They Can Stand Up to FIFA, But They Can’t Stand Up for the Palestinians or for World Peace

I’ve been following with some interest the recent FIFA scandal, which is still unfolding. Trump’s chum Infantino, the head of FIFA, came up with a brilliant scheme to sell off stakes in the World Cup to private investors — a new commercial subsidiary dressed up as ‘FIFA Forward Enterprise’, fronted by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital. This followed hot on the heels of Trump phoning Infantino directly to get a red card against Folarin Balogun, the US striker, overturned before the last-16 match against Belgium. Infantino didn’t even bother to deny the call. He confirmed it, then stood there with a straight face and called FIFA’s disciplinary process ‘independent’. This isn’t a person covering their tracks — he’s not even trying. These days more than ever before, Infantino and politicians like him do what they do in the open because they know they can get away with anything. Most evildoers do, so why hide? So clearly not all is well in the land of FIFA, and I suspect there is a great deal more, given that Infantino’s own senior adviser, Carlos Cordeiro, resigned in protest. Infantino’s days in power now seem numbered, although he should have been removed from his post a long time ago.

Neoliberalism is hard at work everywhere. The greedy characters that drive it leave no area of human activity untouched — not even football, where the last remnants of innocence are being destroyed, completing the sport’s transformation into yet another profit-driven human activity. But what I found interesting, as the scandal unfolded, was the reaction. UEFA’s 55 member associations voted unanimously to boycott every FIFA competition, including the World Cup, unless the sell-off plan is abandoned. Concacaf followed. So did the Asian Football Confederation. ‘Some things are simply too important to sell,’ UEFA said. ‘The FIFA World Cup belongs to football. It always will.’

And this is far from the first time Infantino has shown exactly where his priorities sit. Ahead of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, he stood in front of the world’s press for nearly an hour and, rather than address the deaths of migrant workers who built the stadiums, announced:

The reaction to Infantino and his scheme wasn’t grassroots. It came from above — from the ruling bodies of the sport and from its politicians. It appears that when something is so blatantly wrong, and when it threatens something people in power value, including their own positions and profits, they know exactly how to stand up and act, not only to correct a wrong, but prevent it from ever happening.

This reaction to Infantino’s scheme stood out like a sore thumb against the world’s silence over Israel’s settler-colonial project to empty historic Palestine of Palestinians by any means possible. Millions of Palestinian lives are at stake. Countless people live under daily threats and incomprehensible harassment from the Israeli authorities, their military and police, and the so-called settlers they arm, train, goad and protect. Countless Palestinians languish in Israel’s Inquisition-style torture dungeons — innocent people like Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, held without charge or reason, their only crime is being Palestinian and living on land the settler-colony wants for itself.

Women and men held captive for the ‘crime’ of being Palestinian are sexually tortured, raped, some by dogs. Israel gets away with the worst violations imaginable — violations its own soldiers have been posting on social media to gloat and boast. No one can escape the images out of Gaza and the West Bank, or avoid the instinctive recognition of what it must feel like, as a human being, to suffer as Palestinians suffer. Any parent would have no trouble feeling for Palestinian parents whose children have long been used as target practice for Israeli snipers. 351 Palestinian children were held in Israeli adult prisons at the end of 2025 — over half without charge or trial — suffering abuse in addition to the trauma of incarceration. There has been a total absence of any meaningful action from international bodies meant to protect children. There has been no attempts to lead to actual release or accountability. (Those who look away from the news do it because they can’t bear the emotional resonance with another human beings’ pain, not because they don’t care). But what I feel, what many of us feel, is the utter powerlessness and despair at the world’s lack of meaningful response to Israel’s crimes, and their devastating impact on the Palestinian people. What will it take for our politicians and leaders to do for Palestine and Palestinians what UEFA just did over Infantino’s attempted daylight robbery?

In FIFA’s scandal, the casualty would have been the sport, its integrity, its meaning to millions of fans. No one would have died. No one would have been tortured. No one would have been turfed out of their home or have their olive trees bulldozed. In the settler-colonial scandal — a clear and colossal crime against humanity — we can’t find one decent politician willing to use the words ‘settler-colonialism’, let alone do what is necessary to stop a murderous state, and clip the wings of an annihilationist regime and its society. This should have already been done in 1949, but from 1948 Israel has been enabled and supported to complete its Zionist project — a product of a colonial world.

Until I saw the reaction to Infantino’s scheme, I thought politicians simply weren’t capable of standing up to wrongs — that change could only come from the grassroots. Now I know better. When something is at stake that they care about, politicians are perfectly capable of decisive, even preventive, action. The conclusion is obvious. Politicians act on what they care about. Since our politicians enable perpetual war, genocide and suffering, greed and inequality, that tells us what they care about. They want this. If they wanted world peace, they would choose actions that lead to it.

The inevitable conclusion is not that they’re powerless, or disillusioned, or that they don’t know how to use their own power. The people at the top of our world choose the actions that maintain the status quo: genocide, war, and the human and environmental destruction that comes with them; senseless competition over resources that no one owns and that belong to everyone; privatisation; preferential treatment for those who believe themselves entitled to it. These are the people we put in power, and that we go on enabling. I don’t even blame them in the end. I blame all of us.

Once we see the actions politicians actually choose, we know everything we need to know about their real motivations and interests. It is therefore up to us — the people disproportionately paying for their choices — to stop mistaking their inaction for impotence, or to shrug at their corruption as an inevitable part of politics. Politics isn’t a force of nature. Like everything in our human world, we create it and shape it in our own image. The way our politicians operate actually reflects humanity. If we want world peace, we should enable politicians who will lead us to it.

The idea of ‘changing the conversation’ isn’t just philosophical. In my profession it is an actual intervention that leads to profound change. Clients often raise a real problem but dance around it, wrapping what I can clearly see as dangerous or serious circumstances with euphemisms and softening language. Heavy drinking becomes ‘a bit of an issue’, or ‘a bit sensitive’. Control, threats, violence, fear become ‘he/she has a bit of a temper’. The softening language allows people to keep circling serious problems and dangerous circumstances and dynamics without ever naming them. As a therapist I’m often invited to go along with the fiction that the topics are delicate or ‘sensitive’ and collude with the myth.

It’s time to change the conversation on a global scale like we do on a smaller scale in the therapy room. The phrase settler-colonialism in relation to Israel and its crimes in Palestine must be on everyone’s lips, not ‘conflict’ or ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’. The phrase world peace must take centre stage everywhere, not ‘war’, ‘nuclear deterrence’, or ‘more funding for armed forces’.

The conversation — our public discourse — must change. A crime is a crime. Harm is harm. They’re not anything other than precisely what they are. What we refuse to avoid, what we insist on naming clearly, openly and unapologetically, becomes the catalyst for healing and change in my profession. We need the same on a global scale. Those whose salaries our taxes pay for must name and then dismantle the Israeli settler-colonial machine. They must dedicate their careers and use their positions to work towards world peace. Nothing is more important or more urgent.