On match day, Peadar Brown's pub in Dublin's historic Liberties area is usually packed with football fans. As kickoff approached for the Republic of Ireland's Nations League game against Israel on Sunday, the crowd was similarly busy. With one significant difference: none of the televisions were on.

The pub made a deliberate decision not to screen the game in protest against Israel's military campaign in Gaza.

"We committed about a month ago not to show any of the upcoming Nations League fixtures until Ireland made a stand against Israel," said owner Aidan Brown. "We didn't show the Kosovo game, and we've absolutely no intention of showing the Israel games."

Brown has been compiling a list of venues refusing to screen the match. At his last count, it included 140 pubs and bars in Ireland and abroad, with the number expected to rise before kickoff.

In Derry, in the north of Ireland, pub owner Liam Doherty described a similar sense of mobilisation. "It has to come from the bottom up, and it has to come from a small nation," said the owner of the Delacroix bar. "I think that we have to be the one that shows that this is just wrong."

Rebecca O'Keeffe, chair of Irish Sport for Palestine, which has led the Stop the Game campaign, said the past week had shown how far that mobilisation had spread. "It's a mass movement," she said. "It's reached corners of Ireland that maybe wouldn't have been engaged with this issue before. It's all people can talk about. We are past the point of symbolic gestures and hollow words."

Irish public opinion is clearly against the fixture, though not unanimously so. A poll of Irish football supporters found 76 percent opposed to the match going ahead. Among athletes, 63 percent of members of the Professional Footballers' Association of Ireland voted against playing the game.

Brown compared the atmosphere in Dublin to one of the most enduring sporting dramas in modern Irish history. "I think this is just as big as Saipan and the Roy Keane saga in 2002," he said. That episode became a national drama when Ireland captain Roy Keane left the 2002 World Cup squad in Japan following a confrontation with manager Mick McCarthy over training facilities. This time, the public debate across the island of Ireland is not about football standards, but moral ones.

That groundswell of public sentiment has been at odds with the decisions made by the Football Association of Ireland (FAI). In November, 93 percent of FAI members voted for the association to seek Israel's suspension from UEFA competitions. Yet when the FAI voted in July on whether the Republic of Ireland should play Israel, it chose to proceed with the fixtures. The motion passed 75 votes to 32, with three abstentions. The FAI cited the consequences non-fulfilment could have for Irish football, including potential points deductions.

Daniel Lambert, the Bohemian FC chief commercial officer who helped propose the original November motion, said the sequence explained much of the anger directed at the FAI. "It's been mishandled from the very first day by the FAI," he said. "The November vote was a very clear instruction from the membership, but they never really entertained not playing the games."

Lambert argued that the FAI had also failed to recognise what it could have gained by taking a stand. "There are huge benefits to not playing," he said. "Not only would it have the support of the Irish people... this would have enhanced the FAI's reputation, not damaged it."

Susan Shalabi, vice president of the Palestinian Football Association, said the responsibility lay even higher up. "The deeper issue is that the FAI and many others should never have been placed in this position," she said. "Had football's international governing bodies consistently applied their own rules, this dilemma would not exist."

Instead, the decision has been left not with the governing bodies but with the Irish players themselves. Earlier this week, more than 160 Irish sportspeople signed an open letter calling on the squad to boycott the fixtures.