Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 16, 2016

Petty Apartheid at the Olympics

Arab athletes shun Israelis, and the rest of the world is indifferent.

At this year’s Olympic games, Lebanese athletes prevented their Israeli counterparts from boarding a bus, an Egyptian judoka refused to shake hands with his Israeli opponent after a match, and a Saudi judoka canceled a fight with an Israeli. Such behavior, dictated by Arab and Muslim states, is hardly unprecedented. Employing “petty apartheid,” a phrase used in South Africa to refer to the more minor, everyday forms of racial persecution, Gerald Steinberg describes this scandalous and systematic shunning of the Jewish state, and the world’s indifference to it:

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