If the “Olympic spirit”—that phrase meant to evoke courage and resilience—had any real meaning and were not just a marketing slogan, no one would embody it like Fadi Deeb. The shot-putter is the only member of the Palestinian Paralympian Team participating at the Paris 2024 Paralympics and the sole competitor among the Palestinian delegation from Gaza. Deeb trains every day in Paris, but he bears the additional weight of the brutality of Israel’s war on his homeland. “As a Palestinian, my body is here,” he told us at a small Turkish cafe in Porte de Clichy. “But my mind, my everything, is in the Gaza Strip.”
Deeb’s presence is remarkable given the difficulties of training in Gaza. He spoke about how Gazan athletes face down poverty and occupation with innovation and gumption. “The equipment in the Gaza Strip…,” he said, trailing off for a moment. “We just [use] anything that looks like or can be similar [to] normal equipment. But because the energy and the power is coming from inside of us—this is why we are not stopping…. Sometimes we don’t have a discus, so we use something similar to a discus, like a [piece of] metal or something like that. Maybe [it’s] more heavy, but it’s no problem. Sometimes we don’t have enough shot put or the same kilo of shot put. We use a stone or something similar like that. Nothing can stop us.”
Amid the strain of training and the stress of the wider world, Deeb looks beyond his own situation. “What I’m doing now here is to show there is a Palestinian player [who] is under all of these hard things, [just like] there are people searching [for] life, they still have humanity,” he said. All the while, Palestinian pride burns through his ambitious vision: “I want to send a message to all of the world: The people in Gaza are human; they need the same human rights [as] everybody in this world.”
For Deeb, there is no escaping the fact that he is representing a land that Israel has placed under siege, and like anyone from Gaza, he has felt the effects of the Israel Defense Force’s bombardment. When we asked him how his family is doing, he paused, glanced skyward for a moment, and replied, “It’s a very hard situation. First, on the seventh of December, [I lost] my brother and also two of my nephews—[out of my] whole family, I lost more than 15 persons. The idea now [is to keep] the families in the Gaza Strip [from being] together. So if there is any group, they still attack the others [who are alive] to finish the family. It’s a very hard situation.”
As a Paralympian, Deeb also sees a stark reality: that sports for people with disabilities is going to become vital in Gaza given the number of young people who have been maimed by Israel’s war. Without sports, Deeb said that “social inclusion” could be a nightmare for so many Palestinian children. As Deeb’s friend, the journalist Leyla Hamed said to us, ”The Israeli occupation in Gaza causes mass disability and death. According to Save The Children, more than 10 children per day have lost one or both of their legs since conflict erupted. In the middle of all these atrocities, people in Gaza will see Deeb insist on making his dream come true, on representing Palestine and the Palestinian cause. It’s a message to the children whose dreams have been shattered by bombs and rockets.”
Israel’s participation in these Games, of course, came up, and Deeb leveled a direct question to Israeli athletes: “I want to ask the Israeli players something: What is your message? What do you want to show [about] yourself to the world? To show the genocide that has happened in Gaza? To show what? What do you want to show? What’s your message for the world?”
Deeb’s story disturbs and inspires. But that’s not where this story ends. According to the Paralympian, The Nation is, as of this writing, the only publication to interview him. Normally, we are loath to place ourselves as part of the story, but ignoring Palestinian voices is part of the story. There are thousands of journalists running around Paris, many looking for human-interest stories. To them, is Fadi Deeb less than human? Are Palestinians? Or is this a case of being fearful to even write a piece about Palestinian life for fear that it might offend those with a vested interest in seeing Palestinians only as cannon fodder?
Journalists are also passing over what is clearly thrumming through the streets of Paris. Pro-Palestinian graffiti adorns the walls across the city. Watching the Opening Ceremony in a crowded French Bar faraway from the official Olympic Zone, the loudest cheers, apart from Celine Dion, were for the Palestinian delegation.
Demonstrations to counter the Olympic effects on the city have included a pro-Palestinian element. The presence of Israeli athletes, given the ceaseless brutality and assassinations being carried out by their government, has raised the question of why they are here at all. One sticker we saw on the streets of Paris read, “Le Génocide N’Est Pas un Sport. Boycott Israel Aux JO de Paris!” (“Genocide Is Not a Sport. Boycott Israel at the Paris Olympic Games”). This is not a marginal sentiment in Olympic Paris.
Deeb should be one of the biggest stars of these Games, and by ignoring him, members of the press are being derelict in their duty. They are betraying their readers by missing a great story: the story of someone who epitomizes what these Games are supposed to be about. If they talked to Deeb, they would hear his motivation to succeed at the Paralympics:
My message for the world is: Just be human; give us the same human rights [as] other people. We have life, we have goals, we have dreams. You don’t need to be in the same religion or the same culture or the same nationality. When you [stand up against] the war in Gaza, you defend your humanity, not just us. This is my [request] for the world: Just give us the same human rights. I want to raise my flag here in Paris to show people that Palestine is not dying. We are still here, we are still fighting, we are still alive.
The Paralympic motto is “Spirit in Motion.” That suits Deeb well: His indomitable spirit cannot and will not be stopped.
We cannot back down
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
