There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from watching people find elaborate new ways to do nothing.

For three years, I watched people ignore a genocide. I watched them scroll past videos of children being pulled from rubble. I watched them perform elaborate gymnastics of moral neutrality while two-thousand-pound bombs decimated hospitals and civilian infrastructure with the thoroughness of a society that believes it will face no consequences for its vengeful depravity and bloodlust.

Equally enraging was the bad-faith conflation of any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the ubiquitous societal demand to center our attention on the feelings of some of the most privileged people in America — the “real victims,” after all. There were multiple Congressional hearings about whether the chants “from the river to the sea” made it difficult for college students to go to class, while the flesh and blood of innocent Palestinian lives were being torn to shreds, with our tax dollars and Biden’s blessings.

But now we’ve entered a new phase, and it might be even more infuriating. After the hostages were returned under the theater of a “ceasefire,” it seemed to have given a large portion of the population permission to simply move on. But bombs are still falling, and Palestinians are still being executed, oppressed, and cleansed from their native lands.

What we’re witnessing now is something more insidious: it’s the manufacturing of inevitability. The quiet but determined push to restore the pre-October-7 status quo, the one in which Israel is treated as a normal democracy, which it is not, and never has been. The one in which Israel is regarded as a legitimate member of the global community, like a country that gets to do normal, legitimate things, such as compete in international climbing competitions.

I want to be clear about something: that world is gone. And it should never come back. The mask is off, and there is no putting it back on.

What changed after October 7 was not Israel’s behavior. It was the world’s ability to look away. We have watched, in real time, in 4K, the systematic destruction of my people. The killing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom are women and children, and all of whom have the right to defend themselves against their oppressors. The flattening of 92% of homes in Gaza. The targeting of hospitals, schools, journalists, and aid workers. The deliberate starvation of an entire civilian population, and the disgusting attempts to pretend that none of it is true, just another antisemitic scheme to make people hate Israel.

The consensus among the world’s foremost genocide scholars, including Holocaust scholars, is that Israel is committing genocide. Full stop. For Palestinians, the dishonest insistence of so many voices trying to deny this truth is a dehumanizing kind of pain that is difficult to capture.

To most honest people, however, it is perfectly clear that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state engaged in a multi-front, messianic war. It is clear that it is terrorizing its neighbors, illegally annexing land, and using its Machiavellian leverage over the United States government to act with impunity, now prosecuting a completely immoral and pointless war of aggression in Iran and committing acts of terrorism in Lebanon.

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people enjoys a plurality of support of Israelis, as poll after poll has shown. While Western media go to great lengths to hide Israel’s crimes and depravity, in Israel, it’s all out in the open. They have family picnics on the outskirts of Gaza to watch bombs drop. They bring their kids to aid trucks being prevented from entering Gaza and let them tear open bags of flour. Zionists have been committing the crime of ethnic cleansing, in various forms and intensities, for over a hundred years.They have shown no signs of stopping, and in fact, they are only escalating their aggression — finding new, depraved ways to empower pogroms across the West Bank in the name of building their racist, supremacist colony with its fake history on top of an existing, durable population.

This is not legal, it is not moral, and our international institutions are supposed to exert their own leverage to say in clear terms that mass murder is wrong. No organization that aspires to global legitimacy should be welcoming Israel’s banner, playing its national anthem, and pretending that all is well.

But World Climbing is among the many institutions desperately hoping to leverage the inertia and inevitability of the Zionist political project. The hope is that we can all just go back to the status quo, and no one on any board needs to make tough decisions that might ruffle feathers, let alone tarnish the esteemed reputation of the “only democracy in the Middle East.”

But as I said, that world is gone. It’s time to wake up. And it’s time for the climbing world to make it perfectly clear to World Climbing that what they’re hoping will just go away, will not, in fact, just go away.

I am asking the climbing world to join me, as well as my friends across the global Climbers for Palestine network, in demanding that World Climbing permanently ban Israel from climbing competitions.

The motion in motion …

Last year, I wrote about why World Climbing (formerly the IFSC) must ban Israel from international climbing competitions. The argument was layered. The simplest argument was that the same organization that banned Russian and Belarusian athletes within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had done nothing in response to Israel’s genocide. But I tried to go beyond the comparison to Russia, because I think the example of using sports bans to overturn apartheid in South Africa was far more analogous and appropriate to the situation here.

