Palestinians are urging a Native American team to pull out of the 2018 World Lacrosse Championships in Israel.
This comes on the day Israel is escalating its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Bedouin communities of Khan al-Ahmar and Abu Nuwwar to make way for colonial settlements, as the video above from Khan al-Ahmar shows.
The Iroquois Nationals team represents the Iroquois Confederacy, a group of Indigenous nations whose territory extends across parts of what is now the northeastern United States 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,” PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, said in a letter to the Iroquois Nationals published on Wednesday.
“This year marks 70 years of Israeli dispossession of Palestinians, which began with what we call the Nakba, or catastrophe.”
“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 a traditional term for the North American continent.
Israel often attempts to use international sporting events to burnish its image, and tries to market its violent colonial project in Palestine as “Indigenous,” particularly through appropriating and then erasing the origins of local culture.
At the same time, PACBI noted, “Israel has also attacked, imprisoned and killed Palestinian athletes and bombed and destroyed Palestinian stadiums.”