Palestinians celebrated a diplomatic victory on Wednesday as Israel confirmed the cancellation of a high-profile visit to Jerusalem by Argentina’s national soccer team, which had been scheduled for Saturday.

BREAKING: We welcome news that @Argentina's "friendly" football match with Israel has been canceled! The team responded to creative campaigning from fans around the world denouncing Israel’s sports-washing of its crimes against Palestinians. @FIFAcom: Take note! #NothingFriendly pic.twitter.com/9ZdFYy32ke — PACBI (@PACBI) June 5, 2018

A statement from the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires late Tuesday night claimed that Argentina’s players had decided to back out of a planned game against Israel’s national team because of “threats and provocations directed at Lionel Messi,” the superstar Argentine captain. The nature of those threats was not immediately clear, but Argentina’s foreign minister, Jorge Faurie, said in a radio interview on Wednesday that the team had been unsettled by “a series of threats that came via the internet.” When a journalist pointed out to Faurie that Messi had apparently shrugged off threats from ISIS about traveling to Russia for the World Cup, the foreign minister suggested that these messages were somehow worse. Israel’s sports minister, Miri Regev, showed reporters images from the online campaign pressing Argentina to cancel the match — including one of a protester in Spain holding an Argentine shirt splattered with red paint — which she described as a form of terrorism comparable, in her view, to the 1972 hostage crisis at the Olympic Games in Munich, in which 11 Israeli athletes were seized by Palestinian militants and killed during a botched rescue attempt.

Photo: Ariel Schalit/AP

. @Argentina's football team is scheduled to play a "friendly" /exhibition match w/Israel. Tell Capt Messi & his team to cancel. There's #NothingFriendly about helping Israel use sport to cover up its terrible crimes against Palestinians https://t.co/IIK6ZhQSns #ArgentinaNoVayas pic.twitter.com/ozFUc0mYNS — BDS Movement (@BDSmovement) May 17, 2018

On Wednesday evening, though, Israel’s Channel 2 News reported that an Argentine sports journalist close to Messi, Juan Cortese, said “there were no threats against the players’ lives and they did not take part in the decision” to cancel the match, which had been taken by Argentina’s government. While Palestinian officials and activists from the grassroots Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement had appealed to Messi to not take part in what they called a political stunt, the only threat they leveled against the player was that his popularity would suffer. The Palestine Football Association president, Jibril Rajoub, called on fans to burn replicas of the star’s shirt if he played in Jerusalem. Catalan protesters who waved two Argentina soccer jerseys daubed with red paint outside the squad’s training ground in Barcelona on Tuesday told the Argentine newspaper Clarín that they were not threatening Messi, but appealing to him to not help Israel launder its image by distracting attention from its ongoing slaughter of Palestinian protesters in Gaza.

Last week Shakira and today Argentina football team, both have cancelled their participation in Israel. Pro-palestinians protests outside Argentina training field earlier today in Barcelona. @972mag @activestills pic.twitter.com/2Lnae69sOy — 15MBcn_int (@15MBcn_int) June 5, 2018

In a letter to his Argentine counterpart last week, Rajoub had urged Argentina to cancel the match because the Israeli sports minister had intervened to move it from Haifa, a city inside Israel’s 1948 borders, to Jerusalem, where Israel has ruled over hundreds of thousands of Palestinians it denies full civil rights since in 1967. “The Israeli government has turned a regular sports match into a political tool,” Rajoub argued. The match, he added “is now being played in order to celebrate the ’70th anniversary of the State of Israel,’ and the match itself is to take place in a stadium built on one of the at least 418 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel 70 years ago, Al Malha.” While Rajoub thanked Messi on Wednesday and said that he would not have objected if the game had been played in Haifa as originally scheduled, supporters of the BDS movement pledged to keep pressing for a full sports boycott of Israel, modeled on the pressure campaign against apartheid-era South Africa. Even if the Argentine captain has not endorsed the boycott movement, Palestinian and Israeli activists correctly noted that his team’s refusal to play in Jerusalem was a blow to the promise Israel’s government makes to its citizens: that they can live normal lives and pay no price for continuing to deny civil rights to millions of Palestinians under their army’s control.

Israel rules over millions of Palestinians. denies them basic rights and upholds this regime through the use of deadly force all while telling its citizens, this is ok, this is normal, go to a soccer match, a concert, an orchestra.



Well guess what.



It is NOT OK and NOT normal — (((YousefMunayyer))) (@YousefMunayyer) June 5, 2018

More Argentinian voices, soccer and otherwise, are going to come out in support of the decision and taking action against Israel in the coming days. You can't carry out a mass execution of a peaceful, unarmed demonstrators, medics, journalists, and children, and expect silence. — Remi Kanazi (@Remroum) June 5, 2018

Football may be the only thing that will actually begin to sway Israeli public opinion https://t.co/8JzRIIdsDk — Mairav Zonszein (@MairavZ) June 6, 2018

Great news for anybody who opposes normalization of Trump-endorsed autocracy and apartheid.https://t.co/jffc4ECubB — Eli Valley (@elivalley) June 6, 2018

As Hagai El-Ad, director of the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, told me two years ago in Jerusalem, the Israeli public is clear about what it wants: “more of the same, with no consequences.” Which means that Israelis will see no need to end the occupation that started 51 years ago this week as long as their country is accepted as a normal member of the international community without making any concessions for peace. By pressing the Argentine soccer team to avoid Israel after the country’s military used snipers to shoot thousands of unarmed Palestinian protesters in recent weeks, the activists pressing for a boycott have forced Israelis to suffer at least some consequences. “Whatever the real reasons for the cancellation,” Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer observed on Twitter, “the Netanyahu government’s politicization of the match, particularly the ego-trip of vainglorious Sports Minister Regev made it a convenient target and unearned win for the boycotters. BDS is not a real threat to Israel. Hubris is.” Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, posted an old photo of himself with Messi on Twitter along with the comment, “Another victory for Messi (and the Palestinians), 1:0 from the own-goal of Miri Regev.”