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Leslie Wexner helped shape these Jewish leaders. Now they want a reckoning over his Epstein ties.
(JTA) — This story originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.
For three decades, Debbie Findling led with it.
The Wexner Heritage Program appeared on her CV, LinkedIn page and professional biography. Her participation in it was part of her Jewish identity, a marker of belonging to an elite network of leaders chosen to carry forward the values of the American Jewish community and a useful credential in her work as an adviser to Bay Area Jewish philanthropies.
But over the last several years, the ties between the program’s sponsor, billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein came into focus for Findling. The two men had a close relationship for years. Wexner was instrumental in Epstein’s rise to wealth and prominence, while Epstein managed Wexner’s finances and later served as a trustee of the Wexner Foundation.
Wexner has denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, including those against minors, and has testified that he severed financial and legal ties with Epstein in 2007.
Still, Findling’s pride has soured into something closer to shame.
“I’ve lost something that I was really proud of — it was taken away from me,” Findling said, describing a sense that something “sinister” has corrupted such a positive experience. “I feel like the rug got pulled out from under me.”
Now Findling, 62, is leading what may be the largest organized accountability effort to emerge so far in the Jewish community’s reckoning with Wexner’s ties to Epstein. She’s doing so in partnership with Jan Reicher, 61, also a Bay Area Wexner Heritage alum, as well as a longtime community leader and the immediate past president of Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area.
The two women have circulated a public letter to the foundation signed by 80 Wexner alumni so far, including 50 from the Bay Area, urging the organization to take meaningful action to support survivors of sexual violence and trafficking.
They also launched in May what they call Tikkun Funds — directing donations to three nonprofits that support survivors of sexual violence or trafficking — and asked fellow alumni to contribute $36,000 each. More than $356,000 has been pledged so far. A parallel effort, the ASHRU Fund, is being run by alumni of a separate Wexner fellowship for professionals at Jewish communal organizations.
The Wexner Foundation has not responded substantively to the letter’s demands and declined to comment for this story. The foundation held meetings with alumni after the revelations of Wexner’s deep ties with Epstein first emerged in 2019.
Part of what makes the campaign remarkable is that open conversations about Wexner’s legacy amid the Epstein scandal have been rare. Alumni discussed the implications of the revelations in their immediate aftermath, in group chats and on social media. A number of alumni have made donations to groups, including for survivors of sex trafficking.
The Bay Area initiative appears to be the broadest and most robust so far.
Evan Segal, a Wexner Heritage participant in the Bay Area who left the program after its first year for a job in the Obama administration, said the discomfort stems from how many people in Jewish communal life are close to the issue.
“If you want to know why the Jewish philanthropic world has been crickets, it’s because many of the big names that people have respected for years are tied — some more directly, some indirectly — to this scandal,” said Segal, who didn’t qualify to sign the open letter because he isn’t an alum.
The silence, he suggested, is also about what the Wexner name has come to mean.
“For years, the Wexner name has been put in a pantheon of mensch-y philanthropists. People carry it on their resumes as a badge of honor,” he said. “Now it is 180 degrees of that.”
Findling and Reicher’s campaign is not aimed at dismantling the Wexner Foundation, the two women said, nor at repudiating the education they received and the community they formed.
Instead, they describe it as an attempt to apply the very values the program instilled in them.
“I feel like I am acting in the leadership capacity that Wexner taught me, which is to stand up for those who are less fortunate, to stand up for survivors, to stand up for truth,” Findling said.
For decades, the Wexner name occupied a singular place in organized Jewish life. The retail magnate behind the rise of Victoria’s Secret and other major brands, such as The Limited, Abercrombie & Fitch and Bath & Body Works, became one of the most influential funders of Jewish leadership development in North America and Israel. His name was pervasive in his home city of Columbus, Ohio, where a Jewish nursing home still bears his name, as does the Jewish student center at Ohio State University. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum named a learning center for Wexner.
Beginning in the 1980s, the Wexner Foundation built a constellation of fellowships and leadership programs for Jewish clergy, professionals, philanthropists and lay leaders. Thousands of participants moved through those programs and into prominent positions across Jewish institutions and wider society.
Among the most visible of them was the Wexner Heritage Program, which combined Jewish learning, leadership development and community building. The program, which is offered for free, has attracted almost 2,500 participants across 35 North American cities.
The San Francisco hub, which launched in the late 1990s, became one of its strongest. When the Wexner Foundation began seeking local matching grants, the San Francisco Jewish community set a “stellar example of commitment by creating an endowment,” according to the foundation. The Jewish Federation Bay Area’s efforts ensured there would be a new cohort every few years. Today, the Bay Area is among the regions with the most alumni.
