When Canadian tennis star Victoria Mboko, the child of Congolese refugees, won the National Bank Open title in a major upset last week, Canadians celebrated. Her victory reminded us how sports, at their best, bring people together, inspiring lofty ideals like pride, inclusion, and patriotism. But there is no pride in genocide, and we must not allow sports to provide cover for war crimes and ethnic cleansing. 

On September 12-13, Halifax is scheduled to host a Davis Cup international tennis match between Team Canada and Israel at Scotiabank Centre. This event offers Israel the opportunity to sportswash its genocide in Gaza—to use sports to launder its reputation and distract from its human rights atrocities.  

In a presentation at the Halifax City Council’s Special Events Advisory Committee on August 13, Tennis Canada estimated the event’s economic benefit for the city at $2.2 million dollars. There is a macabre algebra in this number: in 2023, before the onset of the genocide, Gaza’s population was estimated at 2.2 million. For the price of Palestinian lives, the city of Halifax is willing to perform public relations for Israel.

While Halifax plans to welcome Israeli tennis players, a report from the Palestinian Football Association counts 421 football players among the 808 athletes killed by Israel in the past 22 months. The latest victim was former Palestinian national team footballer Suleiman al-Obaid, who was killed on August 6 in an Israeli attack on people waiting for humanitarian aid.

It is unconscionable that Halifax would host this match while Palestinians are buried under rubble, starved, and bombed in tents, hospitals, and places of worship. 

In viewing sports, we’re asked to celebrate the power and achievements of the human body. Yet this is a cruel invitation at a time when the United Nations has described Gaza as “home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history.” The World Health Organization estimates that in the first 10 months of the genocide—from October 2023 to July 2024—between 3,105 and 4,050 limbs were amputated in Gaza. The true numbers may be even higher.

In the lead-up to the 2024 Summer Olympics, Palestinian-American swimmer Valerie Tarazi noted the injustice of children in Gaza being stripped of their right to play sports. and to learn instead the “survival skill of swimming.” She added: “While I prepare to swim in Paris…I watch the news and I see people swimming to receive packages from the sea. I swim to compete, they swim to survive.” 

Palestinians and their allies have long called for sporting bodies to ban Israel from international competition. While defenders of Israel’s continued participation argue that sports are “not political,” the West’s hypocritical human rights double standards—and the Palestinian exception—are on clear display.

Last year, the head of the International Olympics Committee maintained there was “no question” about Israel’s participation in the games, even as Russia and Belarus were barred from competing amid the war in Ukraine. Similarly, in 2022, both Russia and Belarus were banned from Davis Cup events, and the International Tennis Federation condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Are Palestinian lives not equally valuable and deserving of solidarity? What values do professional sports promote in our communities when Israel can announce the annexation of Gaza and admit to assassinating journalists and still have its athletes welcomed into our city with open arms? 

Tennis Canada has responded to calls to ban the match by defending “the principle of sport to bring unity, separate from political conflicts.” Speaking at the Special Events Advisory meeting, Tennis Canada’s representative repeated this canned line while addressing concerns about the cost of security and policing for the match. Exposing the absurdity of the claim that national sports teams exist beyond the politics of the nations they represent, authorities are laying plans to police protest and dissent to shield Israel from criticism. In addition to its high moral cost, the event threatens to bring Haligonians an amped up police presence, not unity.

Tennis Canada also blithely promotes the Davis Cup’s benefits to women and girls. This is a vacuous promise when Israel’s crimes in Gaza are so extreme that the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, has said that existing legal concepts are inadequate to describe the scale of the “femi-genocide” unfolding.

Sports have always been political, as Canadian hockey fans who loudly booed the U.S. national anthem during the 4 Nations Face-Off are well aware. As the BDS movement highlights, “Palestinian players and athletes are routinely attacked, imprisoned, and killed. Athletes are denied freedom of movement to attend their own matches, competitions, and training. Palestinian stadiums and sports infrastructures have been bombed and destroyed. Israel even prevents sports equipment from being imported and sports facilities from being developed.” 

