Every Flag But One
For a few weeks every four years, people across borders, languages and faiths organize their lives around the same 90 minutes. We see strangers embrace over a goal. Flags of nations thousands of miles apart wave side by side in stadiums. Entire countries hold their breath for a penalty kick. For a moment, everyone cares about the same thing at the same time.
This summer, with the World Cup staged across the United States, Canada and Mexico, that vision of unity arrived on our doorstep. It is a beautiful vision: a world that, for the length of a single match, agrees to play by one set of rules.
But for Jewish fans, this tournament told another story. Alongside the joy, the world’s oldest hatred found its way into matches.
It began at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, where an Israeli fan was told to put away his nation’s flag and leave. Even as that happened, the banners of other countries waved freely around him. His Israeli flag, and only his, was the problem.
In the days that followed, the same discrimination surfaced again. When Egypt’s coach waved a Palestinian flag in celebration of a group-stage win, the openly political gesture passed without consequence. The symbol of one people was welcome. Another’s was not. The rulebook came with an asterisk just for the Jewish state.
The hostility was not confined to the stands. After Argentina’s match against Algeria, a television analyst told viewers, without a shred of evidence, that a “Jewish lobby” was responsible for favorable refereeing decisions for Argentina’s Lionel Messi. The historic, dangerous antisemitic trope that Jews secretly pull the world’s strings now laundered into the public conversation as sports commentary.
Online, an influencer with a documented record of antisemitism called Messi “the Netanyahu of football,” turning the Israeli leader into a punchline and an epithet you could throw at anyone. Off the field, a coordinated international movement under the banner #GameOverIsrael actively has campaigned to ban the world’s only Jewish state from international soccer competitions altogether. Hatred even spilled onto the streets. After Morocco’s loss to France in the quarterfinals, Moroccan fans assembled in The Hague to chant antisemitic and homophobic slogans.
None of this was really about soccer. Antisemitism always has sought out the biggest audience it can find, and the World Cup offers a very big one. Kicked out, smeared as puppet masters, mocked and told to disappear, the Jewish state and Jewish fans met the full weight of today’s hatred.
Sports always have held a mirror up to the society that plays them, with bigotry in the reflection, from the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics to the attacks against Israeli fans outside a Maccabi Tel Aviv game in Amsterdam in 2024. The hatred fans met this summer is the same Jews and Israelis encounter outside the stadium every day.
ADL has worked in the world of sports since well before this tournament’s opening whistle, updating our playbook for confronting discrimination in the stadium and helping host cities recognize and respond to hate. We have urged FIFA to take actions that would show the Jewish community full support: publicly clarifying the standards it applies to fan conduct, enforcing those standards equally for supporters of every nation and committing to training its staff on consistent enforcement. It should not be so difficult.
The promise every World Cup makes to the world is simple: on the pitch, under these lights, everyone plays by the same rules. Jewish and Israeli fans ask for nothing more than that and deserve nothing less. We don’t need special treatment – just simply want equal treatment, so that we can live our lives by the same rulebook as everyone else. We will not stop, we will not relax, until we can.
