Chair of LA ’28 Olympics: Israeli athletes will be ‘welcome and safe’ at Games

Casey Wasserman, chair of the 2028 LA Olympics organizing committee, promises that Israeli athletes will be welcomed with open arms at the Games in three years and no discrimination will be allowed.

“I do not allow or stand for anybody to discriminate against Jewish athletes,” says Wasserman at an end-of-year event for the Olympic Committee of Israel in Tel Aviv.

Wasserman, who calls himself a “proud Jewish American,” stresses that Israeli athletes must be able to “compete everywhere in the world to show the true face of this country.”

While the International Olympic Committee has steadfastly rejected any efforts to bar Israeli athletes or make them compete under a neutral flag, athletes from Israel at the 2024 Paris Games faced boos, threats and some protests.

“We’re very focused on making sure every athlete has a safe and shared experience,” Wasserman says. “I don’t want the Israeli athletes to feel like they have a different experience because of the security situation, they should feel equally safe doing the same thing as everybody else.”

Noting that there are more Jews living in Los Angeles than in Tel Aviv, Wasserman tells the gathered Israeli athletes that “you will have a rabbi if you need one, you will have good food… and you will be welcome and safe.”

Wasserman, who is currently on his first-ever trip to Israel, met today with both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog, and yesterday he toured Kibbutz Be’eri in the south, which was ravaged in Hamas’s October 7 attack.