When FIFA—the international governing body for soccer—held its annual congress in Bahrain last week, the Palestinian Authority hoped it would discuss whether six West Bank-based Israeli teams are in violation of the organization’s rules for playing on “Palestinian” territory without permission from the Palestinian Football League (PFA). The item was removed from the congress’s agenda at the last minute, but Simon Smith argues that the issue is bound to resurface, and more than sports is at stake:

The . . . PFA will no doubt push FIFA to make a decision [about the status of the West Bank leagues] in the future. The problem for FIFA is that whatever it decides will have huge ramifications. . . . A ruling in favor of the PFA would represent a significant international body defining the territory of a Palestinian state, which no doubt is the intention of the PFA’s four-year-long campaign to have this item on the agenda. [Yet] a ruling in Israel’s favor would be interpreted by many as an acknowledgment that the six settlements [where these clubs are located] are part of sovereign Israeli territory. FIFA would like to do neither, and yet if the item is ever brought to a vote, [delegates] are caught in a zero-sum game where they have to make a choice.

Should FIFA rule against Israel, the likely reprimand will be a six-month window to remove the clubs from the Israeli league system or face suspension from FIFA and the removal of Israel’s national soccer team from competitive matches such as World Cup Qualifying.

However, compliance would be perhaps more significant still. If the PFA can remove the settlement’s soccer clubs through FIFA, it might give more impetus to the greater Palestinian aspiration of removing the settlements themselves through the UN. We are potentially seeing a microcosm of the Palestinian strategy to internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and once again shirk bilateral negotiations, through the prism of soccer.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.