Like every Olympic Games, the run up to Paris 2024 has been beset by controversies. Critics have challenged its green credentials, pointed out the large-scale removal of homeless people from the city, and complained about the immense disruption to everyday life that the security regime has imposed. All of these, it seems, will be eclipsed by the issue of Israel’s participation in the Games.

For the moment, the precise legal status of Israel’s pulverisation of Gaza has yet to be settled, but supporters of the Palestinian cause argue that if Russia and Belarus can be excluded for breaking international law, then so should Israel. This week, the Palestinian Olympic Committee (POC) called for Israel’s exclusion on the grounds that it was breaking the Olympic Truce, and pro-Palestinian groups in France have been demonstrating and promising protests at events.

Not surprisingly the French security authorities deemed Israel’s game against Mali in the men’s football tournament to be “high risk” and deployed 1,000 troops around the Parc des Princes for the occasion. In truth they might have been more usefully employed at the Morocco vs. Argentina game in Saint-Etienne where Moroccan fans invaded the pitch and threw a fusillade of objects at the Argentinian players after they scored a disputed and ultimately cancelled last-minute equaliser. By contrast, the crowd at the Parc des Princes was less volatile, if more pointed.

The Israeli national anthem was drowned out by booing, Palestinian flags were unveiled across the stadium, and some protestors came equipped with large watermelons, which given their red/green/black colours, have served as cipher for the former. At the start of the match, 13 masked protestors lined up at the front of one of the stands in white t-shirts which read “FREE PALESTINE”.

There will, no doubt, be more of this to come, but the French organisers and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will not be censuring Israel anytime soon. Indeed, IOC President Thomas Bach has gone so far as to suggest that Olympic participation is a kind of balm for the conflict. He said: “We have two national Olympic committees (NOCs). Both have been living in peaceful coexistence. The Olympic Games are a competition not between countries but between athletes.” Bach, however, is living in a reality of his own making. In the one that Palestinians occupy there is no peaceful co-existence in sport. In fact, sport is just another arena for conflict. And in football in particular, they argue that Israel has systematically broken international law since well before the current conflict.

Since 2013, the Palestine Football Association (PFA) has been calling for Fifa to exclude Israel from international competition, arguing that the the  Israeli Football Association (IFA) has broken the organisation’s statutes; specifically, that the matches played regularly by Israeli teams in West Bank settlements, deemed illegal under international law and therefore actually within the jurisdiction of the PFA, are also illegal under Fifa’s own rules.

The PFA also says that Fifa is very clear that its member associations should be free from any kind of governmental interference. But there has been active collusion between the IFA and the Israeli government. In response to a recent PFA complaint at Fifa, the Israeli Foreign Minister threatened to imprison the head of the PFA, Jibril Rajoub. What’s more, a WhatsApp group called “Remaining in Fifa” reportedly brought together “legal advisors of the ministries of foreign affairs, culture and sports and the IFA Chairman Shino Zoertz.” Other nations have been suspended from Fifa for far less.

Then there are the everyday obstacles that Israel has put in the way of Palestinian football: making travelling from Gaza and the West Bank exceptionally difficult for international players and damaging sporting infrastructure. According to the PFA, in the recent conflict Israel has destroyed 42 sports facilities in Gaza and seven in the West Bank. The Al Yarmouk stadium, Gaza’s oldest, has survived only because the Israelis turned it into an internment camp.

At its recent congress, Fifa decided to delay any decision on the IFA’s behaviour until after the Olympics, perhaps hoping that they would find enough legal and political wiggle room to avoid punishing Israel. They may succeed. However, since then the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in a groundbreaking ruling, has determined that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories over decades was “unlawful” and it was obliged to end it as “rapidly as possible”.

The IOC and Fifa have so far been able to ignore the protestors and the arguments, but they will struggle to ignore the world’s highest court. If they do, their stated commitments to international law and justice won’t count for much.

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David Goldblatt is a writer, academic and author of The Games: A Global History of the Olympics.

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