The Argentine national football team does not belong to Javier Milei. Nor does it belong to Benjamin Netanyahu. Argentina does not speak with one voice.
By
Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem
Via
Common Dreams
One day before the FIFA Men’s World Cup final between Argentina and
Spain
, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu
expressed his support for Argentina. In a
video
released before the match, he said: “I don’t hide that I’m a fan of Argentina. I think most Israeli citizens do. That is because President Milei has revolutionized Israel’s relationship with Argentina, and we have no greater nor better friends. Which is why we support them.”
Both
media outlets
known for supporting Palestinian
solidarity
and
media outlets
affiliated with or supportive of the Israeli state immediately framed the World Cup final as a proxy for the relationship between
Palestine
and Israel. The final turned into a symbolic contest due to the official state policies of Argentina and Spain toward Palestine and Israel. Acts of individual actors, for example, Lionel Messi’s commercial connection with Israeli companies or his visit to Israel and the occupied
West Bank
as part of a 2013
“
Peace Tour
”
organized by
Barcelona
or Lamin Yamal’s waving of a
Palestinian flag
after the La Liga championship, were turned into symbols of the collective stance of a nation and became reasons enough to support or oppose a specific team in the World Cup final.
As a Bangladeshi-American who grew up in Bangladesh—a country known for its passion for Latin American football powerhouses and its split loyalties between Argentina and Brazil—I have been a fan of the Argentine men’s football team since the age of 10. I have also been in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom since I was old enough to read newspapers. I found it appalling to see the head of a genocidal state publicly endorse my favorite men’s football team and to watch Palestinian solidarity become over simplistically reduced to supporting or opposing a football team. Can we end settler-colonial violence by winning a football match?
While people have
argued
that symbols matter, I would urge them to consider how such symbolism ignores two important points: First, it overlooks the problem of transforming one of the world’s most celebrated sporting spectacles into a stage upon which Benjamin Netanyahu’s ethnonationalist genocidal project can be publicly performed and normalized. Second, people are not their governments. Argentina’s self-proclaimed “most
Zionist president