Monday's ceremony in London commemorating the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by
Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympic Games 40 years ago is the correct
way to honor their memory. A minute’s silence at last week’s opening ceremony
would not only have been out of place at such a joyous event, it also would have
risked turning the horror of these athletes’ deaths into a barren political
ping-pong over the rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Palestinian
dispute.
An immediate example of such sterile debate was Jibril Rajoub’s
shameful letter to International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge, in
which the Palestinian Olympic official thanked Rogge for not holding the
minute’s silence, stating that having done so would have promoted the “spread of
racism.”
In writing this letter, Rajoub placed a new hurdle on the track
towards possible Israeli-Palestinian coexistence.
There can be no defense
of the events of 40 years ago. But while one can understand, and deeply
sympathize with the feelings of the widows of the slain Israeli athletes, it was
naive to expect that the organizers of the Olympic Games would suddenly agree to
hold a memorial for the murdered Israelis after having failed to do so at
previous Games.
As we know from past American and Soviet boycotts of
different Olympic Games, politics does intrude on sports, despite all the
highfalutin talk of the Olympic spirit. The sad truth is that for as long as the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute continues, there will never be a mention of the
victims of Munich in 1972 at an Olympic Games opening ceremony, and we should
stop fooling ourselves into thinking that if we sign enough online petitions, we
will be able to change this.
We should also stop casting slurs on the
International Olympic Committee and have them, and in particular Jacques Rogge,
listed in popular consciousness as “enemies of the Jewish
people.”
They’re not. Rogge will be attending today’s ceremony in
London’s Guildhall, organized by the Israeli Embassy and the British Jewish
community, and IOC officials will also be attending a ceremony in Germany on
next month’s actual anniversary of the attack.
And last month, just
before the Games began, Rogge led a
minute of silence during a ceremony which
promoted the Olympic truce inside the Olympic village, the first time the IOC
had ever honored the Israeli victims in a ceremony inside an Olympic village. He
started by “honoring the memory of the 11 Israeli Olympians who shared the
ideals that have brought us together in this beautiful Olympic village” and said
that the Israelis “came to Munich in the spirit of peace and
solidarity.”
Rogge added, “we owe it to them to keep that spirit alive
and to remember them.”
One Olympic arena, however, in which the power of
Internet petitions did come partially into play is the BBC’s Olympic website. In
its initial country profile of Israel, it failed to list Israel as having any
capital while simultaneously listing East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine
(yes, the Palestinians do have their own Olympic team, even though they don’t
have a state).
After a flurry of letters from the Prime Minister’s Office
in Jerusalem, and a Facebook petition, the BBC amended the listings, putting
down Jerusalem as Israel’s “seat of government,” adding that most foreign
embassies “are in Tel Aviv,” and changing the Palestinian listing to note that
East Jerusalem is the “intended seat of government,” with Ramallah currently
serving its administrative capital.
Of course, this did not satisfy
everyone, with Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat firing off a press release stating
firmly that “irrespective of the BBC’s political agenda, Jerusalem always was,
is, and will be the capital of Israel and the spiritual, political and physical
center of the Jewish people.”
While Barkat’s sentiments about Jerusalem
are true from an Israeli perspective, it’s not the
BBC that has unilaterally
decided for its own political reasons that Jerusalem is not Israel’s
capital.
It surely can’t have escaped Barkat’s notice that almost the
whole international community has yet to officially recognize Jerusalem as
Israel’s capital. Not even the United States has its embassy in Jerusalem. And
while the pro-Republican Emergency Committee for Israel has been frenetically
running television ads in Florida over the weekend claiming that Mitt Romney
will change this, we all know that should he be elected president, this will
never happen unless an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is reached.
At
the same point of his campaign 12 years ago, George W. Bush promised to move the
US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on his first day in office. In reality,
over the course of eight years, Bush signed 16 waivers telling Congress he would
not be moving the embassy despite a law calling for him to do so, arguing that
such a move would harm US efforts to bring about a two-state solution to solve
the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
And did Bush ever receive the same
venomous flak over this issue that US President Barack Obama is currently
receiving?
The writer is a former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.