Time passed slowly and painfully in the early summer of 1982, the year of the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the occupation of Beirut.
The smell of death hung over the
city, and daily life, between funeral processions, was more like a ruse against
fear, against weariness and scarcity, waiting for the unknown or for the World
Cup matches.
The countdown to the world sporting event had already begun before June 6, the date of the beginning of the invasion, which became our main time marker. We slept and woke up dreaming of the great event that was approaching. We used to collect pictures of the players and paste them on the pages of the Fifa Panini albums that Talal, Hassan, Raghid, Mohamed, Riadh and I used to buy at the bookstore "El Rissala el arabiya" (The Arabic News) located at the intersection of Basta and Noueiri streets. We used to exchange the duplicates with our friends from the neighborhood and from school, because when we bought them, we didn't know in advance what the thick packages contained, which delayed our mission to complete the pages dedicated to each team.
I remember that on June 5th I
managed to finish the pages of the teams from Brazil, West Germany, Poland, and
Argentina. I was missing Juanito's picture to finish the Spain page, Graziani's
to have the whole Italy team and Marius Trésor's for France. The other pages
were empty or half-filled. They remained so because the Israeli Air Force
prevented us from completing our albums and bled our hopes. Before Beirut was
besieged and invaded, the city was bombed from the air for a week. The terror
and despondency took us further away from the prospect of returning to the
bookstore two blocks from our home in Ras el-Nabeh. I don't remember what day
the planes bombed a building near the bookstore. It was said that Ariel Sharon
thought that Yasser Arafat was there and that the pilot miscalculated his shot,
mistaking the building. Arafat escaped, but the bombing cost the life of
Asmahane, my grandmother's friend, who perished with her entire family.
After that, the bookstore closed, destroying any hope I had of finding Juanito, Graziani, Trésor or the other players missing from my album. In any case, the completion of the album was meaningless, since the possibility of sharing, exchanging or bragging was gone. Separated from friends, it was no longer possible to remember the names of the players or to test one's memory by reciting the probable compositions of the various selections.
June 11, 1982. The residents of the neighborhood have a lot on their minds. The Israeli tanks are in Khaldé, at the gates of the airport. The "Joint Forces"[1] tried to resist and stop their advance. The bombardments become more and more intense and a blockade is expected soon. A large number of displaced people fled to the Bekaa and then to the north through a corridor on the Beirut-Damascus road. Others are preparing to head south, where the fighting has subsided after sporadic clashes, the most violent of which took place at the Beaufort Castle in Shqif, on the outskirts of the Ain Al-Hilweh camp in Saida, and on the road to Rmaileh.
The water tankers arrived in the morning. Families and neighbors gathered to fill the canisters. Then it was the turn of the gas truck, which drove noisily into the alley, announcing its goods. The residents who had stayed in the corner brought their empty tanks, worrying about the possibility of a bombardment that, if it hit the truck, would blow up the whole neighborhood.
The responsibility I felt at noon, in front of the bakery in the street parallel to ours, where I had the mission to buy a bag of bread, while there was already talk of a lack of flour, made me feel as if I had suddenly grown up. More importantly, some of the neighbors are in the process of connecting an alternative electrical system. They are hiding supplies of gasoline in a safe place to start their cars so they can charge batteries to power this backup grid and run neon lights and old televisions.
We are only a few hours away from the long-awaited sporting event, which, along with political debates and the possibility of a siege and its consequences, is on the minds of Mohamed, Mohieddine, Sami and Walid Eido[2], who is preparing to welcome everyone on the third floor of the building opposite ours. A friend has connected it to a heavy truck battery that can light a room and run the television in black and white for long hours. A battery that could be recharged every day by a dynamo "dedicated to the occasion".