Among the 10 Wexner Heritage participants interviewed for this story, all described the experience as monumental. Or as Ellen Kahn, a member of Findling’s 1997-1999 cohort, put it, “absolutely life changing.”
“Leslie Wexner, in my view, was this bigger-than-life man who created something that was so extraordinary,” Kahn said.
Alumni describe the far-reaching impact of their two-year Wexner program: It inspired them to serve on nonprofit boards, engage in philanthropy and build both friendships and community networks.
Reicher, who joined the program in 2003 after helping found San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School of the Bay, described the Wexner Heritage Program as formative.
“For me, the biggest thing really was the cohort that we created,” she said. Her group still studies together, supports one another’s institutions and gathers socially.
It took until this January for Reicher to “wake up” about the implications of Wexner’s relationship with Epstein. She was reading court testimony from Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of the most outspoken and prominent survivors of abuse by Epstein and his enablers. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025, had testified that she was trafficked to Wexner multiple times, a charge he has denied.
Wexner has not been charged with any crime in connection with the allegations.
“Oh my God,” Reicher kept repeating aloud to herself, growing more disgusted and horrified with what she was reading in the testimony. She phoned Findling and said, “We’ve got to do something.”
For Reicher, the decision to act has been bound up with her own experience as a rape survivor. She said she came “within inches of losing my life” at 18 but ultimately did not press charges after her father urged her against it.
“That person that I was at 18 didn’t stand up for herself,” she said. “So now I have this other layer as a survivor that I need to stick up for other survivors, even if it causes me harm, even if it causes me trauma.”
The accountability campaign was launched amid intensifying scrutiny of Wexner, whose name appears 1,746 times in the publicly released Epstein files on the U.S. Justice Department website.
In February, Wexner sat for a five-hour filmed deposition before the U.S. House Oversight Committee, where he denied any knowledge that Epstein was a sexual predator or committed sexual crimes.
The accusations that Epstein raped, abused and trafficked girls and young women across many years are extensive. He was convicted of sex crimes with minors in 2008. Eleven years later, he was charged with sex trafficking of minors but died by suicide before trial.
“I was conned by the world Olympic, all-time con artist,” Wexner testified during the Feb. 18 deposition, which was made public.
Around the same time, the Wexner Foundation announced it would hold a series of private listening sessions over Zoom for alumni who had concerns about Wexner’s ties to Epstein. “Together with my colleagues, we want to listen, to take in your thinking aspiring to move forward even if along a different path,” foundation president Elka Abrahamson wrote in an email to alumni first reported by Jewish Currents.
Neither Reicher nor Findling attended a listening session, believing the events would be counterproductive and that no change would result.
“Listening is an essential component of responsible leadership,” they wrote in the open letter. “But listening is not enough. When sworn testimony and public records raise serious moral and ethical questions, silence risks complicity. Our community needs more than private reflection — it needs visible ethical conviction and action from the Wexner Foundation.”
Some Jewish leaders have emerged since February to defend Wexner, albeit with qualifications.
Wexner deserves the Jewish community’s continued admiration based on the principal of “hakarat hatov,” recognition of good even among those who are flawed, David J. Butler, a lawyer who is member of the ownership group of Mid-Atlantic Media, wrote in an opinion for the small chain of Jewish newspapers last month.
Jewish ethics “asks people to live within tension. To condemn wrongdoing without erasing merit. To acknowledge failure without pretending that flawed individuals never contributed profound good to the world around them,” Butler wrote.
When Findling and Reicher brought their appeal to fellow alumni in late February, they found a community divided. While dozens signed quickly, the response did not grow beyond an initial burst of support, and the vast majority of alumni have not joined the effort.
For Marci Dollinger, 61, an elementary school teacher at Brandeis Marin Jewish Day School in San Rafael and a board member of several local Jewish organizations, the decision to sign the letter was obvious. It’s a matter of “not being silent when serious concerns arise,” she said. But she added that many alumni she knows were reluctant to sign.
“Even some in my cohort [declined to sign], and it was upsetting because to me it just seemed like why would you be on the wrong side of this? But they have their reasons,” Dollinger said.
Few of those reluctant to sign were willing to go on the record.
Howard Steiermann, 67, of San Francisco said he didn’t want to sign it initially because he doesn’t feel that the program’s name is tainted.
