They refused to shake hands because one of the israeli players called them all antisemites in the pre game interviews.
Ireland has a long history of supporting the palestinian cause - consistently the highest in europe - which is what the player was intentionally mischaracterising as antisemitism.
Sorry, let me get the full quote and some more context:
In an interview published on Tuesday by the Israeli Basketball Association, Saar addressed the upcoming match with Ireland. “It’s known that they are quite antisemitic and it’s no secret, and maybe that’s why a strong game is expected,” she said. “We talk about it among ourselves. We know they don’t love us and we will leave everything on the field always and in this game especially.”
An official quote at a formal press interview that implicates the entire team.
If an official representative of the team slags off the other side without reason before the game, and says the entire team thinks this, with no apology or attempt to clarify that that person was wrong and only speaking for themselves, that's shitty behavior from the entire team.
Sports boycotts are a useful way of alerting a country's citizens that we are upset by the actions of the government they have chosen to represent them.
You don't go around calling people out for it though. You agree with them that Trump is a jerk and that you didn't want him to become a president. This is different. The Israeli team called the Irish team antisemitic because they don't like what Israel is doing. The truth though is that it has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the genocide that Israel is inflicting on Palestine
It might suck, but yeah we kinda deserved to be excluded from the world stage for allowing trump to be president. Anyone that is willing to represent Israel/Russia/Saudi Arabia right now is kinda a piece of shit.
Russia is far, far superior to any of these, with USA and Israel being at the bottom of barrel. No need to slip in that Democrat anti-Russian propaganda, we know you love Genocide Joe/Hillary/Pelosi types.
Russia and Israel are the exact same as far as I'm concerned. They're both state sponsors of terrorism, and their entire government should be replaced with their heads being executed for war crimes.
Saudi Arabia is not just a state sponsor of terrorism, but a full blown terrorist state.
We will start with USA government being executed and replaced first. No other government will need to be touched. And Russia is an anti-terrorist state, not what you claim it to be.
It's one way to push governments to change, especially in a representative democracy. It's why businesses are pulling their operations from Russia (and to a much lesser extent Israel).
The hours everybody spends in supermarkets, picking out the things they don't want to buy, so they're only left with what they want... But the alternative is worse...
Ok, but that has never been the way the president has been selected? The popular vote for president isn't how the American Election system works and never has. Do you get upset if in football the team with the most yards doesn't win? Or the most base hits? Or the most gold in League of Legends?
We're not talking about whether the US does things like it's always done. We're talking about whether it's a democracy and whether the views of the government are the views of the people. It does pretty poorly on the first one and fails completely on the second.
They both approximate perfect representation close enough. If the difference between one government or the other comes down to variations that are basically explained by the weather being good or bad on voting day, you can't really claim that the government isn't representative.
Just because it didn't represent YOUR opinion, it doesn't make it less representative. A truly representative government will make decisions that align with 10% of the population 10% of the time. So if 10% of the population want to bomb Canada a perfectly representative government will make it happen every 40 years or so.
But with just some VERY MINOR tweaks to the system, the "views of the people" would be very different. In the US, the system is OPENLY engineered to preserve existing power structures, in ways that have accumulated over the decades (Jerrymandering, Electoral College and First Past The Post all add up...)