Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

The Eastern Mediterranean has become a flash-point for the meshing of geopolitics, the struggle for regional hegemony, battles for control of resources, religious soft power rivalry, and blatant interference in the politics of others.

As tens of thousands of refugees shiver in the cold on Turkey’s borders with Europe and a new phase of the brutal Syrian war erupts, Russia, Turkey, the European Union and the international community are being presented with the bill for a flawed, short-term approach to the nine-year old conflict that largely lacked empathy for millions of victims and was likely to magnify rather than resolve problems.

Civilisationalism’s train may well have left the station. That may also be true for a fundamental re-definition of US foreign policy.

To what degree, civilisationalism continues its march and how US foreign policy will be re-defined is likely to be determined by who wins this year’s US presidential election.

Television news summarizes daily what a new world order shaped by civilisationalists entails.

Nicholas Blincoe’s More Noble Than War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine (Bold Type Books, 2019) is a beautifully narrated and written history of a century of conflict between pre-state Jews and Palestinians and Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians after the establishment of the state. It is a story that goes far beyond the history of the conflict, the mirror images of developments in Jewish and Palestinian society, and the internecine ideological infighting and power struggles within the two communities. It paints in graphic detail the incestuous and inseparable relationship between sports and politics and the importance of soccer, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, in identity and nation formation as well as nation building. It also demonstrates in graphic detail how first Jews and then Palestinians exploited soccer to first achieve international recognition of their struggles and then as nations by dispatching teams to tour other countries and being granted membership in world soccer body FIFA. In doing so, Israelis and Palestinians set an example that decades later became a key pillar of the Algerian liberation struggle in the 1950s and 1960s with the National Liberation Front (FLN)’s creation of its own national soccer team that put its fight for independence on the world map. The skeletal facts of Blincoe’s tale have long been known. The significance of Blincoe’s contribution is that he puts flesh on the skeleton by weaving the facts into a meticulously researched and reported, easily accessible narrative in which he brings key players and ideological trends to life. It’s a tale that is all fact but reads like a thriller.
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James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

Sweeping new regulations restricting social media in Pakistan put freedom of expression and the media at the heart of the struggle to counter both civilizationalist and authoritarian aspects of an emerging new world order.

Incidents this week in Israel and Scandinavia ring alarm bells.

They highlight how the rise of civilizationalist leaders in democracies empower anti-liberal and anti-democratic forces.

The optics seem evident: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is at odds with just about everybody.

Saudi Arabia may have been getting more than it bargained for when authorities in Khujand, Tajikistan’s second largest city, ordered that the city’s largest and most popular mosque be converted into a cinema.

The real issue with US President Donald J. Trump’s Deal of the Century Israeli-Palestinian peace plan is not whether it stands a chance of resolving one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. It doesn’t.

More important is the fact that Israel will, in violation of international law, be empowered to unilaterally annex occupied territory and take steps towards creating an ethnically more homogenous state by transferring a significant proportion of the Jewish state’s Israeli Palestinian population to what the plan envisions as a future Palestinian entity.