We stand firmly against injustice in all its forms. Nothing can justify the current war crimes committed by Israel in occupied Palestine. Equally, nothing can excuse the continued support offered by other nations to this apartheid regime. If you believe in human rights, dignity, and justice, then we urge you to boycott this rogue state. Silence is complicity, do what’s right.
Palestinian prisoners—including men, women, and children—were held by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza’s Yarmouk Stadium in December 2023.
(Photo: Israel Defense Forces)
If the IOC has excluded Russia from the games for actions contrary to the Olympic ethos of peace, then consistency demands scrutiny of all participants.
An ancient adage states, “To kill is to invite punishment, except when done en masse.” Despite the passage of over half a century since the United Nations Charter’s inception and the centennial of the National Olympic Committee’s founding in 1894 in Paris, the assertion that sports remain apolitical continues to present challenges.
In a notable September 2023 action, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) initiated legal proceedings against Russia, citing a violation of international peace, and subsequently barred its participation in the Olympic Games. This move echoed a prior decision that also excluded Russia’s football team from the Qatar 2022 World Cup qualifiers.
Eligibility for Olympic participation hinges on the IOC’s endorsement, which can be revoked at any discretion, often without justification. This authority was notably exercised during the war in Ukraine, where the eastern regions’ occupation led to the seizure of Ukraine’s National Olympic Committee offices. Concurrently, concerns arose over the politicization of the Olympics by nations like Russia, where athletic triumphs have been appropriated to fuel expansionist agendas and bolster nationalistic fervor. The athletes’ intent notwithstanding, their achievements may inadvertently endorse these ideologies. This was exemplified when Russia, following its annexation of Crimea, invested an unprecedented $51 billion in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics—equivalent to the cumulative cost of all prior Winter Games—while the IOC maintained a conspicuous silence on both the annexation and calls for an Olympic boycott.
Given the IOC’s stance that violators of international peace should not partake in global events like the Olympics, it begs the question: Why is Israel not subject to similar prohibitions? Historically, even in the absence of IOC intervention, host nations have exercised their right to impose sanctions on countries compromising global peace, often supported by international allies and civil society movements. The expectation for the IOC, and other nations, to prevent Israeli participation is rooted in historical actions.
Questions are being raised about the IOC’s consistency in upholding its standards.
For example, Belgium, hosting the 1920 Olympics, excluded its geopolitical adversaries, including Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey, with Germany’s exclusion extending until 1928. Similarly, the 1928 London Olympics did not extend invitations to Japan and Germany. These decisions were autonomously made by the host countries. However, the IOC itself has taken decisive action, such as barring South Africa from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and maintaining this exclusion through the 1968 Mexico City games until the apartheid regime’s end in 1992. The IOC invoked a comparable rationale to exclude Afghan athletes during Taliban rule in 2000.
Recent reports suggest that Israel intends to send a substantial delegation to the upcoming Olympic Games. Amid this, there is a growing discourse on the IOC’s impartiality and the potential for international advocacy to influence its policies. Questions are being raised about the IOC’s consistency in upholding its standards, particularly in light of allegations regarding the repurposing of Gaza’s Elimuk Stadium. Reports of the stadium’s conversion into a detention and interrogation center have sparked calls for accountability and action. Furthermore, the reported destruction of the GazaOlympic Committee’s office and the killing of Palestinian athletes have intensified debates over Israel’s participation in the Paris Olympics. In light of these events, organizations like Amnesty International have highlighted the urgency of investigating alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
The crux of the debate lies in the absence of steadfast principles for upholding peace and countering aggression and occupation. The notion that nations breaching the sovereignty of others should be excluded from the Olympics and global sporting events, as a reflection of the “community of nations,” remains contentious. While some argue that, based on this principle, the United States might have faced Olympic bans for its involvement in the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, the reality is that the idea of “sports transcending politics” and the exclusion of “the wrong country” from the Olympics is more aspirational than actualized. Moreover, it’s noteworthy that the IOC has even penalized athletes for expressing moral and humanitarian support for Palestinians, indicating a complex interplay between sports, politics, and ethics.
If the IOC has excluded Russia from the games for actions contrary to the Olympic ethos of peace, then consistency demands scrutiny of all participants. It raises the question of whether it is appropriate for any nation, if condemned by the International Court of Justice for grave violations, to compete without addressing its international obligations
The world calls for peace, yet in Gaza, peace remains an illusion. Despite international appeals and the supposed ceasefire, Israel continues to impose a fascist and suffocating blockade — sealing the borders, throttling the entry of food, medicine, and fuel, and turning survival itself into an act of resistance for over two million Palestinians.
A Siege That Never Ended
Since 2007, Gaza has existed under one of the most prolonged and punitive blockades in modern history. Israel controls every crossing point — from airspace to sea access — effectively dictating what enters and exits the enclave. Humanitarian agencies, including the UN and Red Cross, have repeatedly warned that these restrictions amount to collective punishment, a direct violation of international humanitarian law. Israel appears to take pride in, or at least shows disregard for, its actions against children, women, and the elderly
Today, as hospitals run out of essential medicines and food insecurity reaches catastrophic levels, Israel’s continued closure of Gaza’s borders defies both the moral and legal norms that should govern states in times of war and peace.
