Here is a fact that is currently pummeling my brain: Israel is committing a genocide that we can witness on our phones, and yet people in the United States have either tuned it out, cheered it on, or are traumatized by seeing what we’ve always feared, and what Israel has always denied it wanted: A final solution for Gaza. (As a Jew whose family members survived and died in the Holocaust, I use those words with care.) Here is another fact: U.S. police officers take free trips to Israel to learn counterinsurgency, and we don’t need Malcolm X to figure out the people who will bear the brunt of this training.
Yet LeBron James—the NBA’s most prominent player, if no longer the best—wants you and everyone else to know that he stands with Israel.
There are no principled reasons for why he, along with his business partner, Maverick Carter, felt the need to post this. Most athletes have chosen silence for now. Yet James felt like he had to do more than say nothing as children are being massacred for seeking food and famine relief. He needed to make sure that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, a staunch Zionist, as well as his sponsors and friends in politics, knew that he wouldn’t be “one of those” Black athletes. He wouldn’t be like his fellow champions Kyrie Irving and Dwight Howard, who stood in solidarity with the oppressed and supported a free Palestine.
The LeBron Shift is both telling and deeply disappointing. In 2017, he made a point to stand up to Donald Trump and support the Black Lives Matter movement. On the basketball court in Brooklyn, he wore an “I can’t breathe” T-shirt alongside Irving to express solidarity with the family of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a New York City police officer in 2014.
James has also been praised for funding a public school for at-risk students in his hometown of Akron, Ohio. It’s a disgrace that he now goes out of his way to support a country that is relentlessly bombing schools in Gaza.
Perhaps most galling is the way he’s attempted to bathe his own legacy in the tradition of Muhammad Ali, a tough pill to swallow given Ali’s support for the Palestinian people. The eloquent words of eulogist Rabbi Michael Lerner at Ali’s funeral are a reminder that standing with Israel is not the same as standing with the Jewish people.
James might be a larger-than-life celebrity, but he’s also a microcosm of the legions of cultural performers in the United States—actors, authors, athletes—who have been cowed into silence. I don’t believe he supports ethnic cleansing any more than I think Brad Pitt or Cate Blanchett want to see the Israel Defense Forces target practice on kids. But I do think they’re all afraid to risk their power, privilege, and personal peace by speaking out, which is pathetic.
Do they really want to talk about “risk”? What about the risk to a Palestinian American who chooses to protest on campus? What about the risk to those who could end up imprisoned indefinitely for saying that genocide is bad? What about the Jewish protesters who are constantly attacked and shunned by their families and communities for opposing Trump’s favorite ethnostate?
Risk is everywhere in the current political climate. And yet there is also joyful struggle, as seen by Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic Party primary race for mayor of New York City. Mamdani captured people’s imagination by saying that there is nothing antisemitic about opposing genocide.
When athletes choose to risk their fortune, it has a ripple effect, offering people courage—just as Ali did when he refused the draft during the U.S. war on Vietnam. Yet as his own epic career starts to wind down, LeBron James has chosen cowardice. And that, too, has a ripple effect, right when we need him the most.