Boston Palestine Land Day commemoration demands: ‘FIFA – Move the World Cup from the U.S.!’

Boston — At a press conference on the front steps of Boston City Hall Plaza timed to coincide with Palestine Land Day, member organizations of the Boston Coalition for Palestine (BCFP) and allies announced today they are joining the international call to “Boycott the U.S.” for its war crimes in Cuba. Iran, Palestine, Venezuela  and elsewhere. 

Speakers demanded that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) move its scheduled 2026 World Cup games out of U.S. cities, including Boston, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) searches at the airports and kidnappings in the streets have created unsafe conditions for the world’s football fans, players and other travelers.

Omama Marzuq, a Palestine South-Shore Alliance activist and the program’s emcee, explained that BCFP is answering the call of the Anti-Fascist Football Coalition, initiated by the Black Alliance for Peace, to target the United States as the source of financing, weaponry and political support for the Zionist state and all institutions that support it. (peoplescenteredhumanrights.com/move-the-games/) 

At the press conference, activists held up Palestinian and Lebanese flags and wore placards in support of the boycott. A banner behind the speakers carried the campaign’s demands: “FIFA: Move the World Cup out of the U.S.! Boycott the U.S. for war crimes!”

As Marzuq explained, FIFA’s complicity with the U.S. and its Zionist vassal state has been glaring for years as FIFA’s board has refused the world’s demand to expel Israel. This is especially outrageous during Israel’s current genocidal onslaught in Gaza. 

In recent months, FIFA has reached a new low, pledging $75 million for a soccer stadium built on stolen Palestinian land as part of the sham “Board of Peace” plan to colonize Gaza, devised by Donald Trump, Tony Blair, Jared Kushner and other ruling class ghouls. (Reuters, Feb. 20) To crown his organization’s complicity, FIFA President Gianni Infantino created a “FIFA Peace Prize” and awarded it to Trump at the opening ceremony for the 2026 World Cup in Washington, D.C. 

Infantino’s refusal to grant the Iranian national football team’s request to play outside the U.S. following Trump’s threat to players’ safety shows his and FIFA’s obeisance before Trump and U.S. imperialism. Instead of showing support for the thousands of Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians — including hundreds of football players — slaughtered, disabled and displaced by the Zionist state, FIFA is helping the U.S. and the other Western imperialist states whitewash and legitimize these ongoing atrocities by allowing the Zionist state to participate in international tournaments. 

As Marzuq stressed, the boycott campaign is also an act of solidarity with the people fighting U.S. imperialism in Latin America, where the peoples of Venezuela and Cuba are resisting U.S. terror and murderous sanctions. Marzuq called attention to the Global Sumud Flotilla, which is currently braving U.S. and Israeli gunboats to deliver vital food, fuel and medicine to besieged and blockaded Gazans. “So while we are here today to discuss Land Day and the 78 years of occupation, FIFA and the Sumud Flotilla are all related to the global ties to Palestine.” 

Upholding Palestine Land Day

BCFP’s announcement marks the 50th commemoration of Palestine Land Day, which honors the 1976 Zionist massacre of six Palestinians protesting land theft in the Galilee. During the 1976 uprising, in addition to killing the six, Zionist forces injured and arrested hundreds of protesters.\

As Saleh Abbas, a Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) organizer, emphasized, the martyrdom that Land Day honors continues to inspire the Palestinians and their allies in resisting the land theft and genocidal massacres the Zionist settler state continues to inflict. He declared,  “‘Land Day  is a reminder of organized struggle … that the struggle for Palestine is in fact over the land, and it is in fact over resistance itself.” 

As Abbas explained, struggle and solidarity are ways to honor the courage, resilience and sacrifice immortalized by Land Day, whose “strategies remain alive today. … And the central strategy is organization. Organization because we cannot confront empire, we cannot confront Zionism alone. So if you are here, get organized. … Land Day is a reminder that Palestine will be liberated, and it will be Palestinian from the river to the sea! And the land will be betrothed only to those who resist and bleed for its total liberation. Free, Free Palestine!”

BDS the U.S.!

