129: Rebecca O'Keefe - Irish Sport for Palestine and Stop the Game.

And then what I was going to ask you there was...

Looking back now, do you feel like the decision was made to go ahead with the game in the interest of protecting basketball, or do you think that there might have been other forces at play here that kind of compelled them to keep quiet and go ahead with the games?

It's hard to say, and again, I don't want to speak for them, but I can only, from my position, say I don't think the sanctions were overstated.

I don't think that would have been needed out of Basketball Ireland.

There was precedent to rely on, I think they're acting from external pressure and possibly political interference, because we've seen that from many different instances.

So maybe they told themselves they were protecting the sport, but I also think there's something to be said about reputation, integrity, fulfilling these universal values of sport that were taught, and acting in accordance with these.

moral and ethical um values so i don't yeah i think i know what decision i would have made um so no i don't think it helped the sports reputation but what it did help i suppose was spark the conversation around sporting boycotts in ireland it's helped bring that into public discourse as well because a lot of people still tend to rely on sports and politics shouldn't mix um so it did bring that conversation forward and i think as well the groundswell of you know pro-palestinian support from irish civil society grew and has grown and i think we can compare now to how the stop the game or like the football boycott is going and it's a world of difference in terms of the growth and the you know how people have joined this campaign now and i get football is a very different beast to basketball and football's hugely popular and so i'm not comparing them that way but i am comparing you know the the support has grown so much and i guess at the end of the day, our messaging hasn't changed.

We still are saying the exact same things, that you shouldn't be playing against an apartheid state, you shouldn't be normalising, giving cover to genocide, you should be sanctioning the offending regime.

So we haven't changed that messaging, but the support has grown.

And we're talking January 2024 here, right? Well,

November, October, November 2023.

Okay, so it's just

after the beginning of the genocide, really.

And things definitely have progressed there when you look at the trajectory that a lot of people have travelled, not only in the sporting world, but in the musical world as well.

I remember back in those early days where people who had a certain level of... kind of support for the Palestinian cause in general, who were artists or sports people at that point still would have been quite hesitant to kind of make their views public for fear of like being penalized for it, like losing gigs or losing points in matches and stuff like that there.

But when I think about what we're seeing now more and more people are willing to take those steps and I think it is because certain people went ahead and did it anyway in the early days and proved that it's not the end of the world and also proved that it is like morally the right thing to do so I wanted to ask you then about how the pressure ends up back on the players if the governing body keeps quiet is it a case of putting pressure on the players to fulfil the fixture because if the fixture isn't fulfilled that's a team's going to be relegated or points are going to be lost or there's going to be financial penalties?

Yeah, if the governing bodies don't act and don't take moral authority and decisive leadership, it goes to fall on the players then.

And as a player, you never want that.

I mean, you've worked your whole career to represent your country.

You're possibly getting a cap for the first time.

You want to... play the game.

But when it's left to you to decide as an individual, yes, everyone has a moral duty, everyone has a conscience that they will then have to live with, so everyone can act and should act, but it shouldn't be up to individuals on a team setting or when governing bodies have previously demonstrated that they've acted in similar ways before, they should still be acting.

when it comes to players we just say like the last last last resort should be putting pressure on players like it should still be up to the governing bodies they should still be acting and when they don't act and it comes to the game time the scrutiny does go on players and that's not what they have you know signed up for and there was a lot of abuse in the start there still is a lot of abuse um going on and nobody should be subjected to that but then like you just have to support them because people have gone before you can still act and you can still, you know, act morally and stand up for what you believe in.

But you then have to remember and put it in perspective that some things are bigger than sport, but also, you know, if you are to be fulfilling these universal values and acting in a sporting way, sometimes the right decision is not to play the game or not to fulfill that fixture because if you think about how Palestinians are subjected to targeting, maiming, killing, injuring, restriction of movement, you know, there is no level playing field for Palestinians.

And I think when you put that perspective into it, you then very quickly realise, yeah, it's more than sport, it's more than a game.