Eleven organisations, including Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) and the Cyprus Peace Council, said on Friday that Cyprus should not host the Israeli basketball team Maccabi Tel Aviv’s EuroLeague home games, which they described as ‘sportswashing’.
In a joint statement, the groups said they “strongly oppose” Israeli basketball clubs playing home fixtures on the island.
The Spyros Kyprianou arena in Limassol has been formally approved as the club’s home venue, and the first game is scheduled for October 22.
The groups argued that “Palestinian athletes are being killed, imprisoned and denied basic conditions” to train and compete, whilst Cyprus offers an Israeli sporting institution “a safe and convenient home”.
They said this allows the club’s international fixtures to continue with minimal disruption.
The statement referred to Al-Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza, which the groups said Israeli forces had turned into a “detention site”.
They said footage showed Palestinians, including children, stripped to their underwear and held on the pitch, and that the stadium was later left in ruins.
A caption in the statement said CNN and Sky News independently geolocated the footage to the stadium, and that the UN Commission of Inquiry later verified footage showing men and boys detained and stripped at the site.
The groups said moving the games to Limassol helps preserve the appearance that Israeli sporting life can carry on normally, “insulated from the destruction of Palestinian sporting and civilian life”.
They said Cypriots are providing the infrastructure and policing that make the arrangement possible, and that the public has a right to know “who agreed to it, how much the security operation will cost and why public resources should be used”.
They described the arrangement as the kind of normalisation that the Palestinian-led BDS movement calls on international civil society to reject.
They urged Cypriot athletes, sporting organisations, trade unions, supporters and civil society to back Palestinian athletes and the boycott call.
“No business as usual. No Cypriot home ground for sportswashing,” the statement said.
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