Fight Israeli War Crimes Jibril Rajoub, the head of the Palestine Olympic Committee, says sports can be a nonviolent tool to resist occupation.
Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestine Olympic Committee, sits for an interview in Paris on July 27, 2024.
(Thibaud Moritz / AFP via Getty Images)
Paris—Jibril Rajoub, the 71-year-old head of the Palestine Olympic Committee, has been fighting the Israeli Occupation for almost 60 years. He told us that he started after Israel imprisoned him at age 14 for attempting to help Egyptian military members flee Israeli capture. As a teenager in prison, Rajoub was recruited to the Palestinian political and military resistance organization Fatah, also known as Palestinian National Liberation Movement. Rajoub, in total, has spent almost two decades in Israeli prisons. In 1985, Israel freed him as part of a hostage exchange, but Israel arrested him soon after and placed him in solitary confinement, where he almost died during a 30-day hunger strike.
Rajoub’s long career in both Palestinian politics and athletics has earned him many enemies. Fifty-four years ago, as part of the PNLM, he threw a grenade at a bus and was sentenced to life in an Israeli prison (emerging only after the aforementioned prisoner exchange). He is often referred to in the Israeli press as “convicted terrorist Jibril Rajoub.”
He continues to resist the Israeli state, but for the last almost two decades, he has done so through sports. His political and military opponents accuse him of using sports to promote “violence and hatred”—a charge he vociferously denies. By supporting athletes who refuse to play Israeli competitors on political grounds and calling for sporting bans of Israel, he has also faced charges and investigations into his conduct by international sports federations. Yet, while he walks now with weariness, he is still standing.
“Sport today is a global language,” he told us. “I have spent 17 years in Israeli jails, which was worse than the Bastille. But in spite of that, I don’t want to cause suffering to anyone, no matter who he is and where he is coming from. I do believe that using sport, using athletes as an asset in our resistance and in our struggle, is very effective. And even here in France, the way that we were received, and all over the world, is encouraging me and motivating me to continue this path. A peaceful, nonviolent tool: sport.”
Rajoub said these words wearing a rumpled suit, sitting slightly slouched in a bar booth at Paris’s Hyatt Regency at 10 pm. The hotel was an Olympic hub, with officials and the press scurrying around. Amid the hyper, happy chatter around us, he is deliberate in his speech, slow in his cadence: tired but resolute.
Rajoub wants sports to show the world the resilience of Palestine and how Israeli occupation has warped even something as commonplace as organized athletics. He has long campaigned to bar Israel from the Olympics and World Cup—or, as he put it, to give them “a red card”—because of their violations of the Olympic Charter and FIFA resolutions against apartheid in sports. He said, “It’s not a political issue for me. It’s a moral issue. It’s a legal issue. It’s an ethical issue.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/palestine-paris-olympics-jibril-rajoub/
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