Zakaria Kawa, another PYM leader, described the terror inflicted by the ongoing Zionist invasion of Lebanon, where Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) have massacred over 1,000 citizens and displaced over a million adults and children in their latest campaign of colonial land theft. 

Kawa said, “Boston, as one of the World Cup’s host cities, should not be complicit,” The speaker stressed: “We call on the World Cup to be moved from Boston and moved from the U.S.-Zionist empire as it acts so recklessly. … We boycott the World Cup while it’s here, and we say that ‘the beautiful game’ should not be sullied and should be a right for the children of Gaza, for the children of Lebanon and for all children throughout the world.” 

Bahar Sharafi, an Iranian organizer with Congressional District 8 for Palestine (CD8 for Palestine), condemned the imperialist war against Iran as only the latest example of the death, destruction and instability the U.S. empire is sowing from West Asia to the Americas. “An event meant to bring the world together [such as the World Cup] cannot be hosted by a country tearing it apart,” she declared. 

Sharafi went on to detail the decades-long terror campaign the U.S. has waged against Iran, from the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup that established the murderous regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to today’s U.S.-Israeli airstrikes targeting schools, hospitals and power plants. 

“This is much bigger than soccer,” Sharafi declared of the World Cup boycott. “It is about whether we look away or demand accountability. We stand for justice, and we will not be silent while our countries of origin are destroyed. No war on Iran! No war on Lebanon! No funding in supplying weapons for Israel’s genocide on Gaza! And no World Cup in the United States!” 

Solidarity with Iranian football team

Workers World Party organizer Maureen Skehan linked the FIFA Boycott to international divestment campaigns that targeted the white supremacist South African and Zionist apartheid states. “Let ‘BDS the U.S.’ become an international battlecry of the workers and oppressed globally!” Skehan declared. “The World Cup should not take place in the U.S. period.” 

Skehan underscored that both the U.S.’s imperialist terror campaigns overseas and the fascist repression it has unleashed on immigrant, Indigenous and Black and Brown communities inside the U.S. make boycott and divestment a moral imperative. She declared: ‘In the spirit of global resistance and working-class unity, we urge forces in the antiwar movement, students, community and labor organizations, anti-racist, climate justice and abolition movements, anti-ICE networks and everyone to join us — in solidarity with the Iranian national football team — in demanding, ‘Move the World Cup now!’” And “Let’s keep mobilizing to strike against this dying system and its insatiable war machine.” 

Eli Gerzon, representing the Boston chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), called attention to the trauma Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranian civilians are experiencing amid the U.S.-Zionist terror campaign. “All of us should take that trauma and say, ‘Never Again!’ and never again is now!” they said. “‘Never Again!’ is for everyone, and it should motivate us to stop the genocide that is happening right now.” 

Gerzon denounced Democratic Party politicians — above all Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey — for supporting the World Cup for its tourist dollars and other Zionist investment and development schemes. Gerzon spotlighted the most recent scheme, an artificial intelligence “innovation hub” sponsored by Israel’s Sheba Medical Center. The largest hospital in occupied Palestine, Sheba functions effectively as the medical arm of the IOF. Sheba officials have hailed the Boston initiative as the “soft launching pad” for more U.S.-Zionist tech partnerships. 

Stressing the need for local organizing to keep up the momentum for divestment, Gerzon urged, “We can also stop the World Cup, like we stopped the Olympics in Boston, and we can also stop Sheba from building here in Massachusetts.” 

Divestment from apartheid

Leila Skinner, a leader of Somerville for Palestine, pledged local support for the boycott, saying, “The U.S. and all the cities across the U.S. set up to host World Cup games are complicit in oppression abroad and here locally.” 

Skinner described Somerville’s own extensive involvement in genocide. Major local contractors include the tech conglomerate Honeywell, which sells guidance systems used in Israeli heat-seeking missiles. On June 6, 2024, one of these missiles, directly traced back to Honeywell, killed 40 Palestinians sheltering in a school.  She emphasized,  “And this attack was funded by our Somerville tax dollars.” 

