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Born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Jamal Khatib once played alongside Pele in a much-vaunted exhibition match. The Brazilian icon singled out the then twenty-three-year-old Khatib as a formidable talent, and the moment seemed to acquire national significance, with forty thousand watching on at the Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium. Less than a week later, right-wing gunmen shot at a bus full of Palestinian refugees in the suburbs of the Lebanese capital, killing more than twenty and triggering a fifteen-year-long civil war (1975–1990).

By 1982, almost seven years after Pele’s visit and the bus shootings, Israeli forces had invaded Lebanon and turned what remained of the Camille Chamoun Stadium into an interrogation and detention centre. In a three-day massacre orchestrated by the Israeli occupation and executed by their Phalangist allies, three thousand Palestinian civilians across the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps were slaughtered that September about half a mile away from the stadium. Their bloated bodies piled up in mass graves. A woman’s stomach slit open, sideways and upwards, to kill her unborn child. A baby with a bullet through the back of her head. Men and boys castrated, their eyes open, their bodies lined against execution walls. Over the course of the massacre, Palestinian and Lebanese men between the ages of sixteen and sixty had been herded into the stadium in their thousands. Among them was Khatib, now in his thirties.

In Memory for Forgetfulness, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish documented his experience of watching the World Cup inside a bomb shelter during the Israeli siege of Beirut that same year. ‘And we too love football,’ he wrote, ‘and we too have a right to love football… and why should we not escape, for a moment, the routine of death?’ Darwish, a car battery providing his TV with sufficient power, marvelled at the ‘bewitching lunacy’ of football and its ability to unilaterally ‘announce a ceasefire’ or else ‘soften the blows of war and reduce missiles to irksome flies’. The passage echoes a more famous, oft-quoted line in Fewer Roses: ‘And we love life if we find a way to it.’ The contemporaneous verses speak not strictly of resilience, a term since coopted by those who have facilitated the plight of the Palestinian and now seek to at once fetishise and perpetuate it, nor of ‘bouncebackability’, to borrow a football expression. The passages are not about moving forward after enduring hardship. Instead, Darwish’s verses speak here of that unwavering steadfastness, or ‘sumud’, that is the ability to resist the forces of motion. ‘We dance,’ wrote Darwish, ‘in between martyrs.’ Even death is not reason enough for the martyred to move on. They remain fixed in among the dancing living. When death is muted, as through Darwish’s car-battery powered viewing of the 1982 World Cup, it is a momentary respite from the ‘routine’. The innumerable and unrelenting atrocities visited upon the Palestinian people since the Nakba make moving on implausible. If there is to be movement at all, it is in the metronomic steadiness of dancing or the circular rotation of a football. Football and dancing, therefore, become a kind of sumud as opposed to resilience, holding firm rather than moving forward. These lines shed light upon the defiant dignity of the Palestinian struggle and, equally, the thirst of its people for the simple, ordinary pleasures of life.

Darwish turned his attention to Diego Maradona four years later during the 1986 World Cup. In the Argentine Darwish saw an anti-imperialist, anti-establishment figure. ‘Where Maradona advances,’ he wrote, ‘the powers that be retreat.’ On the racial undertones of the French commentary that accompanied Argentina’s run to the world cup final, Darwish remarked that Maradona had ‘awoken within us the urge to stand up against western racism… he has rekindled our yearning for a hero we can applaud, pray for, fear for…’ Darwish admired the maverick’s apparent capacity to redress the balance of power by any means necessary, the infamous ‘hand of god’ goal against the English included. He stopped short of anointing Maradona a champion of the Arab world, however: ‘He does not rouse our sense of national pride, for he is not one of us.’ In so doing, Mahmoud Darwish seemed to anticipate an Arab footballing ‘hero’ on the global stage.

When I recently bumped into the famed nephew of Jamal Khatib on the beaches of Beirut, five-thousand four-hundred miles from where we had last seen one another and over a decade later, it was his toothy grin I recognised first. The years had gently rewritten the face around it, but the unruly curls and slight underbite remained, lending the now middle-aged man a passing resemblance to the Egyptian footballer Mohamed Salah. Much had been expected of him in our youth, owing to his uncle’s status as one of the greatest Arab footballers to play the game in the seventies. As I prepared to ask what had become of his own footballing ambitions, he pointed to the pink scars across his right knee and held up two fingers. He’d torn his meniscus twice in quick succession and become a very capable engineer at a firm in Boston.

It is said that the ‘Bronze Gazelle’ would stare, motionless, at the stadium clock during matches, springing into action, horseshoe moustache and all, as if he were an hour late to an appointment. His mildly less hirsute nephew possessed to my untrained eye the same ability to sit others down when they had resolved to take a stand, to dance with and around them and only then, in the final dip, to expose the folly of their undulating self-regard.

