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Palestine, the NBA, & the Impact of Silence
The NBA claims to care about social justice. But as evidenced by LeBron James recently, when it comes to Palestinians the league chooses silence
In 1996, my family travelled to the Middle East to see Palestine. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, a return to my father’s homeland. My grandparents were refugees in 1948 and established a life in neighboring Jordan, which is where my father grew up. During this trip we witnessed two different worlds.
The first, felt almost European in the hotel that we stayed at in Tel Aviv. It felt as if we were in a coastal city in Greece, Italy, or any other Mediterranean city. The other side was seeing our last remaining relative in the region who lived in a house with barely any furniture and no doors because Israeli military forces had busted through the door so many times that it was no longer worth replacing it just to be broken again.
I was reminded of these two differing realties during the NBA’s All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles when LeBron James was asked about his fanbase in Israel. It’s not a completely outlandish question — the NBA is a global sport, and Portland Trailblazers player Deni Avdija was the first Israeli player that was being represented in the All-Star Game.
LeBron said the typical sanitized thing that you would imagine, noting that he hopes to…
