Mon
Dieu, Mondial!
(Balls
instead of Bullets)
By
Uri Avnery, 24.6.06
IF
PRESIDENT
Bush wanted to deal with Iran by "bombing them back into the stone
age", (as an American general once put it during the Vietnam War), now
would be the time. With everybody riveted to the World Cup, who would notice?
The Israeli government knows this well. In their fight against the Qassam rockets that are landing in the town of Sderot, the Air Force has been given free rein. Since the beginning of the 2006 World Cup, more than 20 Palestinians, including boys and girls, a pregnant woman, a doctor and several paramedics have been killed. It seems that nobody in the world is paying any attention. Why should they? After all, the World Cup is more important.
When
I come back from Jerusalem to Tel-Aviv, I generally make a slight detour to Abu
Gush, an Arab village with a unique oasis: a coffee shop where mixed groups of
Jewish youngsters and Arab youngsters (male only), and sometimes groups of
Border Guard soldiers, Jewish and Druze, sit together on couches and fauteuils,
relaxed, smoking Nargilahs (water-pipes). They devour sugary Baklava, talk,
laugh and listen to the Lebanese singer Fairuz and the Oriental Israeli singer
Zahava Ben. An unusual phenomenon in
Israel.
When
I passed there this week, they were all sitting in great excitement before a
large screen, fixated on the game between Argentina and the Netherlands. They
got excited together, jumped up together, shouted together.
A
few days before, I saw the same in Sarajevo. In the coffee shops in the center
of the town, lots of local youngsters, Muslims, Croats and Serbs, were sitting
together, staring together, getting excited together, jumping up together,
shouting together.
The
same is happening at the same time all over the world, from Canada to Cambodia,
from South Africa to North Korea.
It
that good? Is that bad?
I
AM NOT
a football fan. Like many people in the world who think of themselves as
intellectuals (whatever that means), I usually dismiss this phenomenon with a
condescending, slightly ironic smile, even if I catch myself nowadays looking
for long minutes at the game. When I was a child, my father told me that sport
was "Goyim Naches" (Yiddish from Hebrew, "pleasure of Gentiles"),
and that the only Jewish sport was to ponder the philosophies of Spinoza and
Schopenhauer, or, alternatively, the Talmud. Yeshayahu Leibovitch, an observant
Orthodox Jew, described football teams as "eleven hooligans running after
a ball." (Another Jew suggested, for the sake of peace: "Why quarrel?
Give each team their own ball.")
From
this point of view (too), Israel has long since ceased to be a Jewish state, in
the spiritual sense. The Israeli Goy is like any other Goy on earth. The World
Cup proves it.
A
PHENOMENON
that arouses such deep emotions in a billion human beings cannot be dismissed
with a shrug. Here we have a profound human trait. What does it mean? Where
does it come from?
Konrad
Lorenz, one of the founders of the science of Ethology, which deals with the
behavior of animals (including the human animal), maintained that human
aggressiveness is an inborn trait, a product of millions of years of evolution.
Cavemen lived in tribes, each of which depended for survival on a specific
territory. The aggressiveness was needed to defend this territory and drive
others away.
Predators
in nature, which have natural weapons - such as teeth, claws or poison - are
generally equipped with an inhibiting mechanism that prevents them from
attacking their own kind. Otherwise they would not have survived until today.
But humans have no effective natural weapon, and therefore nature has not
equipped them with such a mechanism. That was a terrible mistake. True, humans
have no dangerous teeth or claws, but they have something more effective than
any natural weapon: the human brain which invents clubs, pikes, cannons and
nuclear bombs. So human beings have a deadly combination of three attributes:
inborn aggressiveness, murderous weapons and a lack of inhibitions concerning
the killing of their own kind. The result: the human inclination for war.
How
to overcome it? Lorenz pointed to a remedy: sport, and especially football.
Football is the surrogate for war. It directs human aggressiveness into
harmless channels. That's why it is so important - and so positive.
AGGRESSIVENESS
AND
nationalism go together. In this respect, too, football allows a glimpse into
the recesses of the human soul.
The
human animal has a profound need to identify itself with a collective. It lives
in a group. Ancient man lived in a tribe. Since then, social forms have changed
many times. The "We" changed from time to time with the change of
social structures. People lived in religious and ethnic frameworks, in feudal
society, in monarchies, etc. In the modern world, they live in nations.
Self-identification
with a nation is an absolute necessity for modern man (with very few
exceptions). Football gives expression to this identification in a way that
outwardly resembles war. That's why the national flag and the national anthem
play a central role in football. The masses wave flags, paint their faces with
the national colors, shout nationalist slogans, give an emotional expression to
this phenomenon.
Sometimes
this becomes downright ridiculous, as happened to us last week. Israel has no
part in the World Cup, having been knocked out before it really began. But a
member of the Ghana team, who plays for Hapoel Tel-Aviv, for some reason waved
the Israeli flag on the field - and the whole State of Israel erupted in an
outburst of joy: We are there! We are at the World Cup!
A
less ridiculous apparition: for the first time since the destruction of the
Third Reich, masses of Germans have been waving their national flag with an
enthusiasm that borders on ecstasy. Some observers speak of a rebirth of German
nationalism and whatnot. Yet I believe that it is a positive thing. A nation
cannot live a normal life when its citizens are ashamed of it. That can cause a
collective mental disturbance and give birth to dangerous tendencies. Now,
thanks to football, Germans can wave their flag.
The
nationalism of football overcomes all other sentiments. A classic example: at
the end of the 19th century, Vienna had a mayor, Karl Lueger, who was a rabid
and outspoken anti-Semite. But when the Jewish "Hakoah Vienna" played
against a Hungarian team, the mayor was observed cheering the local boys. When
it was pointed out to him that they were Jews, he made the famous remark:
"It is I who decide who is Jewish or not."
When
a French-Algerian was the star of the French team, French racists cheered him
on until they were hoarse. The same happened in Israel, when an Arab played on
our national team.
RECENTLY,
A
European intellectual told me: There are jokes about a Pole, a German, a Frenchman
and any other European nation. But he has never heard a joke about a European,
which proves that a European does not yet exist.
I
would apply a similar criterion to football. Every nation in Europe has a
national team, but there is no European team. Until the team of Europe, under
the European flag, plays against the team of Asia or Africa, there will be no
popular European consciousness. (A utopian may well dream of a match between
the team of Earth and the team of Mars or Planet X.)
My
Palestinian friend, Issam Sartawi, who was murdered 23 years ago because of his
contacts with us, once said: "There will be no peace until the team of
Israel plays against the team of Palestine - and we win."
THERE
IS, of
course, a gender angle to it.
A
brilliant advertising copywriter has plastered Tel-Aviv with posters of a
woman's note to her husband: "Itzig, let the goalie of Brazil prepare
coffee for you. I am off with the girls to the drugstore. Gali." In a
cartoon, a woman asks her husband, who is riveted to the World Cup on TV:
"Are you sure you don’t want to come with me to the book fair?"
Football
is a raucous guy thing, even if there are also women fans. In this respect,
too, it is a substitute for war, and perhaps also for ancient man's lust for
hunting. (In the United States, European football - called soccer- is preferred
by women, because American football is far more violent.)
In
football, men dare to do things that, in other surroundings, would be taboo:
they embrace each other, kiss each other, lie on top of one another. This
expresses, no doubt, deep needs, and does not harm anyone.
From
all these perspectives, football is a positive thing that replaces many
negative ones. Provided, of course, President Bush does not use the opportunity
to attack Iran, and we don't use it to bomb children in Gaza.