Basketball Ireland has been given a poison chalice ahead of tomorrow’s scheduled FIBA Women’s EuroBasket 2025 qualifier against Israel.
The game had originally been scheduled to take place in Israel in November with a fixture in Dublin in November of 2024.
Ireland would not travel due to security concerns off the back of the Israeli offensive against Palestinian innocents in Gaza, triggered by the Hamas attack on Israeli innocents in October.
An attempt to switch the fixtures so that Ireland would play at home first was also ruled out because Ireland could not guarantee the safety of the Israeli delegation given heightened public anger here against the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces.
The game was then fixed for Riga in Latvia and will take place tomorrow, February 8th.
There is a natural anger in Ireland that we as a nation should be playing the match and in their eyes placing a sporting fixture above the human tragedy unfolding in the middle east.
Basketball Ireland are between a rock and a hard place. Because FIBA, the international body have imposed no sanction or penalty on Israel, they insist that the fixture be fulfilled. To fail to do so would trigger €180,000 in fines but also a five year expulsion of Ireland from international basketball competition.
That same threat hangs over Latvia and France who are both in the same group. Latvia will play Israel on Saturday, also in Riga.
France are scheduled to play Israel in November at home and next February away.
Israel will be in the draw for the UEFA European Nations League draw in Paris this Thursday. Thankfully they are in League A and so cannot be drawn against either the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland but if they were and the same penalties were being threatened against the Irish teams, would the same level of insistence on not playing be made.
They probably would but we are also engaging in business on a daily basis with Israeli companies, eating food and engaging in many ways less obvious than sport with things that are coming from Israel.
Israel will be in the Eurovision Song Contest, the Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer. The points at which we will be wrapped up in having to make a choice are many and complex.
Individual responses to make a stand are down to every individual and Ireland has been almost alone in Europe in standing against the Israeli actions on purely humanitarian grounds.
Until such time as FIBA as the international governing body imposes sanctions, Basketball Ireland is in an impossible position.
The photographs published yesterday by the Israeli team supporting the Israeli Defence Forces and with guns laid out on the practice court before they left for Riga should be enough to force FIBA to act on their bringing the sport into disrepute. Accusations from Israeli players that the Irish are antisemitic are aggressive, wrong and inflammatory.
There is time for FIBA to do that right up until the buzzer.
It would be the right thing to do and it would have been in part forced by the actions of Ireland in resisting the game without stepping into the world of them being sanctioned themselves and Israel competing away merrily while we are on the sidelines for half a decade.
Failing that there is still the option for the team and players to make a protest when the eyes of the world are upon them.
They have to take to the court but perhaps they do not have to compete. Perhaps there could be injuries that do not enable us to complete the fixture. Perhaps there could be a protest by the players ‘taking a knee’ or making a personal stand themselves.
That alone would be braver in reality than many of the loud protests on social media about their actions. It is easier to fly a flag and wear a badge than to take a principled stand with real consequence for you.
Some people for whom I have the highest regard will take issue with that and John Feehan’s statement that refusing to play would make no difference is not true, we never know the tipping point but the balance of potential good versus certain consequence is not something they should have had to face.
Not playing the game would be the right thing on every level of human rights. But so long as the sanction for doing so punishes the players for taking a stand rather than those who think it OK to pose with guns at a time when those guns are trained on civilians, women and children, then the finger of blame and anger should be on the Basketball administrators of FIBA first and foremost, and alongside them other sporting bodies that have failed to act.
But there is still time.
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