A Ceasefire in Words, Not in Deeds
The term “ceasefire” suggests a pause in hostilities — yet Israel continues to kill Palestinians. Israeli strikes, sniper fire, and raids persist under the banner of “security operations.” Each act erodes the credibility of ceasefire agreements and exposes the asymmetry of power: a population without sovereignty or military capacity facing one of the most advanced armies in the world.
Human rights observers have called this not peace, but management of Israeli occupation by siege.
Control as an Ideology
At the core of these apartheid policies lies a deeper political mindset — one rooted in control and dominance rather than coexistence. Israeli leaders defend the blockade as a security necessity, but its long-term effects reveal a different purpose: to fragment Palestinian society, crush self-determination, and enforce dependency on the very state that denies their freedom.
This fascist logic of domination — separating “deserving” and “undeserving” populations, denying civilians the essentials of life — echoes the dark historical ideologies of the Nazis that humanity once vowed never to repeat.
The Human Cost
In Gaza today, children starve not for lack of food in the world, but because trucks are stopped by Israel at a border. Patients die not because medicine doesn’t exist, but because it’s withheld by Israeli occupation forces. Families bury loved ones not from natural causes, but from deliberate Israeli policy choices.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not a natural disaster — it is an Israeli-made siege, enforced daily by racist policies that disregard international law and basic human decency.
The Path Forward
True peace will not come from airstrikes or racist Israeli checkpoints. It will come only when the blockade ends, when borders open for food and medicine, when Palestinians can live with dignity and autonomy. Until then, every ceasefire will remain a fragile pause in an ongoing tragedy — a wound that the world can no longer afford to ignore.
The world must awaken to the reality of Gaza and take decisive action to end Israel’s fascist policies, which perpetuate the inhumane suffering of Palestinians living under systemic discrimination and blockade. Justice demands that the international community no longer remain silent in the face of such enduring human tragedy.
Demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza in a demonstration in Berlin (6/1/2023 Anatolia)
The German government’s initial response to the events of October 7 was to suspend financial aid to the “Palestinian people.” Despite the strangeness of the situation, when this government targets the “Palestinian people” with its decision, and not a specific political faction or governmental or non-governmental organization, it did not raise many questions at the time, given that Germany was not the only Western country that usually sided with Israel, and also talking about financial aid, and this is it’s right, it gives it to whomever it wants and withholds it from whom it does not want.
What the German government has no right to do, three months after the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, is to announce its participation, and not just its complicity, with Israel in the genocide it is committing in Gaza by joining the International Court of Justice as a third party to cover up the war crimes it is committing. The most extremist Israeli government, and allowing it to continue without deterrence from international law will stop it from committing its crime. Thus, the German government declares war on the Palestinian people, because genocide is being committed against the entire people, and not a specific political faction, which calls us to ask: How can we understand this behavior of the German government, especially the motives behind it?
Let us acknowledge, at the outset, that the position of the current German government headed by Olaf Schulz and affiliated with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) is not consistent with the historical position played by all previous German governments belonging to this party, as they made great efforts to be part of the solution, and not a partner party. In the conflict, it maintained a relative balance in which it supported Israel, but took a clear position regarding achieving the destiny of the Palestinian people and establishing their independent state on the 1967 borders, and an article by the representative of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (affiliated with the ruling party SPD) in the United States, Net Dethlefsen, in Foreign magazine Police on January 14, greatly illustrates the current deviation of the Schulz government from the historical positions of the party when he was governor.
Three factors may help us understand the position of the current German government. First, the traditional explanation that is always given for Germany’s bias towards Israel is its feeling of guilt towards the Jews and the Holocaust during World War II, which the German government carried out against them. It is an important explanation that tells us how German governments work to compensate for what was committed against the Jews, but it does not tell us how the feeling of guilt can cause violations by the German government against another defenceless people (the Palestinian people) who are suffering under occupation and are currently being subjected to genocide in order to be the victim of the victim. Thus, the German government is slowly slipping into becoming a partner in a new genocide, instead of atoning for its guilt in the first genocide.
Germany did everything possible to compensate for what it committed against the Jews in the 1940s, including apologies, financial compensation, and enacting laws that prevent even research into the Holocaust, which was not done by other countries that committed misdeeds and crimes against other peoples, such as Britain, which caused the catastrophe and suffering of the Palestinian people with the Balfour Declaration. The ill-fated (1917), for which it has not even apologized for more than a hundred years.