There is a line from Samantha Harvey’s recent novel Orbital in which an astronaut reflects upon the look that ‘men get watching sports, football, say, in support of a team that affirms them by winning and then straight away negates them, because the glory belongs to the team, not the man sitting on the sofa who will never, now, be on a team like that.’ This ‘Swede’ Levov of my own conjuring appeared consigned sine die to a comfortable desk chair in Boston, far removed from the crisp Beiruti grass of our formative years. With the Mediterranean and the best part of our early youth behind us, we soon began to drink from the spouted clay briq of borrowed glory. While the Liverpudlians have taken to calling him ‘the Egyptian king’, in our native tongue Mohamed Salah belongs to the entire Arab nation. Whenever ‘the Pride of the Arabs’ is on the pitch, Bein Sports’ Algerian and Tunisian commentators Hafid Derradji and Issam Chaouali will devote a good quarter of a match heaping praise on Salah, occasionally serenading him with a blend of classical Arabic verse and original lyrics. Even when the man himself is nowhere near the stadium, with relegation bound clubs contesting an uneventful draw, Derradji and Chaouali will find their way back to Salah.

A Palestinian aid worker for the Egyptian Relief Committee, Mohamed al-Wahidi, had been organising World Cup screenings in Gaza this past July when an Israeli airstrike ended his life moments before Salah’s Egypt played Argentina. The screenings went ahead. Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza watched Salah spearhead Egypt into a two-goal lead against the then-world champions, before succumbing to a controversial defeat. For ninety or so minutes, the maimed, the widowed, the displaced, the orphaned existed in a world foregrounded by the ruins of another where the worst that can happen is that the ball hits the crossbar instead of bulging the net. Still, the adulation that Salah receives speaks to more than the ‘bewitching lunacy’ of the sport or its ability to ‘announce a ceasefire’. Palestinian viewers take pride in his goals, his beaming smile, even his celebrations, which once included the endearing sight of his erstwhile curls grazing the Anfield grass in prostration (sajda). Salah is Darwish’s Arab Maradona: itself an epithet used to connote a talented, young footballer in the Arab world, prior to the emergence of Salah. He is the thick-browed Arab athlete who can kick a ball harder, run faster, dribble better than almost any other player on the globe. In a nation bereft of inspirational leaders in positions of power, Salah has ostensibly shouldered that burden.

A two-year-old video of a man wearing Salah’s old Liverpool shirt from the 2018–19 season, with the white stripe running from the red collar down the shoulders, continues to circle online. The man is prostrate, his spine rounded, his shoulders hunched and his head bowed. Imprinted on the back is Salah’s famous number eleven, and the eternal flame in memory of the ninety-seven fans who lost their lives at Hillsborough Stadium. In the clip, the man’s forehead rests on his daughter’s corpse. His shoulders heave. To his right is a pool of her Palestinian blood.

Replica Salah shirts from his time at Liverpool abound in Palestine. Even so, Salah’s perceived reluctance to speak out against the genocide in Gaza has aggrieved many of his devoted supporters. Salah is not immune from the repercussions that other Arab athletes and public figures have faced in the West for openly denouncing the genocide. The Dutch-Moroccan player Anwar El Ghazi had his contract wrongfully terminated at Mainz as a result of his pro-Palestinian posts, for instance. In ordinary times, it might have been adequate for Salah to keep his head down and burst past defenders. But in the age of Israel’s genocide, football is no longer just a matter of life and death, to paraphrase Liverpool’s former manager Bill Shankly: it is much more serious than that.

After the ‘Palestinian Pele’ Suleiman al-Obeid was killed by Israeli attacks while waiting for humanitarian aid in August of last year, Salah found his voice. He criticised UEFA, Europe’s football governing body, for posting a tribute that left out the culprit and the circumstances of Pele’s death. Al-Obeid joined a list of more than one thousand athletes killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, including 567 footballers and 103 children, according to the Palestinian Football Association. The remains of their stadia have been converted into refugee camps or, in the case of the Yarmouk, into a makeshift internment camp by the Israeli forces. Ahead of the Super Cup match, days after Salah’s rebuke, UEFA unfurled a vacuous banner reading: ‘Stop killing children. Stop killing civilians.’ No moment of silence followed. Enough of it had accompanied the killing of civilians in Gaza.

When footballers are exhorted or feel compelled to fight for something other than a ball on a pitch, it is a sure sign of rot at the top. In this case, the world football governing body, FIFA, has repeatedly refused to suspend Israel from international and club football despite having taken swift action against Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. By ignoring Israel’s repeated violations, including the staging of football matches on illegally occupied land, FIFA has ‘failed to enforce its own rules and is blatantly flouting international law’ as per Amnesty International. In truth, the duty of speaking up against war crimes and crimes against humanity ought not to lie at the feet of a man who kicks a ball for a living. Yet, it is precisely because genocide itself is selective by definition that the fight against it must necessarily be all-encompassing.

That September night in 1982, the detainees erupted into spontaneous applause upon recognising the former ‘Bronze Gazelle’ making his way through the Camile Chamoun Sports City Stadium.  This unnerved the Israeli soldiers who were unsure where to point their guns. Instead, they manhandled Khatib past a non-existent touchline. Accused of being a political leader, Khatib paused to stare at the now defunct clock. The barren pitch stretched, expanded wordlessly before him without the goal posts and the white chalk and the corner flags and without large swathes of the eastern and northern stands, and without the ball between his feet. He was a footballer, he replied, and these people around him were his people. Should any glory have once been plucked from greener grass then it belonged as much to them as it did to him.

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A. Naji Bakhti is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer. His novel, Between Beirut and the Moon, was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. His work has appeared in the Guardian, New Statesman and Kenyon Review. He is a lecturer in creative writing at Aberystwyth University.

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