Abstract

Conflicts today are very much battles of ideas. Alongside the military confrontations, an ‘Image War’ is taking place. The goal of the current study was to examine the usage of the international sports arena as a public diplomacy tool, through which political actors try to promote their goals by attracting public attention to their claims. More specifically, we examine an attack on a country’s image through the arena of sports – the Palestinian Football Association’s attempt to suspend Israel from FIFA in 2015 – and Israel’s reaction to the attack. Our findings indicate that this move had limited success in terms raising the attention of the international media to the Palestinians’ claims against Israel, both in terms of the amount of coverage the topic received and in the ways in which the issue was framed. Although the Palestinian attempt was not very successful, either in raising attention to their political goals or in suspending Israel from FIFA, it emphasises the ways in which conflicts had changed and the importance of images in the information age we live in.