“I’m not sure that my feeling toward the program or the man has changed,” said Steiermann, who added that he has read through the allegations. “For me, I can’t tell you why, it doesn’t tarnish my memory or appreciation for the program that I went through.”
But he ultimately added his name out of a sense of allyship.
“I do believe in innocence until proven guilty,” said Steiermann, who was ordained as a rabbi in 2015, more than a decade after his Wexner graduation. “That said, I think our culture has had such a horrible track record of not listening to women around abuse.”
He added that he wanted to be an ally to what “too many people see as a woman’s issue.”
While Steiermann ultimately signed, his reluctance reflects a wider pattern among some male alumni.
Wayne Feinstein, who said he signed it with no hesitation, noticed that pattern.
Feinstein, 74, served as executive vice president of the Jewish Federation Bay Area from 1991 to 2000 and grew up attending the same Columbus, Ohio, synagogue as Wexner.
“To me, it was an ethical question, plain and simple,” he said.
Feinstein, one of only about two dozen men out of 80 signatories, was disappointed to learn that many male Wexner alumni had refused. They were “reluctant or fearful,” he said, to condemn a businessman in the Jewish community where they themselves worked.
He spent an hour on the phone trying to convince a male friend who kept pushing back. The friend said, “There’s no proof that Leslie Wexner did any of this.” Feinstein replied to him:
“That’s not a reason not to do this.”
Findling and Reicher said they’re not working toward persuading the many holdouts.
“I want to activate the people who signed, who are with me, into meaningful repair,” Findling said.
Their call to action encouraged gifts of $36,000, the amount the program spent on each Wexner Heritage participant, offering alumni their choice of three vetted nonprofits: World Without Exploitation, a national organization supporting Epstein survivors through advocacy, legislative action and public awareness; the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, the national umbrella organization that has been a leader in supporting sexual violence survivors of Oct. 7, 2023; and Shalom Bayit, a prominent Jewish voice on gender-based violence prevention and response based in the Bay Area.
Tricia Gibbs, 67, a Wexner Heritage alum and co-founder of the San Francisco Free Clinic, donated to all three nonprofits and signed the letter — her first time signing anything like it.
“In a way we’d be doing more harm to the program by not standing up, because we wouldn’t show that we learned anything,” she said. “There’s a deeply rooted ethic in Torah that tells us to protect the vulnerable.”
When they began writing the letter, Reicher worried about the impact on the Jewish community. Calling upon fellow alumni meant acknowledging painful truths. “Does this hurt the Jews more?” she asked herself.
A major source of consternation for the Jewish community has been that Epstein, Wexner and a number of other men connected to the scandal — though far from a majority — have been Jews and have had meaningful ties to Jewish institutions.
“It’s incongruous with how we were all raised,” Kahn said.
Naomi Tucker, co-founder and executive director of Shalom Bayit, hears it often.
“We have the exact same rates of violence against women in the Jewish community as everywhere else,” she said. “We would like to think we are better or different. But unfortunately these things happen everywhere.”
One in four Jewish women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, Tucker noted, and one in three will face sexual assault or harassment — all consistent with national figures for all women.
Many alumni continue to reckon with what the program means to them.
“Do I wish the Wexner name no longer was attached to the foundation? Yes,” Kahn said.
That may come to pass.
On May 21, the foundation announced that all Wexner leadership programs will spin off into an independent nonprofit on Jan. 1, 2027, under a new name yet to be released. Wexner and his wife are contributing $40 million to launch the new organization.
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Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time
(JTA) — For many Orthodox Jews, a typical winter weekday begins early: head to synagogue, gather in a minyan for morning prayers, then rush off to work.
Orthodox Jewish groups say a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent could upend that routine by pushing winter sunrises — and the earliest permissible time for some prayers — an hour later.
Agudath Israel of America is among the groups urging the Senate to reject legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, arguing that the change would create both public safety risks and significant challenges for Orthodox Jewish religious life.
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday by a wide bipartisan margin. In a statement issued after the vote, Agudath Israel said it understood the appeal of ending the twice-yearly clock changes but opposed making daylight saving time permanent.
The Orthodox advocacy organization warned that permanent daylight saving time would push winter sunrises past 9 a.m. in some parts of the country, forcing many children to travel to school before dawn. It also said the later sunrise would make it difficult for observant Jews to attend morning synagogue services and still arrive at work or school on time, because Jewish law prohibits reciting key morning prayers before prescribed times tied to sunrise.
“The extension of DST will create an extreme hardship on observant Jews,” the organization said. “It would be extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to arrive on time for a job and will affect the start time of our schools.”
