Israel’s biggest ever Olympic team has faced a “tough” environment during the Paris Games, the head of their delegation told AFP after a week featuring sometimes hostile crowds, online harassment and tragedy back home.
The 88-person Israeli team won its first medals on Thursday through judokas Peter Paltchik and Inbar Lanir and remains hopeful of clinching another two or three over the remaining 10 days, Israeli Olympic Committee president Yael Arad told AFP.
But focusing on the sport has sometimes proved difficult, with Israeli athletes suffering online death threats, leaks of their personal information on social media, as well as being targeted with boos and allegedly anti-Semitic gestures during a football match.
“We prepared our athletes for any kind of provocation,” Arad said. “We prepared them with special meetings, and with a special team.
“The main message that we gave them is that we’re here to compete, to show the Israeli spirit.”
The Israeli government has pointed the finger at Iran-backed groups for a sophisticated campaign of online harassment and phishing attacks.
“It’s been really tough. You know we are a nation in sorrow, in grief since the 7th of October,” Arad added, referring to the attacks by Hamas militants on Israel that left 1,170 people dead, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
A rocket attack from Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah that killed 12 children playing football last weekend on the annexed Golan Heights had also affected the team, Arad said.
“I’m very satisfied that our athletes can … take the grief and sorrow and the problems and go and give hope and inspiration back home,” she explained.
‘Disgrace’
Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza has caused controversy at the Paris Olympics.
The sport had not even begun before the Palestinian Olympic Committee demanded that Israel be excluded for violating the notion of the Olympic truce that surrounds each Games, and for killing as many as 400 Palestinian athletes and sports figures.
Nearly 40,000 people have died in Israel’s 10-month assault on Gaza, according to an estimate from the Hamas-run health ministry, while the territory faces severe food shortages and malnutrition.
Arad called the call for a boycott of her team by her Palestinian counterpart Jibril Rajoub “a disgrace.”
“I think this is a disgrace that instead of concentrating on sports, they bring politics into the field of play,” she said, adding that Rajoud was “a convicted terrorist” after he spent 17 years in prison for attacking Israeli soldiers.
She also defended Israeli judoka Peter Paltchik, who won a bronze medal on Friday, after criticism from Rajoub and other pro-Palestinian activists of his social media post in October that saw him write “From me to you with pleasure. HAMASisISIS” over a picture of Israeli bombs.
Paltchik was chosen as an Israeli flag bearer during the opening ceremony last Friday.
“It’s not against a country. It’s not against a people, it’s against a terror organisation,” Arad said of his message, while denying reports that he had signed the bombs personally.
“He never signed on any bomb… he took a picture from the internet and posted it,” she said.
Security
Security around the Israeli team has been exceptionally tight, with elite French police tasked with guarding the athletes around-the-clock and accompanying them every time they leave the Olympic village in northern Paris.
Arad, a former judoka who won the first Olympic medal in Israel’s history, said Israeli teams were used to being closely guarded ever since the 1972 Games in Munich when the Palestinian militant group Black September attacked and killed Israeli competitors in the Athletes’ Village.
“We have confidence in the security here in Paris. And my role together with my team is to give these athletes the possibility just to concentrate on the sports,” she said.