The Israeli athletes scheduled to compete in Halifax are not bystanders of Israel’s apartheid. Members of Israel’s Davis Cup team are, like many Israeli citizens, former IDF soldiers who directly participated in Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Speaking in a 2021 interview, player Daniel Cukierman, for example, seemed to himself counter the myth that sports and politics don’t mix. When asked how being from Israel influenced his tennis career, he said: “I think Israel is a special place for someone to grow up an athlete because we have the Army. The three-year Army requirement for Israeli citizens is something that’s really important in our professional careers…being Israeli means serving in the Army and we take pride in that.” Cukierman appears to have stayed publicly silent on the IDF’s actions since October 2023.

As we view in horror the images of deliberate starvation in Gaza, let us ask ourselves if we will allow our sports facilities to become venues to cheer on those who cheer on or remain complicit in genocide. 

It’s significant that this match is scheduled to take place at Scotiabank Centre. Scotiabank is among the top five shareholders of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. Elbit supplies 85 percent of Israel’s drones and up to 85 percent of its land-based equipment. This match is serving up Palestinian blood, masked as friendly international competition. 

In the words of the late South African poet and activist Dennis Brutus, who organized the campaign to boycott apartheid South Africa in international sports, “there can be no normal sport in an abnormal society.” The movement to ban South Africa from sports was essential in mobilizing international awareness about apartheid. 

Athletes, sports scholars, and activists now draw on the legacy and philosophies of athletes such as Muhammed Ali, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and the many other organizers for justice and liberation in sports to say “no match for genocide” in Halifax. 

We call upon people of conscience and humanity in Halifax and across Canada to protest, write, and speak out to oppose the use of this event to launder Israel’s crimes and to reject the presence of IDF soldiers in our communities. We call upon the International Tennis Federation and all other sporting bodies to ban Israel from international competition as long as its genocidal occupation of Palestine continues. We call on Tennis Canada to uphold accountability and apply to Israel the same sanctions it applied to Russia. And we call on the unions whose workers staff the Scotiabank Centre to stand in solidarity with Palestinians by refusing for their labour be used to sportswash genocide. Israel must not play while it turns Gaza into a graveyard.

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11 comments

Stumping for Hamassholes isn’t transformative journalism, it’s utilitarian idiocy.

This “article” is absolutely dripping with propagandized malicious muslim brotherhood ideological bullshit. The Palestinians victimhood card has expired. Release the hostages and take your death cult, Jew hating asses of to Sudan.

What Palestinians allowed when Hamas attacked innocent people on the 7 th oct.
There is absolutely no excuse to allow them to get away with such atrocities, especially when they have shown how they deprive hostages, and innocent victim of food becoming emaciated,,
Then the fact has remained that Hamas has been misleading the media with many such false claims,
And yet there still is no excuse for Palestinians to not speak up where Hamas is hiding, as this definitely points to the fact that Palestinians are still in favor of hiding Hamas,
And if Israel does halt its war effort for peace, with Hamas , there is no reason Hamas will return any live hostages, and only return dead bodies,
As any sign of peace .
It will not last long as Hamas will just rebuild itself and do it again,
Definitely there should be no problem with Israel attending any sporting event in Canada,

I have been studying and teaching this subject for thirty years, never a darker moment, and certainly no time to endorse normal relations with the state of Israel.

Piss off with the genitive talk; Israel is dealing with terrorists in an appropriate and realistic way. Hamas supporters are immoral or stupid.

Israel should not be allowed to play, or even travel to Canada. We don’t want them here!

Last night Halifax council voted to allow the match to happen and to spend the $50,000 necessary to bring it here. There were many members of the public there to speak against the motion, and many others had overwhelmed the mayor and councillors with emails begging them not to host this abomination. Did council also get emails from the But-Hamas bots filling this comments section? We can assume they did. Israel, in addition to the endless military force it is given by the US, has endless resources for propaganda. Thank you to El Jones and The Breach for countering it with truth and the limited budget that comes from public support.

Companies and government organizations with weak leadership always turn a blind eye when they see the injustice and immoral stance of the Israeli government control over the Palestinian people of Palestine. They will forever be associated with the reign of terror and apartheid that has never ended since 1948. 77yrs and counting…and yet the Zionist lobby has bought over all!

Thank you.
Aug.23/25

What a bunch of idiotic losers responding in the commments. Israel is genocidal. You are genocide denier. You support an ethnostate. You must all burn in hell.

Screaming that all Palestinians are Hamas is like saying every Canadian is Paul Bernardo. Israel clearly doesn’t need your defense given the massively lopsided death toll. Do you deranged clowns even watch tennis, or is barking at headlines your only hobby?

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