Football and False Consciousness

by Haidar Eid*, Gaza Strip

I had hoped with all my heart that neither the Egyptian nor the Algerian teams would reach the World Cup finals that are to be held next year in South Africa. And, yes, by that I describe myself as being a "traitor" to Arab nationalism and I declare my innocence of the kind of "patriotism" embodied in the feet of a soccer player or the hands of a goalkeeper. Do we really want to measure national belonging and patriotism by the extent to which one exhibits passionate admiration for the moving legs of a football player?To watch the unprecedented "mass mobilization" for a football match, one that has far exceeded any recent political mass mobilization, is not only frustrating, it is nauseating in the Sartre-esque sense of the word. It is nauseating to watch the dominant status quo controlled and manipulated by inauthentic social classes that shamelessly sell all that is truly national for their own narrow interests, and transform common understandings of belonging and nationalism into an aggregate of collective hysteria rising to an artificially induced crescendo before "the decisive historical moment": 14-11-2009.

Eleven months ago, Israel heinously attacked the Gaza Strip. With battlefield tanks, massive air-power, phosphorus bombs and other types of anti-human weapons, Israel committed unspeakable massacres, killing 1,500 martyrs most of whom were civilians, children and women, injured more than 5,000, the majority of whom have become permanently physically challenged. This assault destroyed more than 40,000 homes and institutions, thousands of whose residents are still living in tents which were rendered ineffective by the heavy winter rain just last week! How did the official Arab regimes, those admirers of the football heroes, react to that? It is simply too painful, cruel and contentious to even compare.

To many Egyptians, Algeria has "conspired" against the Egyptian dream that they have struggled for. For as long as a week the Egyptian television stations continuously played national songs that celebrated “Egypt the mother of the world” who awaits her children heroes, Emad Mut'ib (who scored the second goal against Algeria), Muhammad Zeidan and Essam Al-Hadary (the goalkeeper), to make up for the humiliation in Algeria when the Egyptian national team was defeated 3-1.Meanwhile, on the Algerian side, the slogan “Viva Algeria,” which was once the inspiration for many in the struggle against French colonialism, has now become the inspiration for the new heroes: the Algerian football players that outsmarted the Egyptian team. Now Egypt’s flag, not Israel’s, has become a symbol for public burning.Discussion of an historical offensive created by a football match, has dominated the media scene.

After the intensive attack it launched against the starving population of Gaza who dared and challenged "our national security," the Egyptian media machine that was taught by the likes of Mustafa Said, in a Goebbels-esque manner, now went on to launch a new strange and pretentious campaign: Friday the 13th of November, 2009 is a decisive day for pilgrimage and prayer for the victory of "our boys"—the football players!

And so drowns Gaza in the deepest oblivion.

The production of a culture industry saturating us with video clips, movies, soap operas, advertisements, action films, sexual gossip about pop stars, popular songs and so on, has developed enormously and overtaken revolutionary values in Algeria, with its millions of martyrs, as well as those of Nasserite Egypt. It has reached a point of creating an unprecedented false consciousness embodied in the latest media mobilization and supported by the ruling classes. The average citizen has been made to question not the price of a loaf of bread, or the salvation of the people of Palestine and the best ways of breaking the siege of Gaza, but rather whether or not Abu Treikeh will achieve the "national dream" of winning the match!

And ... patient number 400 in Gaza dies because of the suffocating siege, while, simultaneously, a Palestinian child in Gaza is killed on the Eastern borders. The numbers of these new martyrs fade into insignificance compared with the number of expected goals the match is to produce. These ruling classes have managed to commodify feelings of national belonging and have transformed allegiance with Palestinians into a saga of meaningless tears and slogans not put into action, an emotional outburst easily swept away by the legs of 11 football players. These football-playing legs have had the power to do what images of Huda Ghalyeh's family, the Sammounis, the Dardouneh children and Iman Hejju did not. The prayers muttered on the lips of the spectators, civilians and politicians, before and during the match have far superseded those prayers muttered for the families in Gaza from the first till the last day of Israel's last and continuing genocidal war against the Palestinians!

*The author is an independent political commentator and professor in the Department of English Literature at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza. This article originally appeared on Ma’an in Arabic and was translated by Natalie Abu Shakra.

Chomsky is 'too political' for the Politics Deparment at Glasgow!

Incongnito: "The Politics Department at Glasgow University refused to publicise the talk by Prof. Chomsky on the hilarious grounds that the event was ‘too political’! Noam Chomsky is the world’s most academically cited political writer. There are rumours that GU’s world-renowned Medical School will henceforth decline to sponsor events that are ‘too medical’."

The Chomsky Disappointment

Chomsky gave a lecture at the Institute of Education on Thursday Nov. 29, 2009. Many students came out dissapointed. Many revolutionaries came out... de-revolutionarized.

I remember meeting Finkelstein in Gaza, and I was dissapointed similarly, particularly when it came to the right of return and BDS campaign.

Here's John Rose from the Socialist Worker giving the talk a deeper analysis:

"Chomsky continued with this catastrophic image of hopeless defeat.
The Palestinians will be left out “up in the hills. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if the Israeli tourist agency subsidised that nice biblical landscape for the American tourists zooming by on the Israel-only superhighways. They could see a man leading a goat up on the hills that reminds you of the bible, maybe the man goes to one of the wells that’s still accessible to get a bucket of water…”
The day Chomsky was speaking there were renewed clashes in East Jerusalem as Israel prepares public opinion for the annexation of the whole city – with all that implies for the city’s Muslim holy places. Israel’s one and a half million strong Palestinian Israeli population in the Galilee area are constantly denounced as “traitors” and face a very real threat of ethnic cleansing. Elsewhere in his speech Chomsky described the increasing authority of the fanatical rabbis in the Israeli army who invoke the bible to justify Israeli purity.
Most commentators take for granted that this is a tinder box waiting to explode. Of course Chomsky is correct to discuss what we can do in the West with an audience in the West. But with no reference at all to Palestinian resistance, there is a risk that the BDS movement is seen as a substitute for the liberation movement. It is not and can never be. It is a solidarity movement."

Notice that even with Chomsky's student Finkelstein, there is still no mention of Palestinian civil resistance.

Also, notice that whilst mentioning human rights violation figures, many Western scholars do NOT use Palestinian human rights organizations figures. Remembering Edward Said: "As if Arab sources have something intrinsically untrustworthy in them," they cannot be trusted. From Orientalism Revisisted.

Latest Boycott News: Sussex and Trondheim

"Students at the University of Sussex, England have voted to boycott Israeli goods. The decision follows the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, which calls upon the Israeli state to respect international law and end the occupation of Palestine.
In a campus-wide referendum, 56% of students voted in favour of the boycott."

"The signatories of this letter are employees at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and University College of Sør-Trøndelag (HiST), both institutions located in Trondheim, Norway. We ask the boards of our institutions to approve an academic boycott of Israel. The boycott should cover the educational, research and culture institutions of the state of Israel and their representatives, regardless of religion or nationality. This means that we refrain from participating in any kind of academic or cultural cooperation with Israeli institutions and their representatives until guaranties are issued that the occupation of Palestinian land will be terminated."

November 8: the Othmana family massacre

No week or two weeks pass without there being a commemoration of a massacre carried out by the Israeli occupation forces against the Palestinians.

On November 8th, it was the commemoration of the Othmana family massacre in Beit Hanoun in 2006, where 19 martyrs, women, men and children, went down by 10 continuous tank bombings on the Othmana family neighborhood. It was during the night and the family was asleep. The place was turned into a pool of blood and burnt flesh.

Never to forgive, never to forget.