June 12, 1982. The situation is
worrying in terms of the advance of the Israeli forces, which will eventually
surround Beirut, but rather reassuring in terms of the gasoline reserves to
feed the batteries and the televisions. The latter sometimes require a good
shake so that the picture stops jumping and the sound stops crackling. At least
they can pick up the Lebanese relay station of Aarbaniyeh or get the scrambled
images from Jordanian, Syrian, Cypriot, Egyptian and even Israeli channels. That
was enough to follow the games. But we had one last important mission: to make
sure that the battery clamps used for the installation would hold and that the
electrical cables were strong enough to avoid any nasty surprises at the moment
of a goal or a pass that could change the course of the game.
After a sober lunch and between two waves of bombing, the Beirutians take a short nap. It is to compensate for the lack of sleep of the previous day or to anticipate that of the next night. As for us, the young football fans, we meet for a very competitive game, before the official ceremony of inauguration of the greatest competition, but with two fears: that an intensification of the bombardments does not interrupt our game in a critical moment, depriving us of a certain victory or preventing us from coming back to the score to carry out a draw that seems deserved. The second fear is sweat and dust, at a time of year when the summer temperature and humidity in Beirut increase in inverse proportion to the water available for personal or domestic hygiene. In addition, we were all very careful not to scratch or injure ourselves, lest the apothecary on duty treat us with his burning iodine tincture, which would have had the effect of undermining our commitment and our "fighting and manly spirit". An expression we discovered while reading the Monday newspapers, which reported on the European championship matches that we followed with passion, dividing us between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest fans, between Bayern Munich and Hamburg, and of course between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.
June 13th, 1982. Time passes slowly
and this morning's bombing is terrifying. The planes pounded the Basta Al-Fouka
line behind us and the Israeli forces officially announced the beginning of the
siege of the capital.
Time is passing slowly, in the opening game of the World Cup, tonight in Barcelona, Argentina, the defending champion, will challenge Belgium, which is proposing a new style of play that will become a school of tactics: to make the opponent's attack fall into the trap of offside, to wear down his nerves by sabotaging his chances and forcing him to hold the ball unnecessarily, and then to rely on stealthy and effective counterattacks to score goals. Some of us meet at Walid Eido's house, others at the old house of the Chami family. Abu Khaled (Eido) welcomed us all, young and old, in the living room where Khaled served us juice and dried fruits. Belgium dominates Argentina with only one goal. We were happy and relieved, the competition had really begun. It is as if we were afraid that the Israeli invasion would jeopardize it. As if the bombing or the siege had the power to prevent it.
Brazil, Germany and Algeria
In our neighborhood, as in others in our besieged city, two major "football parties" faced each other. The supporters of Brazil, an experienced team, the "experts", and the supporters of Germany, a new community that had been able to unite around the German championship matches that were accessible to us thanks to the summaries broadcast by Télé-Liban. On the fringes of these two major parties, there were also supporters of Italy and France, and then of the Soviet Union, Poland and Hungary (for "ideological" reasons and on "instructions" or "political orders").
Despite all this, one match managed to blur the previous partisan lines in a completely unexpected way. The West German game between Breitner, Rummenigge, Hrubesch, Fischer and Littbarski against Algeria, which for us was limited to two names, Rabah Madjer and Lakhdhar Belloumi. The Lebanese, who supported other teams than Germany, were certainly behind Algeria, while the German fans were torn between their Arab nationalist fiber, which urged them to be on the side of the country of the million martyrs, and a German victory, which would allow them to avoid the mockery of their opponents.
June 16, 1982. The bombing of Beirut is very violent and the gathering at Eido's is more sparse than usual. But the game is incredible, a real thunderbolt. The Algerians came out with their heads held high, scoring two goals each from Madjer and Belloumi against a single goal from Rummenigge. Had it not been for Algeria's unexpected defeat to Austria five days later, and the scheduled match between Germany and the same Austria on the 25th of the same month, Algeria would have qualified for the second round[3].
The shots fired in the air by the "Joint Forces" to celebrate Algeria's victory covered for a while the noise of the Israeli bombardments, which had been heard before the start of the games. Congratulations, celebration of Algeria and mockery of Germany were the dominant topics of discussion for several days. This lasted until Brazil's dramatic loss to Italy on July 2, ten days after the start of Ramadan. This was a godsend for most of the besieged families in Beirut, who had to do without the usual two daily meals during this period of food shortage. The S'Hour has become an occasion to continue the analysis of the matches and to look back on the great opportunities missed.