The Orthodox Union and the Coalition for Jewish Values have also come out against the measure.
In a column for Chabad.org that didn’t take a position on the bill, Menachem Posner also wrote that the change would present a challenge in parts of the country for morning minyan, the 10-person prayer quorum. But he also noted an upside to the extension of daylight saving: a later start time for Shabbat on short winter Fridays.
Shabbat begins at sundown, which during the winter can fall before 4:00 p.m. in parts of the country. “With DST, however, this will be shifted one hour later, so that even on the darkest day of winter, Jews will have one more hour to prepare for Shabbat,” Posner wrote.
Orthodox parties in Israel have also made an issue of changes to the daylight saving calendar. In 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet unanimously approved extending daylight saving time until the first Sunday after Oct. 1, despite objections from haredi parties. The change brought Israel’s clock closer to European practice while still acknowledging Orthodox concerns about morning prayer and a later start time to Yom Kippur that they argued would make the fast more difficult.
This week Agudath Israel also pointed to the brief U.S. experiment with year-round daylight saving time during the 1970s energy crisis, when Congress repealed the policy after widespread public dissatisfaction over dark winter mornings.
The organization said it hoped the Senate would weigh the broader consequences of permanent daylight saving time, including alternatives such as permanent standard time or retaining the current system of seasonal clock changes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Colombia and Slovenia recently recognized a Palestinian state. Now they’re moving their embassies to Jerusalem.
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Colombia, the world’s second most populous Spanish-speaking nation after Mexico, has little in common with landlocked Slovenia, the second-smallest of the six republics that once comprised Yugoslavia.
But when it comes to their stance on Israel, the parallels are hard to ignore.
Within one month of each other, leftist, pro-Palestine governments in both countries were voted out of office and replaced by right-wing leaders who vowed not only to restore full diplomatic relations with Israel but also inaugurate embassies in Jerusalem.
In fact, Colombia’s next foreign minister, Omar Bola Escobar, promised exactly that Wednesday during a meeting in Washington, D.C., with his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar. That followed a declaration by President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella that Colombia would establish relations “like never before” with Israel once he takes the oath of office on Aug. 7.
In June 2024, the parliament of Slovenia — an Alpine republic of 2.1 million — voted to recognize a Palestinian state only a week after Spain, Ireland and Norway had done the same thing. But half a year later, it went further. Slovenian public broadcaster RTV, citing the ongoing war in Gaza, became the first in Europe to demand Israel’s exclusion from the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest.
Then last year, Slovenia under Prime Minister Robert Golob banned all imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank as well as all weapons trade with Israel — the first member of the European Union to do so. And this past June, RTV not only boycotted Eurovision altogether but aired films about Palestine instead.
That anti-Israel campaign made life uncomfortable for the country’s 100 or so Jews, said Robert Waltl, president of the Ljubljana-based Liberal Jewish Community of Slovenia.
But on May 22, Janez Jansa — leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party and an admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump — formed a winning coalition with other right-wing parties following the country’s parliamentary elections, clearing the way for Jansa to replace Golob as prime minister.
In a striking about-face, Janza immediately announced that Slovenia would cancel its previous recognition of Palestine and move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That would make it the first country in the 27-member EU to take that step (though not the first country in Europe: Kosovo already has an embassy in Jerusalem).
Likewise, Israel will open an embassy in Ljubljana for the first time.
“That’s an important and welcome milestone — and something many of us have hoped to see for a long time,” Waltl explained in an email. “That said, I still feel it’s too early for me to draw broader conclusions about what this will mean in practice for bilateral relations, or for the Jewish community. I’d rather judge by actions than by first impressions.”
Ernest Herzog, executive director for operations at the World Jewish Congress, said Slovenia’s new direction is a lot more than a foreign policy adjustment; it carries huge historic significance.
“Israel was among the first countries to recognize Slovenia’s independence in 1991” following the breakup of Yugoslavia, he said. Opening an embassy in Jerusalem “would send a clear signal that Slovenia views Israel not only as a key regional partner but also as an important ally in defending the rules-based democratic order at a time of growing geopolitical instability.”
In Colombia, the shift is even more dramatic. Famous for world-class coffee, salsa dancing, beautiful beaches and biodiversity, it’s home to maybe 5,000 Jews out of 54 million inhabitants.
