Israel aims for Olympic glory in Paris amid high security and historic challenges - editorial

Three years after Israel’s most successful Olympics, the time has come again for this country’s finest athletes to aim for sporting glory as the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad begin in earnest in Paris tonight.

The successes of Tokyo 2020 that were played out a year later, in 2021, because of the COVID-19 pandemic will be hard to emulate following two gold medals and two bronzes. Out of the 206 countries competing at those games, 86 won medals; certainly, that is a great achievement for a nation that does not have a natural propensity for sporting excellence and where every shekel devoted to gaining sporting success has to be fought for tooth-and-nail.

There will be 88 Israeli competitors at the Paris Games, its second-largest Olympic delegation, two fewer than in Tokyo three years ago. Not all the events will take place in the City of Love; the sailing regatta, which involves Israel, will be held in Marseille, several hundred kilometers away on the Mediterranean coast.

In addition to hosting soccer matches across France, the French, rekindling their colonial history, have dispatched board surfers to Tahiti, a distance of 15,000 kilometers. Anat Lelior will fly Israel’s flag there.

However, Israel will focus on events mainly in Paris, where never-ending security threats will make them the most protected among the 10,500 competing athletes over the next 16 days of competition.

The security forces’ vigilance was already apparent earlier this week. Fears of a suspicious individual lurking on a nearby rooftop briefly disrupted President Isaac Herzog’s arrival in Paris on Wednesday, forcing him to remain on his plane for 40 minutes.

Israeli officials to attend games

Herzog and Sports Minister Miki Zohar will attend tonight’s opening ceremony along the banks of the Seine, and there is no need to elaborate on the task that awaits the huge security detail for the event. As befits the biggest and most complex of global events, security staff, both overt and covert, will be deployed for during these Games and for the Paralympics that begin on August 28.

Hamas released a video earlier this week, threatening “rivers of blood” against the West for arming Israel in the Gaza war, and this is the type of threat that those security forces have been trained to confront. Let’s wish them success in their critical task over the next few weeks.

Israeli competitors are accustomed to receiving tight protection, as they are always under threat, wherever they compete, but obviously, the Olympic Games, the world’s largest and most high-profile event, makes them an even more “lucrative” target for bad actors. Terrorists would indeed love to see blood flowing through the Seine River but the entire sane world will be behind the security forces, who will do everything possible to ensure that the tragedy of the 1972 Munich Olympics is not repeated.

It is not only the bad actors – terrorists and evildoers – who will ignore the tradition of the original Olympic spirit of ancient Greece, where wars were suspended and enmities cast aside to allow competitors to display their sporting skills. Demonstrators against Israel – described by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his US Congress speech on Wednesday as “Tehran’s useful idiots” – will be out in full force to keep their narrative in the headlines.

We look forward to an Olympics of the highest quality and for a betterment of human achievement for all athletes, and we hope that Israel’s representatives will at least equal the successes achieved in Tokyo, but we deeply lament one important point that we highlighted in our editorial on the day of the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Games on July 23, 2021: the representation of Israel’s minorities is sorely lacking. Since Israel first began competing at the Olympics in 1952, only two Arab Israelis have been among the hundreds of competitors. This time, one competitor, swimmer Adam Maraana from Haifa, the son of an Arab-Israeli father and a Jewish mother, represents Israel’s minorities. Something is not right when 20% of the country’s population is represented so poorly, and we demand far more investment to encourage greater sporting participation from Israel’s minorities.