My comments a short time ago about the political machinations behind the election of Michel Platini as president of UEFA, especially the last-minute intervention of Sepp Blatter on Platini’s behalf, laid bare that however beautiful the sport, behind-the-scene politics have a major effect upon soccer, including selections for the World Cup, and—believe it or not—upon refereeing. It happens in all sports, I suspect.

You only have to imagine what went on this last week with the selections for the NCAA basketball tournament to guess at the influence of politics in sport. Or better yet, think about the process of selection of each site for the Olympic Games: bribes, favoritism, corruption and other illegalities. And if you want to go back further, think of Adolf Hitler‘s attempt to use the 1936 Olympics to showcase his belief in Aryan racial superiority. Jesse Owens must have really ticked him off!

And now in little over a week from today, in London, we are going to have a public confrontation over the little matter of whether Israel should be allowed to continue playing in major competitions. If you are a long-time follower of international soccer and the organization—FIFA—that controls it, you may know of historical precedents that would lead you to say either that they should be banned, or that they should not. Take your pick.

Sepp Blatter, the master politician at the head of FIFA, has gone on record for keeping soccer and politics separate. Last December in Asia he told a group of reporters: “We are not going to enter into any political declarations. There have been so many rants from heads of states, even in Europe, and we in football, if we entered in such discussions, then it would be against our statutes. We are not in politics.”

How he kept a straight face while saying that I do not know, since in the last few years several member-nations of FIFA have been suspended for interference of their government into the sport, and others have been threatened. Iran, Kenya, Yugoslavia, Greece and Palestine have been suspended briefly until their respective governments backed off. Blatter believes that FIFA, not government, must control the sport. But has that always been true?

Consider the case of the World Cup of 1974. The Soviet Union was due to play an elimination match against Chile in the national stadium in Santiago, shortly after the U.S.-backed 1973 overthrow of the elected president, Salvador Allende, by Augusto Pinochet, later to become loathed worldwide (except in some rooms and corridors in Washington) for his repression of political opponents and dissenters. The Soviet Union refused to play in the stadium where Pinochet had herded thousands of supporters of the Marxist Allende. They were later to be tortured, shot, raped, forced into exile, or simply to join “Los Desaparecidos”—“the disappeared”. The stadium became a symbol of Pinochet’s brutality.

In that particular case FIFA refused to act politically, eliminated the Soviet Union and allowed Chile to qualify for the cup in Germany. Earlier, however, in 1961, the organization had acted politically, banning South Africa because of its apartheid policies that did not allow a team to field white and non-white players together. That ban stayed in place for almost thirty years, until in the early nineties, apartheid itself was dismantled, and the modern South Africa emerged.

What of this dispute over Israel? In 2002, Arab countries called for a ban for a list of reasons that included Israel’s incursion into areas of Palestinian self-rule; racial and ethnic discrimination against Palestinians; and obstructions raised to block the progress of Palestinian sports. Just last November, Israel refused to allow members of the Palestine team to travel from Gaza to play a match in Singapore.

The current protest by The Boycott Israeli Goods Campaign and supported by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has not received much attention in U.S. newspapers, but gets a lot of attention in the press in Europe, Israel and Palestine, as did other sporting boycotts. And the subject of Israel’s full compliance with international law, including the permanent lifting of all barriers to freedom of movement for Palestinian goods, people and capital, has been raised for governmental debate in London, supported by 57 members of the British parliament.

The intent is to put pressure upon Israel, which is seeking to improve its relationship with the European Union, whose members are aware of the illegalities in current Israeli policies of building the wall of separation across Palestinian land. The protest on March 24, the day of a match between England and Israel as a qualifier for Euro 2008, is in front of the headquarters of the Football Association in London at 1 p.m. In the recent past, similar protests were organized for tennis and cricket, in the latter case resulting on the cancellation of a planned match between Scotland and Israel.

On the world stage, soccer is a vastly more important sport than either tennis or cricket, and the idea that political action could affect scheduling of matches, or a country’s right to participate in international competition, would have serious repercussions within FIFA. Which way will Sepp Blatter go?