BDS fails to convince Iroquois Indians to boycott Israel’s world lacrosse championships

A Palestinian BDS group has called on the Iroquois Nationals to pull out of the lacrosse competition in Israel, but the team rejected the appeal.

By: World Israel News Staff

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement has been trying to hinder the 2018 World Lacrosse Championships in Netanya, Israel, and has called on the Iroquois Nationals to pull out of the competition.

The Iroquois Nationals team represents the Iroquois Confederacy, a group of indigenous nations from the northeastern US and eastern Canada.

They are credited with inventing the sport of lacrosse.

“As indigenous peoples, we have both seen our traditional lands colonized, our people ethnically cleansed and massacred by colonial settlers,” the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) said in a letter to the Iroquois Nationals published last Wednesday.

“Like the Iroquois Confederacy and the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, we struggle daily for self-determination and against ongoing dispossession and colonization,” the letter adds, using an Iroquois term for the North American continent.

The letter claims that the Wingate Institute, a sports college where the tournament will be held next week, is a “settlement” built on the Palestinian lands of Khirbet al-Zababida, even though it is on sovereign Israeli land, within pre-1967 lines.

Ansley Jemison, executive director of the Iroquois Nationals, told Indian Country Today that he has seen some of the requests to stay away from the championships in Israel, but said he and the team must remain focused.

“I think we are going to keep it as much about the game and as much about us understanding what we bring. What we are taking to the game is our medicine. And that can be a healing for both sides. We are an indigenous representative on the world level. We are not choosing a side. It is non-binary,” he said.

‘Attempt to steal the story of indigenous peoples’

“The entire position of PACBI is based on fallacy and the attempt to steal the story of indigenous peoples. They, the Arabs, are not indigenous to Israel and in fact would more closely be analogous to the white people who conquered and tried to impose colonial rule. As such it’s ridiculous for them to make these claims of similarity,” Ryan Bellerose, a Metis from northern Alberta and a Zionist advocate, told World Israel News.

PACBI has long sought to pressure artists and others to avoid performances in Israel and to distance themselves from events with Israeli involvement. The group is a leading driver of the BDS campaign, which describes itself as an effort “to isolate Israel academically, culturally, economically and militarily.”

Supporters of the campaign describe it as a movement to secure justice for Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law. Critics say it denies the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and aims to undermine Israel’s existence.

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