The fact is, you simply cannot claim to meaningfully support the Palestine Climbing Association as a federation within World Climbing while simultaneously welcoming the country that is actively oppressing Palestinian climbers. You’d need to ignore that every layer of Israeli society and government is absolutely committed to making it impossible for Palestinian athletes to develop as climbers, as their crags are being stolen, as they are being thrown in jail without due process, and as they live every day under some of the most draconian systems of oppression and apartheid in the world today.

Last November, the Palestine Climbing Association, along with the Jordan Climbing Federation, submitted a request to World Climbing’s Executive Board. Their letter laid out the specifics:

• Palestinian climbers are blocked from accessing their own crags by Israeli checkpoints, settlement expansion, and military zone designations.
• Palestinian athletes have been detained for days at the Allenby Bridge attempting to travel to competitions.
• Palestinian climbers — including filmmaker Abdullah Motan, whom I met personally during my trip to Palestine — have been imprisoned under Israel’s policy of “administrative detention”: no charge, no trial, no due process, renewable indefinitely.
• The letter cites specific World Climbing statutes and Olympic Charter principles that Israel’s conduct violates, and calls for the immediate suspension of the Israel Climbing Association from all competitions, events, and activities.

Much of these arguments and many more can also be found on BanIsraelFromIFSC.com

World Climbing’s response was pure cowardice. They acknowledged the “seriousness” of the concerns raised. They noted the “broader humanitarian and ethical” issues. Then they explained why they couldn’t do anything about any of it.

The Executive Board’s assessment argues that suspending a National Federation requires a significant violation attributable to that Federation itself, not to the state. Since the violations described are actions of the Israeli state rather than of the Israel Climbing Association, there is insufficient legal basis for suspension. They also warned that acting without this statutory foundation would expose World Climbing to “substantial legal and financial risk,” including a likely successful appeal before the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

In other words, sure, Israel is committing genocide, apartheid, and oppressing another member federation … but because the Israeli climbing federation didn’t do it, so to speak, World Climbing’s hands are tied.

The hole World Climbing is trying to thread here is so narrow it barely exists, and they know it. You don’t need to pull the trigger to be complicit in the crime. And of course, none of these concerns prevented them from banning Russia, which is also why they ring hollow.

As banisraelfromifsc.com lays out in great detail, the ILCA, the Israeli climbing association, is complicit in Israel’s crimes. They actively encourage climbing on occupied lands, apply their logo to guides to stolen crags, and support climbers who live in illegal settlements, which are used as a tool of the state to divide and dispossess Palestinians as a whole, but specifically make it more difficult for Palestinian climbers to move and climb freely on their own lands.

One World Cup Israeli climber, Ayala Kerem, is supported by a company that is complicit in ethnic cleansing and oppression. Ayala’s Instagram lists the Shikun & Binui Group as a sponsor. This is a company that literally built the cage around Gaza, constructed the settlements that are stealing Palestinian land, and is now building the military recruitment infrastructure that processes the soldiers carrying out the occupation.

Some climbers are sponsored by clothing companies that try hard but don’t quite meet their sustainability goals when making waterproof jackets. Others are sponsored by companies that build the physical infrastructure of an ethnic-cleansing project. These are not the same things.

In recent weeks, more bad stuff has happened. The Israeli government overwhelmingly passed a new law mandating the death penalty after 30 days for Palestinian hostages accused of murder by the state. Once again, in these Israeli military prisons, Palestinians are held under administrative detention. They are not allowed to see the charges brought against them, and they are tried in military courts, where they are convicted over 95% of the time. (Compare this stat to the fact that no Israeli citizen has been prosecuted for killing a Palestinian civilian in the occupied West Bank since 2020.)

There are currently three Palestinian climbers being held hostage in these prisons, which are known as bastions of starvation, torture, and rape by both weapons and dogs, which Israelis think is the funniest, best thing in the world. They actually protest en masse in support of their soldiers’ right to rape Palestinians. In fact, these soldiers — who don’t show their faces because they’re cowards — are celebrated in Israeli media and welcomed on talk shows.

This new death penalty law by hanging saw Israeli politicians wearing gold noose pins on their lapels. “The rope is for Arabs only,” they say. As a climbing community, is it too much to ask everyone reading this to share that ropes are for climbing, not nooses? Is it too much to ask World Climbing to forbid waving the banner of this genocidal death cult that is using the symbol of our sport, the rope, as their chosen tool for mass murder?

