You might be surprised, but the National Basketball Association has a better grip on what’s needed for Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking than any recent American president.
Recently, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, engineer of both the recent Gaza offensive and the ill-fated summer 2006 war in Lebanon, attended a charity basketball match between the New York Knicks and the leading Israeli club team, Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv in New York City’s famed Madison Square Garden arena. What made the game remarkable was not the play or the score, but rather the demonstration of the limits of Israeli power. The grandstanding Israeli head coach ran headlong into a situation Israel did not control -- and lost.
The growing Israeli exceptionalism -- rules apply to others, but the world must not be allowed to impose neutral laws on Israel -- was on view for all to see. It was jarring. Late in the game, a replacement referee issued Israeli coach Pini Gershon his second technical foul when he argued about the Knicks’ Al Harrington’s challenging of a call. (Perhaps this should not be a surprise. Gershon was caught on video in 2000 delivering a racist speech to Israeli armed forces personnel. In it, he asserts that darker skinned people are mentally inferior. Harrington is African American.)
Regardless of the subtext, as a result of the second technical foul, Gershon was ordered to leave the court, per NBA rules -- two technical fouls on a player or a coach and that person is out of the game and must leave the arena. But Gershon went back to his bench to continue coaching. The officials brought security guards to escort him out, but the scene became still more bizarre when Rabbi Yitzhak Dovid Grossman -- whose Israeli charity the exhibition match was to benefit -- walked on to the court and intervened on behalf of the coach -- rules be damned.
Such interventions are legion in Israel. A leading rabbi of the right-wing settlement movement in Israel went to the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin -- shortly after American settler Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslim worshipers -- and begged him not to evacuate the settlers from Hebron, as he was expected to do as part of the Oslo Accords and international law. Rabin obliged him. But on this night in Madison Square Garden, NBA rules prevailed and Gershon was required to leave the court.
Perhaps President Obama, he of basketball skill and passion, would do well to look to the example of these NBA referees and learn how to stand up to Israeli officials and settlers – some of whom refer to him as a kushi or “darkie” and members of his staff as “self-hating Jews.” The stark contrast of the NBA officials holding firm while President Obama shrinks from his settlements freeze position in order to start negotiations without preconditions could not be stronger. Obama’s quick stand-down on a freeze suggests he will be no different on Israel’s settlement activities than his predecessors.
Once-optimistic Palestinians increasingly have come to believe he will falter in using American power and influence to secure Palestinian freedom. The American president, after all, recently put significant pressure on the Palestinian Authority to abandon the rights of Palestinians in Gaza. Intimidated Palestinian leaders initially buckled and agreed not to pursue Judge Richard Goldstone’s report and its careful documentation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. All the while, Israeli leaders cruelly attacked Goldstone’s integrity and sought to bury the report rather than grapple with the hard truths exposed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone so far as to threaten peace talks over the report and to call for rewriting international law -- an implicit admission of wrongdoing.
So a group of NBA officials have set a better example than American politicians vis-à-vis Israel, in applying rules consistently rather than arbitrarily. Gershon’s ejection restored on-court peace much as the act of an American firm insistence that Israel must abide by relevant laws could establish the framework for regional peace.
President Obama should take decisive action in confronting Israeli violations of international law, Israeli commitments to signed agreements, and the expanding Israeli occupation. Until then, Israeli politicians will regard him as a pushover -- or in today’s Israeli vernacular as a freier or “sucker” for resigning himself to their repeated hacks at peace and international law. American leadership needs to look a little more like the justice eventually meted out at Madison Square Garden the other night.
Adam Shapiro is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and human rights activist, currently working with the Free Gaza Movement.
Copyright © 2009 Adam Shapiro – distributed by Agence Global
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