46th Chess Olympiad - Australian Player Boycotts Israel

Hello,
This is a very good initiative you are taking.
It would be even better if you would share it to larger audiences, other than this.
PS: Is the whole Australia team boycotting or only you?

I'm not anywhere in support of MAGA, just for reference sake. I define myself as left-centrist (heck, in these days I don't know where I'm located on the spectrum anyway, I'm just like ARRRGH...) I hate right-extremists and right-populists for all the lies, instigations, oppression, violence and wars they're bringing, I hate islamists for destroying the foundations of a free society, and I hate left-extremists for their bigotry and hypocrisy.

The calls of "Free Palestine" include such hypocrisy. The Gaza strip has never been free under the tyranny of Hamas in the first place. It is fraught with social and political upheavals, regardless of Israel.

I'm not fond of what the Israeli government is doing. But I'm sick of the exaggerate use of "genocide" and "apartheid", the victim-perpetrator reversal, and the latent antisemitism.

Why is this post polluting the chess section? It should go to off-topic.

Free the Pond from the Frogs!

The bad stuff is done by the country governments and not the common people. By boycotting playing with them, you just gave them a point. Watch who you are fighting against

"if someone refers to BDS"

• BDS = Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
  The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide holds an obligation to act against genocide.

"Israel's right to exist"

• That is not an issue.
  Israel and the Palestinian State can exist together: like in the Two-State Solution as proposed by Ehud Olmert: a Palestinian State in Gaza and the West Bank, a corridor between them, and an international status for Jerusalem as the cradle of 3 religions.

"any Russian representative will be closely tied or dependent on the neofascist government of Putin"

• You can say the same for the neofascist government of Netanyahu.

"Israel which is still a democracy"

• Russia has elections too. In Israel the Religious Zionist Party is in the government.

FACT CHECKS:

• it is still to be decided whether Israel's war crimes constitute genocide. The verdict of, say, AI or HRW, who had already displayed strong anti-Israel views before the war, is not sufficient.

• Russia's elections are pseudo and fake, obviously enough.

• Most BDS voices neglect the state of Israel altogether and pursue the dystopy of "from the river to the sea", they want to get rid of Israel as a whole and they are jingoist supporters of Hamas and its terrorism. BDS is a message of hate.

• The government of Israel is far right but not fascist. While it tends to be an illiberal democracy, it is still a democracy. You don't get arrested in cruel detention camps for opposing the government of Israel

@tpr said ^

Standing up against the Gaza genocide is no antisemitism.
Several Jews outside and inside Israel oppose the Gaza genocide.
As for the October 7 attack, Haaretz wrote Netanyahu knew of it in advance.

Of course, you are correct in your first two points. Israel is committing genocide, there is no real argument against it.
But believing one side is committing genocide onto the other side does not mean you should, without further thought, support the other side completely and believe everything that they claim.

I am a big supporter of Ukraine in its fight against Russia, anyone who has read my comments in previous forums on Lichess and elsewhere knows as much. But that does not mean I support them when they celebrate Stepan Bandera, when parts of their army wear insignia from the 1940s, when they completely ban books and other school materials in other languages in parts of their country, when they broadcast illegal interviews with POWs. The list goes on. The world is not black and white.

Likewise, for your third point, while Netanyahu may have been warned of the planned attack a few days in advance, the idea that the Mossad and the Israeli government on purpose allowed the attack to happen starts very quickly smelling like any other anti-jew conspiracy of the past few millennia. There is little need to give any fuel to supporters of Israel when the overall facts are so overwhelmingly in your favor.

"it is still to be decided whether Israel's war crimes constitute genocide"

• The International Criminal Court has indicted Netanyahu.
  73,400 direct deaths counts as a genocide.
  It is disproportional to say the least.

"they want to get rid of Israel"

• And the Religious Zionist Party wants to get rid of Palestinians and acts to that effect.

"You don't get arrested in cruel detention camps for opposing the government of Israel."

• Palestinian children got imprisoned, tortured and raped in prison, for throwing stones.
  The rationale for the October 7 attack was to take hostages to exchange them for Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

Standing up against the Gaza genocide is no antisemitism.
Several Jews outside and inside Israel oppose the Gaza genocide.

if someone refers to BDS, as OP did, I'm highly suspicious if they respect Israel's right to exist in the first place.

Also I will note again that with regard to sportive events or ESC, any Russian representative will be closely tied or dependent on the neofascist government of Putin, while this need not be the case for Israel which is still a democracy (e.g. EBU member KAN is perceived leftist-liberalist and very oppositional)

@Himawari_Nohara said ^

The bad stuff is done by the country governments and not the common people. By boycotting playing with them, you just gave them a point. Watch who you are fighting against

The boycott is to highlight Fide's double standards in comparison with Russia.
It is not specifically against the chess team players, however it would have been nicer if they had taken a stand against their government and military actions like many of their Russian colleagues did when Putin invaded Ukraine.