The International Olympic Committee used cowardly tactics when it refused to ban Israel during the last two Olympics. World Climbing, which has consistently hidden behind the IOC for cover on this issue, is doing the same.

As I wrote last year, it’s worth remembering that the IOC used this familiar reasoning to delay action against apartheid South Africa for years. But then, enough nations forced their hand by actively boycotting sporting events. These boycotts played a substantial role in helping to bring an end to apartheid in South Africa. This precedent should give climbers the courage and conviction to do the same.

The assembly that wasn’t

We were prepared to bring this fight directly to World Climbing’s General Assembly, which was scheduled for this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. National federations have the power to submit formal motions for a vote, and we had planned to submit ours through the Spanish federation and others.

Then Israel and America launched a major military assault on Iran, striking its leadership and its civilian population, including killing over 160 school girls in a double-tap strike.

In the chaos that followed, World Climbing announced it was canceling the in-person General Assembly in Riyadh and moving to an online summit on April 23 — where, they specified, only statutory items would be heard. A session allowing for a vote has been deferred to December 2026.

Consider the irony, for a moment. The country we are trying to ban from international climbing competitions just started a regional war, which directly led to the cancellation of the meeting where our motion could have been voted upon.

And while all of this was unfolding, World Climbing lifted the ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes — the very ban that exposed the organization’s hypocrisy on Israel in the first place.

The situation in Russia and Ukraine is functionally no different than it was in March 2022 when the ban was imposed. But with a General Assembly coming up where the Russia comparison was going to become inconvenient for World Climbing to continue addressing, it was awfully convenient to neutralize that particular line of attack.

Why you should boycott World Climbing

World Climbing has no appetite for this fight. That has been obvious for years. They are not going to act on their own. They are going to continue hiding behind the IOC, behind procedural objections, behind vague commitments to “neutrality” — which is not neutrality at all, but a choice to normalize a genocide.

World Climbing still has time to do the right thing. If they do, I will be the first to applaud them. It won’t be easy. It will require them to break from the IOC, absorb political pressure, and accept that sport cannot be a consequence-free zone for genocidal states. But that is precisely what moral leadership looks like. Every institution that has ever been on the right side of history had to make that choice before it was comfortable, not after.

World Climbing has a genuine opportunity here to separate itself from every other spineless international body that has hidden behind procedure and neutrality while a genocide unfolds. Be the organization that said: not on our stage. Not under our banner. Not in our sport.

That would mean something, and I would be the first to say so.

Here’s what everyone can do right now:

Peacefully protest. If there’s a World Climbing event near you, go. Bring a Palestinian flag, wear a keffiyeh, and hold a sign. If Israel is competing, the event is not a neutral sporting event. It is a platform for a genocidal apartheid state attempting to normalize its reputation and wash away its crimes. Anyone participating in this event is helping to wash away the crime of genocide. Show up for the Palestinian climbers who can’t be there, and make your presence heard and our demands clear.

Don’t watch World Climbing events. Don’t share them, or give them clicks and views. Magazines and websites can refuse to cover results. Use the event as an opportunity to speak out on behalf of Palestine.

Don’t compete. Athletes: consider whether you want to compete alongside Israel. I know this is a hard ask. Careers are short, and the pressure to stay quiet is real. The Olympics are just around the corner. The World Climbing athlete license literally prohibits political speech, and the Trump administration has made clear that solidarity with Palestinians can get you barred from entering the United States. These are not small stakes. But sports bans work precisely because they are uncomfortable. The discomfort is the point. Think about Muhammad Ali, who sacrificed his title and three years of his career rather than participate in an unjust war.

Some prominent athletes are lending their voices to this issue. Follow them, support them, and amplify their voices.

Contact your national federation. USA Climbing. The BMC. Whichever federation represents you. Tell them you want a motion brought to ban Israel from World Climbing events. It can happen. The mechanism exists. What’s missing is the pressure from climbers like you.

The status quo is not inevitable. The status quo is not coming back. Palestinian climbers deserve better than a sport that looks away while their crags are stolen and their teammates are thrown in cages. The courage exists in this community — I’ve seen it on the rock. It’s time to show it somewhere that actually matters.