basketball, daiquiris, & genocide: a grotesque travel vlog
why are athletes still playing in israel?
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basketball, daiquiris, & genocide: a grotesque travel vlog
This afternoon, a TikTok video featuring one of my favorite WBB couples came across my feed. Shyanne Sellers, the 2025 WNBA second-round draft pick and Maryland WBB alum, and her fiancé and former Maryland teammate, Faith Masonius, were headed to the beach.
“The vibes were high, it was immaculate, drinks were flowing, it was a great time,” Masonius says in a voiceover. “We are right on the Mediterranean so the beach was beautiful.”
Sellers was drafted by the Valkyries but cut before the season began, and then was signed briefly to the Dream before being waived. After dedicating time to rehabbing a nagging knee injury, the pair has headed overseas so Sellers has another chance to play pro ball.
The last few videos on Masonius’s page are vlogs of the two preparing for the move, as neither one of them has ever really been out of the country or lived overseas. In voiceovers, the country Sellers will be playing in is never directly named; Masonius simply calls it “this country” or “a foreign country.”
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Why wouldn’t they want to name the country that Sellers is playing in? Doesn’t that seem odd? Well, it makes a lot more sense when you learn that Sellers has signed with the Israeli Maccabi Haifa Basketball Club.
News broke this morning that after nearly two years of death and destruction (and nearly a century of land theft and apartheid conditions), the United Nations (finally, and much too late) has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
A report published today concluded that Israel met four of the five genocidal acts in Gaza as laid out by the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (which, ironically, formed in the aftermath of the Holocaust). According to the Commission, the genocidal acts by Israel include “killing Palestinians, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”
The juxtaposition of Masonius, Sellers, and the rest of their American teammates partying at a tiki bar less than 100 miles from the Gaza Strip is dissonant and grotesque. Al Jazeera is reporting that Gaza City residents are currently being subjected to “heavy, relentless” bombardment as Israel’s military expands their ground offensive and begins their planned seizure of the city, even as the U.N. and much of the rest of the world condemns their actions.
Cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa (where Sellers is playing) are often promoted as welcoming gay tourist destinations, without mentioning that Tel Aviv is built on top of several Palestinian villages and the land around Haifa is home to several mass graves of Palestinians killed in the 1948 Nakba (this is known as pinkwashing). These bars, resorts, and beaches are also off-limits to most Palestinians who carry West Bank or Gaza Strip IDs. Despite these being their ancestral lands, Palestinians do not have freedom of movement within Israel’s borders due to it being an apartheid state.
According to the Palestinian Football Association, at least 774 Palestinian athletes have been killed by Israeli forces since the onset of the war in October 2023. Last month, Suleiman al-Obeid, who was known as the Palestinian Pele, was killed by Israeli forces while waiting for humanitarian aid.
In 2023, following the October 7th escalation, the Israeli pro basketball season was suspended. Alysha Clark, who played for five seasons in Israel, told the AP that she didn’t think it was an option for her to return amid the conflict. Connecticut Sun rookie Leigha Brown was supposed to fly out on October 8th of that year and had to rethink her overseas plans.
But the following season, play resumed and with it, American athletes signing contracts with Israeli teams. After Dyaisha Fair was waived by the Aces last season, she signed to play with Maccabi Haifa B.C. Emily Engstler played for Lev Jerusalem during the 2024-25 WNBA offseason, saying that it was an opportunity for her to grow her game and improve her areas of weakness.
As disappointing as it is to see a player like Sellers sign to an Israeli team right now, she clearly isn’t alone in making the decision to do so. There have been very few WNBA players—or pro women athletes, in general—who have spoken out about the humanitarian crisis facing Palestinians. New York Liberty player Natasha Cloud is one of the few who has.
“I know why they’re not speaking up,” Cloud told Andscape last year. “Your money is affected by it. When you’re talking about players needing to feed their families – they’ll lose sponsorships, they’ll lose endorsements, they’ll lose their jobs.”
It’s especially frustrating to to see openly queer American players choosing to play in Israel, as Palestinian liberation and queer liberation are inherently linked. “You cannot have queer liberation while apartheid, patriarchy, capitalism and other oppressions exist,” Ghaith Hilal, a leader with AlQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, wrote in 2013. “It’s important to target the connections of these oppressive forces.”
Israeli teams have been increasingly facing pro-Palestinian protests or disruptions. This past weekend, Canada and Israel played in an empty arena in Halifax due to “safety concerns” and ongoing protest over Israel’s inclusion in the Davis Cup. Last season, the Irish women’s basketball team refused to shake hands with the Israeli team at a EuroBasket qualifier. Earlier this year, hundreds of people gathered in the Spanish city of Vitoria to protest Maccabi Tel Aviv’s participation in the European Basketball League. “Sports should not be used to whitewash war crimes,” one protester told local media.
“Sports serve as a potent tool of soft power for the Israeli state,”
writes at Sports Politika. “Denying that platform — cutting off its means of reputation laundering and image management — is a straightforward way to pressure Israel to end its genocidal campaign. It is a strategy that was applied, successfully, to apartheid South Africa, and, most recently, Russia. Israel, too, should be made a pariah.”
Indeed, Israel should be made a pariah. And if the international sporting bodies won’t make them one, individual athletes should do it by refusing to play against them and by refusing to play for them.
It should go without saying that making travel vlogs while sipping daiquiris at a beach resort in an apartheid state that is currently genociding an entire population of people is, at the very least, an incredibly bad look. No one has to go play basketball in Israel, but they especially don’t need to romanticize their overseas adventure while people are quite literally being starved and bombed just a few miles away.