Why should Israel be barred from Paris 2024 Olympics?

Over the past two months, developments in Gaza and the Zionist Israeli crimes have hit the world media headlines. Recently, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (commonly known as Euro-Med Monitor and sometimes as Euro-Med HRM) said in a report that 20,031 Palestinians have been martyred in the Zionist regime’s aggression, 8,176 of whom were children.

Amid a four-day temporary ceasefire that started on Friday and has been repeatedly violated by the Zionist regime’s army, international demands for pressure on Tel Aviv are growing. From the commentators’ perspectives, one of the ways to pressure the Zionist regime is barring it from taking part in sports events, most notably the next year’s Paris Olympics.

Recently, the American magazine The Nation has examined the possibility of preventing the Israeli regime from competing in the Paris 2024 Olympics.

“Israel’s attacks on Gaza raise a question that Western powers in the world of sports would like to avoid: Should Israel be penalized or even barred from competing in the Paris 2024 Olympics?” The Nation wrote in a report.

History shows that different countries have been barred many times for various reasons and they have not been allowed to participate in the Olympics, and South Africa during the apartheid period was one of those cases.

Boycotting Apartheid South Africa regime from sporting events

South Africa was formally expelled from the IOC in 1970. In 1976, African nations demanded that New Zealand be suspended by the IOC for continued contacts with South Africa, including a tour of South Africa by the All Blacks: when the IOC declined to do so, the African teams boycotted the Games.

South Africa under apartheid was subjected to a variety of international boycotts, including on sporting contacts. There was some debate about whether the aim of the boycott was to oppose segregation in sport or apartheid in general, with the latter view prevailing in later decades. While the National Party introduced apartheid in 1948, it added sport-specific restrictions from the late 1950s, on interracial sport within South Africa and international travel by nonwhite athletes. The international federations (IFs) governing various sports began to sanction South Africa, both in response to the new restrictions and in reflection of the broader anti-racism of national federations in newly independent postcolonial states. By the early 1970s, South African national teams were excluded from most Olympic sports, although South Africans competed in individual events in some, mainly professional, sports through the 1980s. Although from the mid-1970s the National Party relaxed the application of segregation provisions in relation to sport, this failed to alleviate the boycott, which continued until the end of apartheid.

Boycotting Russia and Belarus from the Paris Olympics

The teams from Russia and Belarus will not receive formal invitations to participate in next year’s Olympic Games in Paris because of the two countries’ aggression against Ukraine, the International Olympic Committee announced in a statement back in July 2023.

The decision means that when invitations go out to more than 200 countries, a year before the start of the Olympic games as per ritual, Russia and Belarus will not be included.

The IOC’s condemnation of Russia and Belarus’s participation in “the senseless war” in Ukraine was first issued in February 2022, soon after the military attack was launched by Russia.

In March, the IOC recommended that Russian and Belarusian athletes could be allowed to participate as long as they did so as “individual neutral athletes.”

Now is the time for the Zionist Israeli regime

Now, Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank may lead to a campaign to get it booted from the Paris Olympics.

In the last 75 years, the Zionist regime has used all means to oppress the Palestinian people. But after the Al-Aqsa Storm operation launched by Hamas on October 7, the crimes of the regime intensified more than ever before. In 50 days, the Zionist regime committed a crime against the people of the Gaza Strip to the extent that even the Western supporters of this regime did not dare to publicly support Israel’s attacks. A quick look at Israel’s crimes in the Gaza war before the 4-day ceasefire clearly shows how barbaric Israel’s attacks were:

During the Gaza war, according to information from reliable institutions, a Palestinian was killed every four minutes. On average, 6 children and 4 women were martyred every hour. More than 20,000 Gazans were martyred as a result of Israeli attacks. So far, the Zionist regime has targeted 52 medical centers, among which 25 hospitals have been out of service. The severity of bombardment by the Zionist regime in just one week has been more than the total of bombardment in Afghanistan during the 20 years of American occupation. The death toll in Gaza in the first 25 days of the war exceeded the death toll in the war in Ukraine, which has been going on for nearly 21 months. The power of the Zionist regime’s bombs against the Gaza Strip was more than twice the power of the Little Boy nuclear bomb (against Hiroshima). The explosives used in the Zionist attacks is equivalent to 10 kilograms of explosives for each Palestinian residing in the Gaza Strip. In just three weeks of the war, the number of Palestinian martyred children exceeded the number of children killed in all parts of the world since 2019.

Those cases were just a few instances of the Israeli regime’s crimes.

The situation of apartheid South Africa, which was barred from the Olympics, is very similar to the gross violation of human rights by the Zionists. Many black activists in the field of human rights and the campaigners against apartheid argue that the crimes of the Zionist regime in different periods have shown that despite the similarities between the apartheid system of the regime and South Africa, the apartheid in the occupied territories is much more fierce, violent, more blatant and more inhumane than the similar situation in Africa. It is expected that at least a similar fate will happen to them regarding the Olympics.

Recently, the American newspaper New York Times in a report compared the US killings in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan with those of the Zionist regime in Gaza and concluded that the crimes that the US committed in 20 years, Israel committed in 50 days.