Stadiums, the New Israeli Nightmare

After the attacks on the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv football club in Amsterdam a week ago, again the "hell of Amsterdam" repeated itself for the Israelis in France during a European Football Championship match between Israel and France national footbal teams in Stade De France Stadium in Paris, an incident that once again made the match a place for humiliation of Israelis.

The story began when the French fans before the match booed Israeli national anthem in opposition to the genocide in Gaza. The organizers had to intervene to prevent clashes several times before the match.

Videos taken by spectators and shared on X show fans with Israeli flags moving between the rows of seats at the French stadium, while other fans react by whistling and booing.

Playing under most strict security measures

The match was held under strict and unprecedented security measures and about 4,000 police officers and security forces, in other words one officer for every four spectators, were mobilized a few days before to ensure the security of this match. About 3,000 security forces were deployed in the streets around the stadium to prevent any clashes between the fans of the two teams. For this match, due to security concerns and after the widespread boycott by fans, only 13,000 tickets were sold, which was unprecedented in the history of games in this stadium.

The Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation reported that clashes between Israeli and French fans took place while Shabak Director Ronen Bar was present in Paris to oversee security arrangements.

About 150 Israeli fans were present in the stadium, some of them holding the flags of this regime and clashed with the fans of the French team and the security forces. 

Before this match, the Palestinian fans held several demonstrations and gatherings in protest at the France-Israel football match.

The match was affected by the recent violence in Amsterdam, after the provocative actions of Israeli fans and attacks on them by pro-Palestinian football fans. 

In the clashes in the Netherlands, which took place a week before the Paris game, hundreds of Israelis were beaten by Dutch youths for insulting Palestinians. For this reason, the Israeli government asked the French officials to prevent the repetition of this incident in France with strict security measures, but these measures did not work and could not put down the anger of the French people at Israeli crimes in Gaza and Lebanon. 

Anti-Israeli protests outside the stadium 

The French public opposition to hosting the Israeli football team was not limited to stadium and hundreds of protests in northern suburb of Paris, which is only two kilometers away from the Stade De France, protested while holding Palestinian flag. 

The demonstrators, while expressing their anger at the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron and other officials, condemned the hosting of this game by Paris.

Protesters chanted: "What is our president doing? He went to the stadium to support the Israeli team, this is madness."

Some other protestors believed that there should be no difference between Israel and Russia in terms of human rights violations, killing civilians and committing war crimes. If Russia was banned from the Olympic Games, the Israeli national football team should be banned from UEFA games. 

Sportswashing, the Israeli instrument to cover up its crimes 

Lacking a positive image on the world stage since its foundation in 1948 for its countless crimes against the Palestinians, Israel is investing ij sports events to burnish its image among the public. 

Peter Sagan is one of the cycling coaches in Israeli regime, who has done much since 2019 to help train and find talent for young Israelis in this field. With the help of several other people, he established the "Professional Cycling Team of Israel Start-Up Nation" in the occupied territories, whose athletes are supposed to pursue a specific goal for this regime in international competitions.

This fledgling team has big sponsors such as Israeli billionaire Sylvan Adams, who calls himself the "ambassador general of the state of Israel". Adams sees sports as a means of promoting Israel amid widespread criticism against the regime's human rights record, which has a bad reputation around the world for its treatment of Palestinians and continued defiance of international law. 

Adams says: " In Israel, we are considered a war zone that is always in a state of conflict, but Israeli athletes should tell a story that most of the world's people don't hear about... Most people don't care about politics, and through cultural and sporting events at the global level, we can attract the silent majority."

Ron Baron, another owner of the Israeli cycling team, also describes the presence of athletes in international competitions as a kind of "sports diplomacy". Guy Nev, one of the few Israeli cyclists and a former army sniper, believes that "every athlete knows that by participating in an Israeli team, he is an ambassador of the country." 

Basically, Israeli athletes are either members of the army or registered as army reservists, and each of them has in some way directly contributed to the killing of Palestinians, and this fact has been made available to the public today with the expansion of access to social networks by ordinary people.

Increase in the global awareness of this reality has blocked Israelis from taking political and propagandistic advantages of the sports. 

While earlier refusing to compete against the Israeli athelets, especially in Olympics, was limited to the Muslims, this is now a globalized phenomenon, as public opposition to presence of Israeli athletes in the US and Europe is growing. This shows that the policy of sportswashing for Israeli occupation to gain international legitimacy has not gone anywhere and the Israelis cannot whitewash their hands stained with blood of innocent people in Palestine and Lebanon.