1MAY

Rajoub refuses Suliman handshake on stage

2 min read

14:31UTC

Palestine FA president Jibril Rajoub declined to shake hands with Israel FA vice-president Basim Sheikh Suliman at the Vancouver Congress on 30 April, asking publicly whether Gianni Infantino understood 'the deep suffering of the Palestinian people'.

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Key takeaway

Rajoub's refusal told the Congress what the CAS appeal already says: FIFA's $191,000 fine is not the answer.

Jibril Rajoub, president of the Palestine Football Association (PFA, the FIFA-recognised body for Palestinian football), refused to shake hands with Basim Sheikh Suliman, vice-president of the Israel Football Association, at the 76th FIFA Congress on 30 April 2026. Gianni Infantino had invited both men to the platform for a photograph during the Vancouver session. Rajoub's response asked whether the FIFA president understood 'the deep suffering of the Palestinian people' ¹.

The refusal sat on top of a live legal action. Ten days earlier, the PFA had taken FIFA's $191,000 fine on the IFA, in lieu of suspension or club expulsion, to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS, sport's independent supreme court) in Lausanne ². Rajoub's gesture in Vancouver showed that the disciplinary outcome the PFA is contesting at CAS is not the federation's preferred resolution; it is the resolution it has formally appealed against.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Palestine's football chief and Israel's football deputy-chief were both invited on stage at FIFA's annual meeting so the FIFA president could photograph them together, a gesture meant to show football bringing divided sides into dialogue. Palestine's representative refused to shake the Israeli's hand and asked publicly, in front of 1,600 delegates, whether Infantino grasped the depth of Palestinian suffering. The refusal happened while Palestine's federation has an active legal case running against FIFA itself, challenging FIFA's decision not to ban Israeli clubs based in occupied West Bank settlements.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: At the 2018 FIFA Congress in Moscow, ahead of the Russia World Cup, Infantino staged a similar photo opportunity between the Russian and Ukrainian football associations in a deliberate neutrality gesture. Ukraine's federation representative accepted the photograph under protest. FIFA's political neutrality framework treats symbolic co-presence as adequate governance, a pattern that produced a stage incident in Vancouver for the same reason it produced discomfort in Moscow.

Counter-parallel: The 1994 FIFA Congress in Zurich saw the Palestinian Authority's observer status debated directly on the floor. No photo opportunity was attempted, and the political question received a floor vote rather than a choreographed gesture. Governance through process rather than symbolism produces durable outcomes; symbolism produces stage incidents.

Consensus view: The Centre for Sport and Human Rights in Geneva notes that Infantino's stage photo attempt follows a well-documented FIFA playbook: using symbolic proximity to substitute for substantive governance action. Applied to an active arbitration dispute, Rajoub's refusal on camera produced a more damaging image than the original problem FIFA was trying to paper over.

Counter-view: Israeli government commentary, cited by Haaretz, frames Rajoub's refusal as a potential violation of FIFA's anti-discrimination rules under Article 13 of the FIFA Statutes, which require member associations to promote respect regardless of political background. Israel's FA may file a separate FIFA ethics complaint citing the public refusal as discriminatory conduct.

Key tension: Whether FIFA will initiate any disciplinary process against either federation for the Congress stage incident, and whether doing so while the PFA's CAS appeal is live would constitute prejudicing the arbitration.

First Reported In

Update #9 · Iran's Pearson test

Sports Illustrated· 1 May 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

PFA appeals FIFA Israel ruling at CAS

The PFA's CAS appeal, filed on around 20 April, set the backdrop for Rajoub's handshake refusal on the Congress stage on 30 April.

Occurred 20 Apr 2026

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This Event

Rajoub refuses Suliman handshake on stage

The on-stage refusal landed on top of a live legal action the PFA had filed at CAS ten days earlier; FIFA's photo-op did not paper over either.

Different Perspectives

French Football Federation

The FFF called an 11:00 CEST press conference for 28 July, at its Paris headquarters, following an extraordinary executive committee meeting, at which Zinedine Zidane is expected to be presented as head coach succeeding Didier Deschamps. As of this writing no communique confirms the appointment, contract length or start date.

Morocco

Morocco is pushing for the 2030 final at its Grand Stade Hassan II in Casablanca, a planned 115,000-seat venue that would be the world's largest football stadium on completion. The venue is contested by a Spanish petition for the Santiago Bernabeu, and FIFA has fixed neither the venue nor the tournament's proposed 64-team format.

FIFA

FIFA's first tournament report, published 27 July, itemises nearly 300,000 accredited personnel, 73,700 security staff and 300,000 square metres of custom-grown turf, with no revenue or cost figure attached. As a Swiss association answering to its own Congress rather than a treasury, FIFA has followed the same operational-before-financial sequence it used after Qatar 2022.

Javier Tebas / La Liga

La Liga president Javier Tebas said on 21 July that FIFA's system is rotten from the root and that Gianni Infantino's time as president has, in his words, concluded. Tebas has no vote in FIFA's process, so days after the IOC declined jurisdiction over a separate ethics complaint, he used the only instrument he has.

Mexico City government

Head of government Clara Brugada presented a closing report on 22 July crediting the tournament with 44 billion pesos of economic activity, 2,000-plus accelerated public works and 100,000 formal jobs in June alone. The city has not published the method behind that figure, and three other Mexican bodies count the same five weeks differently.

Town of Foxborough

Foxborough answered Kraft Group's June lawsuit on 7 July with a 61-page counterclaim, calling the stadium's owners 'a collection of multibillion-dollar corporations' trying to shift its $7.8 million security bill onto taxpayers. The town says its licensing power and its billing power run through the same board, and it wants the court to award its own costs too.