And Skinner stressed: “In Somerville, just like all across the U.S., we are seeing our leaders continue to actively fund oppression worldwide, including in Palestine, in Lebanon and in Iran, while their constituents are kidnapped off the street by masked federal agents. When our leaders fail us, just like today, the people rise up for justice!” 

Somerville for Palestine’s divestment campaign has generated mass support for divestment as part of an “international movement of peoples, cities, states and countries, holding the U.S. and Israel accountable for their crimes,” which the FIFA boycott will continue to intensify. To close her remarks, Skinner led the crowd in chanting, “From Somerville to Palestine, apartheid is a crime!” 

Same global struggle against billionaire Zionists

Stevan Kirschbaum, a decades-long leader of the Boston School Bus Drivers Union and current activist with the Franklin Park Defenders, argued that the city of Boston’s plans for the World Cup expose its warped priorities. 

Like its for-profit relationship with FIFA, the city government is trying to turn over public parkland, including Franklin Park, to real estate speculators and sports billionaire tycoons, such as Zionist billionaire Robert Kraft, owner of Gillette Stadium, where the World Cup will take place in June. Kraft is also heavily invested in professional soccer teams that covet Franklin Park’s White Stadium, which belongs to Boston Public Schools. 

As Kirschbaum pointed out, “Those forces that stand to profit from genocide, those forces that are part of Trump’s racist, despicable genocidal war, are the same forces that are now trying to sell off … Franklin Park.”

Kirschbaum called attention to the international solidarity football fans have shown for Palestine, from Ireland to Boston. These expressions of support serve to rebuke the “Boston boosters” involved in the Franklin Park and FIFA schemes. “We’re here to tell you that the Franklin Park Defenders are with this struggle,” Kirschbaum said. “We need to free Palestine. We need to have our tax dollars for jobs and public improvements and not for this war. … 

“Robert Kraft and the other Zionist billionaires supporting the World Cup hate the working class. They hate us, but they can’t stop us! … We applaud this Coalition. This is just the start. The games aren’t until June. We should go to that stadium and shut the damn thing down!” 

KVR, speaking for the Boston South Asian Coalition, said, “The United States has been a center of imperialism and neocolonialism,” and it “should be isolated.” Pledging solidarity with the workers of the Global South, KVR urged that, “We should also encourage and demand the total boycott of FIFA and all such organizations” that support and profit from genocidal Western imperialism. 

Harmony, a Protect Trans Futures organizer, connected the fascist terror targeting transgender and immigrant communities in the U.S. with the genocides it is sponsoring overseas, explaining: “Throughout time, moments come where people must stand together to say, ‘Enough!’ Now history turns again. … The world is only just beginning to understand the depths of our American horrors.” 

Harmony continued: “At home we’re denying trans kids lifesaving care, amplifying fear and violence with ICE and putting HIV/AIDS care at its lowest nadir since Ronald f-–king Reagan. The violence underpinning our society is squeezing us with an iron grip, ripping the fabric at the exact moment we need to bind ourselves together. … One day we may yet be able to play together and compete harmoniously. But football season is over. Boycott FIFA! Boycott the U.S.! And Free Palestine!”

Fawaz Abusharkh, a co-leader of the BCFP, stressed the need for resilience in the global struggle against Zionist and U.S. imperial conquest, which grows more vicious as it gets more desperate: “We are on the righteous road. That should give us enough power to keep going. … Please keep talking to your family and your comrades. We have to keep this movement moving forward.” 

Abusharkh pledged to continue the global struggle for liberation from U.S.-Zionist imperialism. He said: “We are here today, because first of all, we are humans. … We are here for every single issue on Earth, not just in the United States. If there is a place for human rights to be advanced and to be promoted, we are here, and we will be here tomorrow and the day after in more and more numbers. This genocide is going to end one day. From Turtle Island, in solidarity for a free world, starting with a Free Palestine!” 

To close the conference, PYM leader Zakaria Kawa stressed: “Palestine cannot be de-emphasized. Iran cannot be de-emphasized, like every nation that is under the boot of this empire. Any strike against the empire is a strike in the direction of humanity, and we must be on the side of humanity in this cause!”