President Gustavo Petro — Colombia’s first left-wing leader in recent memory — is a former M-19 guerrilla leader. He became mayor of Bogotá in 2011 and president in 2022. On May 2, 2024, in the midst of worsening conditions in Gaza, Petro severed diplomatic relations with Israel and stopped lucrative exports of coal to Israel, as well as all weapons deals.
Margarita Manjarrez, Colombia’s first female ambassador to Israel, stayed on until June 30 of that year, at which point she closed the embassy in Tel Aviv (though consular services remain open).
Petro, constitutionally limited to one term, backed Iván Cepeda as his successor. But Cepeda lost to right-wing businessman Abelardo de la Espriella by the narrowest margin in Colombian election history.
Widely supported by Colombia’s small but wealthy Jewish community, the new president will be sworn in Aug. 7. One of his first acts, he said, will be to open an embassy in Jerusalem. That would make it the ninth embassy in Israel’s capital, along with those of the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Fiji and Argentina.
Manjarrez, now Bogotá’s ambassador to Singapore, declined to comment. But Harry Toledo, the Israeli-based director of Fuente Latina — an NGO that provides pro-Israel Middle East coverage for Spanish-language media in the United States and Latin America — says he’s not surprised by any of this.
“I don’t think the issue was Israel,” said Toledo, who is originally from Medellín but has spent the last 24 years living in Tel Aviv. “As we’ve seen in recent years, all these governments are taking advantage of the situation here to distract from their problems at home. In Spain, we clearly saw that Sánchez is using the Palestinians to dispel criticism of his own government. Petro in Colombia did the same thing.”
Toledo, one of thousands of Colombians living in Israel, noted that the Trump administration revoked Petro’s U.S. visa last year, and then later added him, his wife, his son and his interior minister to its Specially Designated Nationals list due to their alleged illicit drug trafficking.
“Petro was a criminal and a genocidal guerrilla. He was a real antisemite who even posted ‘Heil Hitler’ online,” said Toledo. “It’s not like he was hiding his position against Jews.”
Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue — a D.C. think tank — noted that 12 of Latin America’s last 15 elections have been won by right-wing candidates. Voters in only Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay elected leftists.
Shifter said it’s not so much an ideological conservative turn that’s fueling this wave — but more a profound desire for change.
“The recent electoral swings are better understood as a reflection of widespread frustration with governments of different political stripes that have failed to address persistent economic, security and governance challenges,” he said.
Shifter is no stranger to the region. In the early 1980s, when the Dialogue was founded, Latin America’s biggest economies — Argentina, Brazil and Mexico — were cash-strapped, debt-ridden and beholden to the IMF. And the United States under President Ronald Reagan was actively supporting the government of El Salvador in its bloody war against leftist insurgents, while at the same time secretly funding contras hoping to overthrow Marxist Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.
The only country doing well at the time was energy-rich Venezuela — which today is considered a failed state.
Mike Skol, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela who has extensive business ties in Colombia, said de la Espriella’s election is certainly part of that Latin rightward shift against socialism.
The question, he poses, is whether he’ll behave more like Argentina’s Javier Milei, a libertarian who is an outspoken supporter of Israel, or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — a hugely popular president of Palestinian origin who has on more than one occasion called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
“The White House is looking for outspoken allies — on Venezuela, on Cuba, on Israel, and on oil,” Skol said in an email. “Expect Colombia to be unequivocal in all. The payoff will be an important pillar of regime success.”
Ultimately, the real prize for Israel would be a full restoration of ties with oil-rich Venezuela, which were broken by Hugo Chávez in 2009 following an Israel incursion into Gaza that year. After Trump’s ousting of former president Nicolás Maduro last year and his tacit support for Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, anything appears possible.
Just last week, Rodríguez was photographed in a once-unthinkable meeting with uniformed IDF brass overseeing Israeli rescue efforts in the wake of two powerful earthquakes that have devastated Venezuela’s coastal region. The 30-member team’s efforts mark a rare diplomatic thaw following years of official Venezuelan hostility toward Israel.
This raises the inevitable question: Could the Israeli flag one day flutter from an embassy in Caracas?
“Yes, I think it is very possible that Venezuela under Delcy will restore relations with Israel,” Skol said, noting that the U.S. secretary of state is seen as running the show in Venezuela since Maduro’s ouster. “All Marco Rubio has to do is ask.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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He organized World Cup viewings in Gaza. Then an Israeli airstrike killed him
Soccer is a universal language. Billions of people around the world watch the game, which means that soccer fans everywhere can appreciate someone like Mohammed al-Wahidi, who enabled others to participate in that shared global experience.