Undoubtedly, the regret of losing to
Brazil was (and still is) the most important thing to remember about this
competition. It must be said that football has probably never in its history
seen a team as powerful and seductive as that of Brazil, thanks to the magic of
the collective game and the genius of its individuals. The team of Zico,
Socrates, Falcao, Serginho, Eder, Junior and Oscar had performed masterfully
until they were surprised by the solid and rigorous defense of Italy, against
which their attacks failed, and then by the goals of Paolo Rossi, who ensured
the elimination of the Brazilians from the competition.
The end is well known: first, the defeat of France against Germany in a tragic match in which the German goalkeeper Schumacher sent the French player Battiston to the hospital without being penalized with a penalty and a red card that would have allowed the French team to become a finalist; and finally, the victory of Italy, the surprise of the tournament, against Germany in a match tactically mastered by the Italians, who thus brought back to Rome a trophy that they had not lifted since 1938.
Abou-Ammar, Italy and the multinational forces
After the 1982 World Cup, Yasser
Arafat repeatedly said that the Italian team had dedicated its victory to the
Palestinian resistance in Beirut, praising Paolo Rossi as one of the main
architects of this victory and gesture of solidarity (while mispronouncing his
first name with the Palestinian tendency to pronounce the "P" as a
"B"). There is no evidence that this actually happened, although
there were press leaks about Rossi's, Altobelli's and other players' overt or
covert sympathy for the Palestinians. In fact, Palestinian flags were waved
during the celebrations that greeted the return of the blue team to Italy with
the world's most valuable trophy.
These words of Abu-Ammar (regardless of their veracity), as well as the courtesy of the Italian soldiers who came to Beirut with the multinational force in charge of supervising the ceasefire and the departure of the Palestinian fighters and their leaders after the siege, had the effect of facilitating their mission in Lebanon and ensuring them a cordial contact with the children and young people of the stricken Palestinian camps and neighborhoods in the southern suburbs of the capital. Their units were deployed in this area and their medical corps brought humanitarian aid. Their military football team played against local teams, bringing them closer to a new generation of football fans, a generation that would soon become passionate about Italian football and make Italy the third great "football party" among the Lebanese and Palestinians.
The end of the World Cup marked the end of the celebrations and the return to the daily life of war, back to the shortage of water, electricity, flour and air, back to the sound of planes and cannons that killed tens of thousands of people for whom the games were the last thing they experienced. Thus ended a Beirut summer in which the dreams and sighs of football and death under the bombs were intertwined. Those who survived returned to their "normal" lives in early fall. I don't think that in October, when school started, we remembered the siege, Paolo Rossi or Belloumi, or even the disappointment of the Brazilian golden generation, or our albums that were left incomplete and lost under a pile of objects, just as the names of Asmahane, her children and others who were crushed under the Israeli fire that turned their homes into mass graves were lost from our memory.
After all that, life went on.
World Cups have come and gone every
four years, and now we are about to experience another competition. As we
prepare for it, we are reminded of the intense emotions of June 1982. The
feeling of staying alive as long as the battery of the neighbor's car keeps his
television on and keeps our eyes, ears and all our senses alert,
"protecting" us from the siege, the fear of airplanes and death in
the space of ninety minutes...
Ziad Majed
Text originally published in Arabic in The Journal of Palestinian Studies, Beirut, June 2018
[1] The "Joint Forces" are the joint military divisions of the different factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the leftist parties of the Lebanese National Movement.
[2] Walid Eido and his son Khaled were killed in a political assassination on June 13, 2007, exactly a quarter of a century after having been the "hosts" of the World Cup at their home in Ras El-Nabaâ in Beirut on June 13, 1982.
[3] Following this arrangement between Germany and Austria, the International Football Federation rectified the rules of the first round by imposing that the last matches of each group take place at the same time.
