Israel evades FIFA sanctions – for now

A compromise formula this week saved Israel from being sanctioned by world football governing body FIFA and has bought the Jewish state time, but serves as a harbinger of growing diplomatic and public impatience with perceived Israeli intransigence in efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In rejecting, at least for now, Palestinian efforts to suspend membership of the Israel Football Association (IFA) if not expel it from FIFA on the grounds of alleged persistent Israeli measures to undermine Palestinian football activity and development, FIFA for now averted becoming the first international organization to sanction the Jewish state.

The campaign by the Palestine Football Association (PFA) is part of broader move by the newly formed unity government that is supported by rival factions, West Bank-based Fatah headed by the Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas (the Islamist militia that controls the Gaza Strip), to gain recognition of Palestinian statehood through membership in international organizations and isolate Israel. It follows the breakdown in April of U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The compromise presupposes an Israeli willingness to cooperate at a time that it is on the defensive because of a U.S. and European willingness to deal with the new Palestinian government despite the fact that the United States and Israel have blacklisted Hamas as a terrorist organization and Israeli concerns about efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis and growing calls for a boycott of Israel that could be boosted by a possible European Union boycott of Israeli products that originate from occupied territory.

The compromise hammered out by FIFA at a meeting between the PFA and the IFA in Sao...