Al-Wahidi was a Palestinian aid worker who organized public screenings of the FIFA World Cup in Gaza. He’s emerged from anonymity for the worst reason: An Israeli airstrike killed him last week, while he was on his way to watch a screening of the knockout stage match between Argentina and Egypt.
With the world’s attention focused on the World Cup in North America, al-Wahidi’s killing briefly brought Gaza back into the global frame.
For the people of Gaza who attended the screenings organized by al-Wahidi, World Cup matches offer a brief respite from the daily struggle to survive, the loss of loved ones, and the absence of any political horizon of hope. Cheering for Egypt against Argentina could not end Gazans’ suffering, but it provided a much-needed moment of escape. Until it didn’t.
It’s common to hear that “politics has no place in sports” — although frequently the governments and sporting institutions that make this claim, while recognizing soccer’s symbolic power, are really arguing that sports should not be used to advance political goals they oppose.
Al-Wahidi’s death made headlines because that refrain simply isn’t true. In fact, it’s both legitimate and necessary to politicize al-Wahidi’s death even further.
In reporting on al-Wahidi’s death, mainstream media outlets — including the BBC, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times — situated it within its broader context. They reminded readers that he was only one of more than 1,000 Palestinians killed by Israel since a ceasefire was announced 10 months ago. His death became an opportunity to highlight that, for Palestinians in Gaza, the so-called ceasefire has amounted to little more than a reduction in the scale of daily killing and ongoing dispossession.
At the same time, some Israeli officials have openly declared their intention to promote what they call the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza. Violence against Palestinians — including the killing of al-Wahidi — is a central mechanism for creating the conditions under which such migration becomes possible.
The politics of soccer
The chronology of state violence and the chronology of soccer usually unfold independently, but at times they intersect. When they do, that intersection reveals soccer’s symbolic power, which manifests itself in diverse — and sometimes contradictory — ways.
In 2024, an Israeli airstrike killed Hani al-Masdar, an assistant coach of the Palestinian men’s Olympic national football team, earning an outpouring of international mourning. Both al-Wahidi and al-Masdar were humanized because of their publicly visible connection to soccer. Unlike most Palestinian victims, they had their names and faces shared broadly in Western media, and their deaths briefly resonated far beyond Gaza.
But they’re among more than 900 Palestinian athletes and coaches killed by Israel since October, 2023. The fact that most of us have only heard two of their names, at most, is a tragedy.
Israel has long turned to soccer as a public relations instrument, a way to divert international attention from the long-term process of Palestinian dispossession.
As one senior Israeli minister said after inviting the Argentine team, with star Lionel Messi, to play in Israel in 2018: “When we fight over moving embassies to Jerusalem, there is no question. One of the most popular players in the world, who has billions of followers—surely, it is the right thing to see him playing in Jerusalem. What better public relations tool do we have?” (The match was eventually cancelled, after pushback from pro-Palestinian parties.)
FIFA has occasionally lent credibility to these efforts. Despite the fact that official United Nations bodies have described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, and that Israeli and international human rights organizations have documented systematic abuses against Palestinians, FIFA has declined to apply the same standard to Israel as it has to other countries, like Russia, which it suspended in 2022 following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In doing so, it has contributed to the normalization of violence against Palestinians.
In an awkward attempt to appease critics, FIFA even proposed that an under-15 match between Israel and Palestine serve as the opening fixture of a new global youth tournament in the United States this September — a proposal that many Palestinians regarded as adding insult to injury.
Palestinian activists, by contrast, have made calls for soccer-related sanctions against Israel an important component of efforts to raise international awareness of the Palestinian struggle for justice. One of their most notable successes came in 2018, when they persuaded Argentina to cancel that planned friendly match against Israel in Jerusalem. Although repeated attempts to suspend Israel from international soccer have so far failed, such efforts are likely to continue.
The possibility of sporting sanctions
Israel has faced few meaningful consequences for these policies, and without sustained international pressure, like in South Africa decades ago. they are unlikely to change. One possible form of such pressure is the imposition of sporting sanctions — a prospect that, for understandable reasons, Israeli officials have worked hard to prevent.
But as long as it doesn’t seriously consider those sanctions, the international sporting community sends the message that there is no meaningful price for the continuous and systematic violation of Palestinian human rights.
Al-Wahidi dedicated himself to bringing the world’s game to Gaza. The symbolic significance of his death should now help bring the world’s attention to Gaza — and to the question of whether Israel should continue to enjoy the privileges of international sport while denying Palestinians their most basic rights.
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