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.
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.
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'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...
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...)