Harkin back to when we had a conscience

LockerRoom: On match days if you dawdle long enough at the crossroads outside Lansdowne Road you'll meet everyone. Including parts of your former self.

On Saturday I met a fella handing out leaflets about the Palestinian state. Hugh Harkin was his name. Still is probably. We shared a similar background. Well, same school, same straggly beards.

Hugh lamented that he was kind of a single-issue guy. I nodded sympathetically. Hugh is just an issue away from being a zero-issue guy. Like me.

Those of us who used to hand out leaflets and stand behind placards and banners and get dragged out of occupations trod a little uneasily through the crossroads on Saturday night. Somewhere along the line we got fat enough and comfortable enough to give things like playing soccer with Israel a free pass.

You can look at the series of games with Israel in a couple of ways. Four points dropped. Or just glad it's over. Mainly, being one of those who contributed so handsomely to the lack of debate over whether we should be playing Israel at all, I'm just glad it's over.

I left Hugh Harkin's company and drifted onward toward the little lane the press use for access to Lansdowne and was met straight away by a band of beery (my presumption) football fans who were blithely singing the words Football Not Politics, Football Not Politics as they chugged through the throng, disdaining the proffered leaflets lest they might learn something. A shiver took a long, leisurely walk down my back.

Football not politics! A level of intellectual engagement comparable with a three-year-old sticking his hands over his ears and screaming La! La! La! La! I'm Not Listening! La! La! La! Is that what we've become?

Well just about. We didn't even have a debate this time around about the necessary mingling of football and politics, about the implications of one state's representative team playing against another state's representative team regardless of what the other state represents.

Most of us had a few uneasy thoughts about the Israeli state when the draw was made and the fixtures were announced but we shelved them conveniently. Inside the ground on Saturday night, we old guilt-toting lefties were pleased to see a good scattering of Palestinian flags about the place. Some people had been more engaged than us. Thumbs up to them! We had a chuckle at the recordings of the two captains for Saturday night reading out a scripted statement for the Football against Racism campaign. Plenty of ironies there if you were a Palestinian listening in, heh, heh.

The problem, though, lies with us, with how complacent and distracted we've become. I can remember a couple of months ago leaving the Tel Aviv Hilton (reality central!) and wandering off in a state of semi-serious endeavour. I had the intention of re-educating myself about Israel. I found a bookshop and then lost concentration altogether. In the end I bought a book called How Israel Lost, by Richard Ben Cramer. Why that one?

Well I liked his biography of the baseball player Joe DiMaggio and his entertaining account of the 1988 US election. There might be good one-liners. The bookshop had a little section serving drinks and nice cakes and sticky buns so I sat down, got stuck into Richard Ben Cramer for about three minutes and then remembered I had some printouts of soccer articles from the Israeli media in my bag. Football not Politics. Sticky Buns too. Priorities puhl-ease.

I finished Richard Ben Cramer when I got home. Easier that way.

When I got home on Saturday night there was an email waiting for me from Hugh Harkin. I'll use a few paragraphs of it rather than paraphrase and pretend I thought of them myself.

"It may also be useful to add - knowing how difficult it is to keep track of alternative news - that despite the incessant mainstream chatter over 'disengagement' and the 'peace process', little, as always, has changed on the ground in Palestine. West Bank settlements continue to expand, Jerusalem is being irrevocably annexed, the Wall gets longer every day, and raids, arrests and killings are still the unreported lot of the ordinary Palestinian. As for this bloody 'disengagement', Amnesty's Israeli human rights partner B'Tselem released a report in March entitled One Big Prison, which stated pretty much bluntly that disengagement was occupation by remote control.

"And I regularly receive reports from Palestine myself, such as this heartbreaking one last week from friends in Jayyous, a West Bank village cut off from its (now annexed) farmland by the Wall, with access through one gate only: 'We call you to do something to help the farmers in Jayyous who couldn't reach their land since five days continuously. Every day the farmers go to gate number 25 and wait at the gate to open but no way.

"'The farmers and their families wait under the hot sun looking for this gate to open, but the hope disappears. The source of living for 300 families in Jayyous is through this gate. Who is responsible to feed the kids of these families? Who is responsible for the trees and vegetables which will die if this situation will continue? If this wall is build for security then who should be responsible for the life of 300 families in Jayyous?'"

So there you go. One small story, from one small almost forgotten place. There's lot of stories like that (and a lot worse) in Richard Ben Cramer's book, which is also shot through with the depressing thought that decades of military conscription have made the Israeli population more hawkish than they would naturally have become.

The absence of debate here merely reflects the absence of debate in Israel. The line of greatest paranoia is followed in Israel and accepted like a credit card everywhere else.

This time I'll quote Cramer.

". . . the shootings and suicide bombings started after Israel turned over policy on Palestine, and the Arabs who dwelt in it, to Jews who justified their seizure of the land, their occupation and the violence required to maintain it, simply and solely by their Jewishness, a promise to them by their God."

So here we are in this little country bedevilled by a history of occupation and religious extremism and acidic sectarianism and dividing walls and collectively we are chanting Football Not Politics!

Let Us Eat Cake And Sticky Buns! We're Not Listening. Blah, Blah, Blah! The old notion of a nation being loyal to the lessons of its own history has become as redundant as the thought that the measure of the success of the nascent Israeli state would be found in its treatment of Palestinians.

All these decades on and we have the new apartheid. Most of us haven't the energy or the cojones to stand up to it but the least we can do is not go chugging past singing Football Not Politics.

Like Shankly's nostrum about football being more important than life, it makes fools of us.

This column has no solutions but it knows this. We had a responsibility to have a debate. There are worse things in the world than what Dudu Aouate got up to on Saturday night.