Bringing Some Healing to the World Through Sport : Israel
"As Indigenous peoples, we have both seen our traditional lands colonized, our people ethnically cleansed and massacred by colonial settlers."
"We are asking you to respect our nonviolent picket line by withdrawing from the 2018 World Lacrosse Championships, denying Israel the opportunity to use the national sport of the Iroquois to cover up its escalating, violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians throughout our ancestral lands."
Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)
"What's going on in Israel and what's happened to the Palestinians is wrong. A lot of people are relating it to what's happened to Native American people in Canada and the U.S., and it is similar."
"Morally, I want to [show] support and I'm going to support them in the best way I can. But taking myself away from the game that's given me so much, and something that's very positive to our people, I don't think is the right decision for us as Haudenosaunee people."
Lyle Thompson, elite Iroquois lacrosse player, Iroquois Nationals
"Our position is that we're coming to play a medicine game. Were hoping to bring some healing to the world."
"There are so many things that plague indigenous communities. It's good to have people who are competing at the world level, who can be these beacons of hope and be positive out there and walk the walk."
Ansley Jemison, executive director, Iroquois Nationals
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| Lyle Thompson (second from left) poses with his brothers Jerome (left), Miles (second from right) and Jeremy before a National Lacrosse League game between the Georgia Swarm and the Saskatchewan Rush. |
Israel is hosting lacrosse's most important tournament this week in Netanya, Israel, the world field lacrosse championship, held every four years. A leading member of the Iroquois Nationals, the transnational Iroquois Confederacy's international competition representative and star player, Lyle Thompson, was the recipient of a July 4 open letter from the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, whose purpose was to persuade him and the team to forego competition because it was taking place in Israel this year.
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| Netanya Stadium (courtesy GoNetanya.com) |
The Nationals is the third ranking team in the world behind Canada and the United States. And they have decided there is no way they can refrain from the opportunity to compete, irrespective of where the international competition is being played. After he received PACBI's letter, Thompson revealed that he is unfamiliar with the controversial relations between Israel and the Palestinians. He did, however, he said, briefly discuss the historical conflict with friends and did some cursory reading leading him to empathize with the Palestinians.
Whether he read actual unbiased historical accounts of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians with an open mind rather than allowing himself to be persuaded by pervasive slanderous propaganda that has been so successfully promulgated by industrious Palestinian public relations in support of the 'cause' of the Palestinians is doubtful. Slander is just so much more approachable and easy to digest than the laborious details of actual events and a parsing of violence inflicted by those claiming to be non-violent while clasping a pathology of martyrdom.
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| The Iroquois Nationals arrived in Israel hours before they're scheduled to take on the United States at the 2018 Men's World Lacrosse Championship. (Submitted by Federation International Lacrosse) |
'Normalization' with Israel is anathema to the Palestinians. For their claims are that they represent the original inhabitants of the land that heritage and history attribute through archaeology and ancient accounts of Israel written by scholars and historians of the day to a historical Jewish presence. The Palestinians are as much indigenous to the area they claim Israel has taken from them as British colonials are today as Canadian citizens.The land on which Israel sits, along with the West Bank are in fact, ancestral Jewish lands.
But the reality is that newly re-founded Israel has given status of recognition, equality and citizenship to those Palestinians who remained when Israel declared its sovereign status while those who fled as invading Arab armies sought to destroy the fledgling state now have possession of a portion of the territory that the United Nations offered through partition, and which they adamantly refused. And in Canada the indigenous population is now inclusive of the descendants of the original colonists along with the First Nations that met them.
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| Scott Neiss (far right), Executive Director for the Israel Lacrosse Association and Miriam Feirberg-Ikar (center-holding Israel Lacrosse jersey), Mayor of Netanya, hold a press conference on Wednesday, 23 May 2017, to announce Israel’s hosting of the 2018 FIL Men’s Lacrosse World Championship. |
Labels: Boycott, Conflict, Israel, Palestinians
posted by Pieface @ Friday, July 13, 2018
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