The Olympic Games and Israel’s security narrative

The Israeli Olympics team will be provided with 24-hour security during their stay in Paris, after left-wing MP Thomas Portes said that protests should be staged against the Israeli team’s participation. A call for protests triggers security concerns, but Israel’s genocide in Gaza triggers no concern for the safety of the Palestinians who are being annihilated.

Portes’s call for protests elicited assurances from the French government, with interior minister Gerald Darmanin saying that the Israeli athletes will be “protected around the clock during the Games”, and foreign minister Stephane Sejourne extending a welcome to the team and reassuring Israel of “ensuring the security of the Israeli delegation.”

According to sports anthropologist Jean Baptiste Guegan, as reported by the Times of Israel, “My greatest fear, and I am not the only one to share it, is that we have a rekindling of the memory of Munich and the desire of certain actors to make Paris a new Munich.” Munich, of course, is a reference to the killing of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in the German city.

US State Department official Paul Benvie stated that anti-Israel sentiment is “part of the ongoing analysis to determine where we do need to adjust our strategies.” And if Israel has its way, the Olympic Games will also become part of Israel’s security narrative, even though the bigger picture should concern Israel’s prevailing impunity in the face of committing genocide openly, in real time.

How does committing genocide not automatically exclude a state from international sporting events?

Is it because, despite human rights being part of the Olympic Charter, political neutrality is also applied as one of the fundamental principles? And if political neutrality applies, why is Israel being allowed to politicise the Olympic Games by constantly juxtaposing the games against its colonial agenda to wipe out the Palestinians in Gaza? Israel dictates not only the Palestinian people’s trajectories, but also the entire world’s perception of any event it participates in. So much so, in fact, that an international event is now being projected as something where the priority is Israel’s security, not the sports and athletes.

Turning to the International Olympic Committee, how does it define political neutrality, since athletes are representing their countries? Israel has involved the entire world in its genocide; does that constitute political neutrality by way of acquiescence, overt support or futile opposition, since genocide is a newly-invented status quo? How about the Palestinian victims of genocide? Where is the political neutrality in Israel’s genocide kill toll?

In Gaza, there is no protection for Palestinians, never mind the 24-7 kind promised by France for Israeli athletes and coaches, despite an entire population being forcibly displaced from one area to another only to be bombed time and time again by Israel’s occupation army. Human rights, as in the Olympics, are wiped out by so-called political neutrality, which is clearly a euphemism for silencing the colonised people and, preferably, killing them, even though international organisations will never own up to such a strategy. However, Israel is not restricted by political neutrality. Just like it does with international law, Israel can politicise the Olympic Games, secure the event within its own racist narrative and use it as publicity for its genocide in Gaza. While Palestinians are killed en masse by political neutrality, Israel is protected by its malleable concept.

The Olympic Games and Israel’s security narrative