Liel Levi-tan comes from a family of great chess players. At the age of four, she started experimenting with this discipline. And she recently topped the European championships in Krakow, attended by several hundred elementary school students, at the age of seven.
At the end of the award ceremony, Liel declared: “I love chess. I think it's a game for all ages, not just for adults. My dream is to become a world champion”.
From the first to the ninth of September, Liel was to take part in the chess world championship, scheduled in Monastir, Tunisia. But Liel will not participate, since she is an Israeli citizen. From the North African Arab state, the most “moderate” and successful of the "Arab spring" season, a sharp refusal has come: “We do not want Israeli chess players in the race”.
It is worth remembering that Beersheba, in southern Israel, is the world capital of chess players, the city with the highest per capita percentage of champions.
The International Judo Federation tried to push Tunisia to change its mind by suspending the Grand Judo Prix of Tunis a week ago. But this did not change the attitude of the Tunisian authorities.
Six of the seven states that appear in Trump's executive Muslim order (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Yemen) forbid entry to any Israeli passport holder, as do ten other countries with a Muslim majority.
Shades of the Egyptian Judoka who, in Rio 2016, did not shake hands with his Israeli opponent - who had just defeated him. The Israeli judokas, protagonists a year ago in a tournament in Abu Dhabi, are forced to sing the anthem themselves. There are many similar cases, but for the first time a seven year old Israeli girl has been targeted.
A week ago, after the approval of the Israeli state-nation law, which inscribed the Jewish vocation of the state in a fundamental law, many European newspapers shouted about the “Israeli apartheid”, supporting the false claims of the Arab deputies of the Knesset - forgetting that they could never be in the Knesset if Israel was an apartheid state!.
Today, almost all Arab states no longer forbid the entry of Jews as such as occurred after 1948. But they continue to prohibit entry to Israeli citizens. Six of the seven states that appear in Trump's executive Muslim order (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Yemen) forbid entry to any Israeli passport holder, as do ten other countries with a Muslim majority.
Not only that.
Many of these countries do not allow entry of non-Israeli citizens who have an Israeli visa in their passport. It does not appear that the international community has ever considered this behavior as a particularly resounding outrage to international standards. Nor that the newspapers have screamed at the “apartheid”, which also affects those Arab artists who have set foot in Israel, such as the Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal and the Syrian poet Adonis, through the Egyptian writer Ali Salem.
Last September, Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, whose actor Kamel el Basha, at the Venice Film Festival, won the award for best actor in the film “The Insult”, was awaited by the Lebanese police at the Beirut airport on his return from Venice. Doueiri was arrested and interrogated for three hours by the military court, accused of “collaboration with Israel”. His “guilt” was to have filmed some scenes of the film in Israeli territory.
Then the Tunisian film producer Saïd Ben Saïd had to give up the direction of the Film Festival in Carthage, Tunisia. His “guilt”? Being a jury member of the Jerusalem Film Festival.
This is the only “apartheid” in the Middle East, that of the Arab-Islamic world against the Israelis, but nothing is said about this. You see, anti-Semitism is not racism. It is socially acceptable.