Football and false consciousness

I had hoped with all my heart that neither the Egyptian nor the Algerian team 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 mobilisation' for a football match – one that has far exceeded any recent political mass mobilisation – 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 November 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, and 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 to challenged 'our national security', the Egyptian media machine that was taught by the likes of Mustafa Saïd, in a Goebbels-esque manner, now went on to launch a new strange and pretentious campaign: Friday the 13 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 cultural 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 mobilisation 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 when 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.

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* Haidar Eid 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.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.