Four months ago, in the first week of December 2023, I wrote that the Paris 2024 opening ceremony needed a Plan B.
Since then, I have had dozens of conversations with people inside and outside the Olympic movement. No one has said the idea of a flotilla of boats, the athletes of the world floating down the River Seine for six kilometers, or three-plus miles, is good. Almost everyone has said the same thing about this idea: it’s flawed.
For the sake of all that is decent in our world, the hope here is that they pull it off. But it so obviously seems the farthest thing from safe.
Image from the Paris 2024 website depicting dream scenario of the opening ceremony
There is no way you can stop anyone intent on killing Jews for the sake of killing Jews when Jews are, by design, for the glorification of France and, moreover, the five Olympic rings, sitting ducks in a boat on the Seine. This in a country – a city – where reports of antisemitism have exploded since October 7, where the danger is a known and deadly thing. “You are the two things I hate the most in the world,” the heavily armed Islamist extremist Amedy Coulibaly told hostages amid the 2015 Hypercacher kosher supermarket massacre in Paris. “You are Jewish and you are French.”
You don’t like it that blunt? Sorry not sorry. The brilliant American author Dara Horn wrote a book three years back entitled, People Love Dead Jews. The whole point: uncomfortable truths. We need now to think about the alive Jews, especially those on the Israeli team, and keep them – and everyone else in that ceremony – safe.
The Olympic Games mark an aspirational ideal. In a fragile and broken world, we send our young people, our athletes, to a particular place for 17 days once every four years (Winter Games, every other year); there, we say, perhaps we can, in the words of the 1990s Los Angeles soul poet Rodney King, just get along.
It’s not possible. Cold reality intrudes into our fever dream. Everyone knows this.
The beauty of an Olympics is, for 17 days, the two ideas live in parallel. The magic of an opening ceremony is the come-to-life of the one dream, at least for one night. This is why, for most of the athletes, it’s far and away the highlight of their Olympic experience.
There are roughly 8 billion human beings on our blue planet. Worldwide, the mood in 2024, as the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, has described it: “aggressively divisive.”
Two conflicts in particular have engaged, if not enraged, a significant portion of the Western world, one in Ukraine, the other in the Middle East.
The IOC’s role in our fragmented world is to try to build peace.
From the IOC viewpoint, you can’t only invite those you like to a Games. When you only have friends at a party, how does that make those on the outside looking in feel? Like, more accepted? More given to making peace? For those who do not understand the rationale, this is why the IOC is trying to find a way to have some number of Russian (and Belarusian) athletes at the Paris Games as neutral athletes.
In December, the IOC issued a self-styled communique. It “reiterated the call by the Olympic movement to all political leaders in the world to ‘give peace a chance.’”
Then, though, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, unqualifiedly a political leader in the world, goes and says Saturday, on a trip to Kyiv, that Russian (and Belarusian) athletes “were not welcome in Paris.”
Madame Hidalgo, please.
Heading toward these Games, we need less volatile rhetoric, not more. If the mayor of Paris, whose symbolic role means her words carry outsized influence, was trying to be inflammatory – she could not have been more so. Was she figuratively trying, before the opening ceremony, to light a match?
Neutrality? Restraint? Inclusivity? What peace? What chance?
As for the conflict in Gaza, and its impact particularly on Israeli athletes competing in international sport:
For emphasis, this happened this week, not four months ago. The presence of an Israeli sports team is reason for protest in Japan?! Sagi Muki is a Tokyo Games bronze medalist — the Israelis took third in the judo mixed team event — and the 2019 world champion at 81 kilos.
And this, just a couple days ago, the Israeli under-19 soccer team in Norway. Norway! Where, as in Japan, they purportedly pride themselves on civility?
If it’s this way in Japan and Norway in March, what does this reasonably foretell for Paris in July?
Ladies and gentlemen, and there is no other option here but to address matters directly, because 2,000 years of Jewish history, and in particular the years 1939-45, teach that those of us fully alive now are obligated to speak truth to power.
Some numbers, please, for those who may not have ever been exposed to these facts, because it is often the case that someone who is Jewish can be the very first Jewish person someone else meets. Which these numbers underscore:
In a world of 8 billion, the Jewish population is roughly 15 million. That’s not even 0.2%.
That 15 million number is still – still – fewer than there were in 1939, the historical peak, just under 17 million. By 1945, because of the Holocaust, it was roughly 11 million.
Most of the 15 million live in Israel or the United States. The country with the third-most number of Jews in the world? France.
If you were looking to make a statement the way one was made at the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, and Germany is of course the same country where the plan was launched that led to the murder of 6 million … wouldn’t the country that now holds Europe’s largest Jewish population be a logical place to strike anew?
When Jews count on other peoples for protection, history shows the lessons are always – always – sorrowful. In the context of the Olympics, this is the lesson of Munich 1972.
Horn’s book is not about the Olympics, not hardly, but a parallel from one of its key sections is an easy construct because at the Olympics we are asked to believe in the possibility of each other’s goodness. The book talks about the teenager Anne Frank, who of course has become an icon. The Diary of a Young Girl is now in 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies, its most famous sentence: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
Horn writes, “It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious. Frank wrote about people being ‘truly good at heart’ before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing these words, she met people who weren’t.”
The security focus in 2024 at the opening ceremony has to be about alive Jews. Once more about being so direct: sorry not sorry.
The Israelis are the No. 1 target.
As they have been since 1972.
In regards to Paris and an opening ceremony that would put its athletes as sitting ducks in a boat on a river for any terrorist with a vivid imagination, the Israeli Olympic team is being asked to be between the proverbial rock and hard place.
There is no way, none, the Israelis cannot not show up. The Israelis cannot give in to terror. This is exactly what the former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin said to the-then U.S. Senator Joe Biden in 1982 when threatened with a cutoff of American economic aid: “It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees.”
Shin Bet and others in the Israeli security apparatus can and will do the utmost. Yet they will be facing a dilemma: in France, how much control, including ultimate control, do they, would they have over the security of the Israeli team?
In a boat on the river.
This is not Lucy in the sky with diamonds. This is real. As real as it gets.
And to make it that much more real, the IOC president is a German who vividly knows – feels – the horrors of 1972.
Just to be super-clear about this reality:
The Israelis are the No. 1 target. The Americans are a right-behind-you No. 2 for any terrorist. How any American parent can or should feel good about their sons or daughters being on an open boat in the Seine for three-plus miles – after the 2017 Route 91 Harvest music festival massacre in Las Vegas – is a question that ought to be pressed to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee. Reminder of what happened: the shooter busted open a window at the Mandalay Bay hotel, firing more than 1,000 rounds, killing 60 people, wounding at least 413. The ensuing panic lifted the total number of people injured to at least 867.
Imagine now, worst-case scenario in Paris: people jumping off the boats and swimming for their lives.
Plan B in Paris on July 26. Please.
Before we regrettably refer to Paris 2024 the way we all now do Munich 1972.