Secondly, there is another reason, perhaps represented by the “racism of the German government” and its treatment of other people with different degrees of rights and affiliations to humanity. Looking at the history of Germany itself, it is noted that genocide, unfortunately, is rooted in its history, like the genocide committed by (Kaiser) Germany. Colonialism against the Herero and Mama peoples in Namibia (1904 – 1908), in which more than one hundred thousand citizens were killed, because of their revolution against the German colonizer. Germany did not acknowledge the “genocide” it committed in Namibia until 2015, that is, more than a hundred years later, to apologize for it, and it did not provide compensation for the genocide it committed except 1.1 billion euros, paid over 30 years in the form of development aid, and this all that is. It seems here that there are degrees of victims, as this is the price of the extermination of the black Namibian and recognition after a hundred years, and the extermination of the brown Palestinian is not only without a price, but also contributes to it by providing cover for its perpetrators, the fascists of the Israeli government. As for atonement for the guilt of genocide of the white Jew by Schulz’s racist government, it will continue forever, even if this requires contributing to a new genocide, the price of which will be paid by the “brown Palestinian.” Here it is worth remembering that the main tool used by colonial Germany in the genocide in Namibia was “starvation” and “thirst” of the rebel people, and it is one of the tools that Israel uses today to starve and thirst the Palestinian people in Gaza, as its Minister of War, Gallant, stated when he said : No food or water to Gaza.
Third, there may be an ideological factor affecting the position of the German government, as the target of the current genocide is a Palestinian Arab people whose confrontation is led by an Islamic movement, “terrorist” as the German government considers it, as opposed to “the only democracy in the Middle East,” as Western governments in general like to call it, despite its implementation. A system of hateful racial discrimination that has been categorized by international human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and Israeli others, such as B’Tselem. The war, at the present time, in the view of the German government, is a war of “Islamic terrorism” against “democracy” on Western standards, which requires participation. The German government committed this genocide. This position carries implications not only for the Palestinians, but for the people of the region as a whole, how the German government understands it and what price it is worth to it.
The German government, therefore, declares war on the Palestinian people and not the other way around. Therefore, the Palestinian people have the right to respond to this unjustified war by the racist Schulz government. In the first place, the Palestinian Authority is required to sever its relationship with the current German government in order to be deterred from its aggression against the Palestinian people, and to become more in line with the historical positions of the SPD governments on the Palestinian issue. Here we must mention how the boycott of the Palestinian Authority contributed to the former US President, Donald Trump, in thwarting his ill-fated deal that targeted the entire Palestinian issue.
Palestinian civil society organizations have an important role to play in this issue, especially since a significant number of them have a liaison with the German government and the institutions emanating from it. At a time of genocide to which the Palestinian people are being subjected, there is no place for ambiguity, flattery, and similar positions. The racist Schulz government must hear the position clearly and unambiguously, and demonstrate in front of German representations not only in Palestine, but also in other Arab countries where demonstrations are permitted. Such as Lebanon, Tunisia and others.
The economic boycott of German products is one of the options available to Arabs and Palestinians, and let us remember that the German government’s racism and ideology include Arabs and Muslims in general, and therefore the Arab popular level is demanding that measures be taken against the German government’s racism, in order to preserve its human dignity, as it forces this government to deal with all people. On the same level of human belonging, and not who is first degree, and who is other degrees.
Finally, dialogue must be kept open at various levels until the German government realizes the evil of its actions and its sinful bias in favor of genocide against the Palestinian people. It is necessary to remember that the Palestinian people are not against Germany or its government, but are defending their existence and continuity!
For more than seventy years, the people of Palestine have lived under occupation, displacement, and constant fear. Yet Israel continues to speak of peace — as if peace can coexist with the daily reality of walls, checkpoints, and military control.
How can a nation claim to seek peace while stealing another people’s land and demolishing their homes? How can anyone justify the coexistence or expansion of illegal settlements and the uprooting of families by invoking divine promises? No true faith can sanctify injustice, and no moral principle can excuse oppression.
Israel often presents itself as a perpetual victim — a small nation surrounded by threats. But how long can that false narrative hold when one side possesses overwhelming power and the other lives under siege? How can the powerful remain victims while the powerless are starved and buried under rubble?
Palestinians are not merely numbers in a headline. They are mothers waiting at checkpoints, children growing up under drones, families forced from their homes, and communities cut off from one another by concrete walls and barbed wire. These are not the marks of peace or self-defense — they are the signs of a people being slowly erased from their homeland.
The separation walls and thousands of checkpoints have not brought safety; they have deepened division. True peace cannot come from fear, domination, or the silencing of another nation’s identity. It must be rooted in justice, in the recognition that every human being — Israeli or Palestinian — deserves freedom, dignity, and security.
The Israeli nation cannot feel safe while making millions of Palestinians live in constant insecurity. It cannot speak of democracy while enforcing apartheid laws and denying basic rights to those living under its control. Peace will not be achieved through might or divine entitlement, but through empathy, equality, and the courage to face uncomfortable truths.
One day, history will ask who stood for justice and who turned away. The answer will depend on whether humanity values compassion over conquest and truth over silence.
Real peace can never be built upon another people’s suffering. It begins only when freedom is shared — not stolen.
