Ken Early: Why the discomfort over Israel fixtures? Because we know our position is a fudge

A certain word kept recurring in the week before Ireland lost to Kosovo on Thursday night. FAI chief executive David Courell: “It’s been uncomfortable and unwelcome for the FAI to find ourselves in this situation.” Heimir Hallgrímsson: “I can say honestly some of [the players] felt really uncomfortable playing the game.” FAI technical director John Martin: “It’s a deeply uncomfortable situation for us to be.”READ MOREWhy are we uncomfortable? We are uncomfortable because our position is a fudge. We feel like maybe we shouldn’t be playing the Israel games but also we are playing the games. “We are aware of the noise” – and deem it best to keep our heads down. We don’t want any trouble. The contradictions go right to the top. The Irish Government knows how most Irish people feel about Israel’s war on the Palestinians, but it also doesn’t want to jeopardise Ireland’s relationship with Israel’s chief sponsor, the United States. Life was simpler back in June 1999, when the Irish government refused visas to the visiting Yugoslavia team because of “the illegal and appalling actions of the Yugoslavian regime against the people of Kosovo”. At that time, Ireland’s strong moral stance happened to be agreeable to the United States, which was then leading the NATO bombing campaign against the Serbs along with several of Ireland’s senior EU partners. To take similar action against Israel would be more complicated. Then you have the FAI, still dependent on Government support. The FAI doesn’t want to alienate the fan base but also doesn’t want to lose Uefa money and points. The FAI delegates who voted last November by a 93 per cent majority to ask Uefa to suspend Israel from European competitions voted in July by a 68 per cent majority to fulfil the fixtures. So we are going ahead, making nervous noises about how uncomfortable it’s making us feel. Last week Heimir Hallgrímsson seemed uncomfortable as he fielded question after question about Israel, while the FAI’s press officer complained that nobody was talking about football. [ Kevin Kilbane: The FAI will come to regret letting the Ireland-Israel match go aheadOpens in new window ]Hallgrímsson eventually came out with the line that “we’re not playing with genocide, we’re playing against genocide”. His intention, it seemed to me, was to make the point that by playing the games against Israel, the Irish team are not somehow endorsing the policies of the Israeli state. But his use of the word “genocide” drew a predictably furious response from the Israel FA, which promptly accused Hallgrímsson of “stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy”. Of course, Israel denies the conclusion of the UN special committee, the UN commission of inquiry, and numerous other relevant agencies and scholars that it has committed genocide in Gaza. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu speaking at the UN General Assembly on Thursday. Photograph: Dave Sanders/New York Times At the United Nations on Thursday afternoon, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, was calling the charge of genocide against Israel as “the greatest lie of the century”. Taoiseach Micheál Martin, also at the UN this week, called for the Israel FA’s “unacceptable” remarks about Hallgrímsson to be withdrawn. But when Hallgrímsson was asked for his reaction on Wednesday he essentially withdrew his own remarks, saying that “maybe from a leadership point of view, it was not clever from me to take the attention like this”.It’s understood that the FAI has privately complained to Uefa about the Israel FA’s attack on Hallgrímsson but is wary of further confrontational exchanges. You wonder if its reticence is rooted in the fear that, in a war of words between Ireland and Israel, there could only be one winner. Ireland is anxious to get through these games without creating any unnecessary trouble. Israel is long past caring about that. While Irish officials and players hesitate as they try to find the right words to address this awkward subject – who, after all, speaks well when they’re “uncomfortable”? – the Israelis speak with the conviction of believers. Those delegates who stayed to listen to Netanyahu’s apocalyptic speech to the UN got a taste of the version of reality to which many Israelis are now fully committed. The Israeli prime minister raged against the “moral cowardice” of Israel’s critics and swore to defeat its enemies on all eight fronts of the current war. In this reality, as Netanyahu put it, “Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.”Ireland's manager Heimir Hallgrímsson at Fadil Vokrri Stadium in Pristina, Kosovo on Thursday. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho Say what you like about the tenets of apocalyptic Zionism, at least it’s an ethos. The Manichean worldview simplifies and clarifies, cuts down on time you might otherwise waste in hand-wringing and deliberation – on the one hand this, on the other hand that, on second thoughts maybe it wasn’t smart of me to say ... On Wednesday, Israeli footballer Manor Solomon was asked by an Austrian journalist for his reaction to the Austrian federal president’s statement last Tuesday that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza. Solomon replied that he had never heard about this and he didn’t care about it – here he seemed to mean he hadn’t heard and didn’t care about the Austrian president’s remarks, rather than the war crimes. He then demanded to know why the journalist thought that he, a football player, should have an opinion about it. The journalist responded that he was doing his job, and Solomon replied, with heavy sarcasm: “And you do a great job, by the way. You do a great job.” Solomon did not seem in the least “uncomfortable” as he dealt with this question. In the reality now inhabited by many Israelis, the charge of war crimes against Israel is an absurdity, of interest only to the “moral cowards” Netanyahu denounced. The only motive a journalist could possibly have for mentioning this absurdity in the context of an Israel national team press conference would be to somehow smear Israel. Solomon felt free to treat the question and the questioner with the contempt he believed they deserved. With the clarity of knowing where you stand comes the boldness to take the initiative. So we have discovered this week that Israel’s players will not be swapping shirts with ours. Israel’s coach will not shake hands with ours. The implication is that they, Israel, are the ones who have been aggrieved, and that we, Ireland, are the ones who have made ourselves unworthy of respect.Ireland's Troy Parrott and Chiedozie Ogbene react during Thursday's Nations League game against Kosovo. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho There may be players in Ireland’s squad who, like Solomon, find it exasperating that they – professional football players – are expected to take positions on the disastrous state of the world. If so they have not yet ventured to say as much in public. Chiedozie Ogbene came closest when, asked on Thursday evening whether the Israel game should go ahead, he said “my personal view is Uefa have put us in a difficult position – you are asking a professional footballer” but went on to say “I am a practising Catholic and I have morals. I do not agree with what is happening. I feel sorry for the civilians, and that is where my heart is, the people who are being affected.” The tone of these comments is quite different from Solomon’s brusque dismissal of the war crimes question as an irrelevance. The Irish players deliberated at a team meeting on Friday whether they would mark Sunday’s game with some kind of gesture of protest. But what would they even be trying to say with such a gesture? “We disapprove of your mass slaughter of innocent civilians, but not enough to sacrifice these potential Nations League points”? This is the core contradiction Ireland have been struggling with all week. The only meaningful protest they could have made was to refuse to play the match. If the decision is that the game goes ahead, the time has come to get on with it.