International sport has always been built on a simple premise: respect. Respect for your opponent, respect for the game, and respect for the principle that on the court or the field, politics is set aside in favour of fair play. Yet in Cologne last week, that principle was shattered.
At the Wheelchair Basketball Nations Cup, the British team turned their backs as Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, was played. For the Israeli players—athletes who train, sweat, and sacrifice just like any others—the moment that should have marked dignity and pride was instead turned into a humiliation. For what crime? Representing their country.
It was not just rude. It was cruel. These are athletes who know hardship, who know what it means to struggle against the odds. Many of Israel’s wheelchair athletes are veterans, wounded in service, men and women who rebuilt their lives through sport. To deny them the most basic courtesy of respect—simply standing for their anthem—was to deny their humanity.
This is not protest. It is prejudice.
The International Wheelchair Basketball Federation now finds itself at a crossroads. If such behaviour is excused, it sets a precedent: that some nations’ athletes can be treated as pariahs, subjected to ritualised humiliation under the guise of “political protest.” That is not solidarity. That is discrimination, dressed up as moral conviction.
And it reveals a deeper hypocrisy. Time and again, Israel is singled out for ostracism in arenas that are meant to be neutral. Athletes from countries with far worse human rights records—dictatorships, theocracies, regimes that suppress women and execute dissidents—are welcomed without protest. Their anthems are played, their flags raised, and no one dares turn their backs. Yet when it is Israel, the one democracy in the Middle East, respect is suddenly optional.
For Jewish athletes, this is not just an insult. It is a continuation of an old pattern: exclusion, shaming, the denial of equal standing. Once it was at universities, then in professions, and now even on the basketball court.
The Paralympics movement, of all communities, should know better. It was founded on the principle that sport can heal, that dignity can be restored through competition. To allow Israel’s athletes to be treated as outcasts undermines that very mission.
There must be consequences. Apologies are not enough. The British team’s behaviour was a violation of the spirit of sport, and of the principle of inclusion they themselves embody. If international sport cannot enforce neutrality and respect, then it becomes just another battlefield—another place where hatred, not talent, decides the rules.
Israel’s athletes deserve better. And so does sport itself.
