The Soccer War

BOOTS

I met him in Damascus, in the elevator of a small hotel. He is a Palestinian, but he looks as if he has come straight from Siberia. Felt boots, a heavy coat tied with a belt, a fur cap with ear-flaps. Fortunately, the evenings are chilly in Damascus and you can walk around in a thick quilted jacket without roasting inside it. During the elevator ride, he reaches into his bag and hands me an apple. The Palestinian way of making acquaintances: offer fruit to the person you’ve just met. Fruit is the largest, and in fact the only, natural wealth of Palestine, and to give someone fruit is to give him everything you have.

He invites me to his room. He is the commander of one of the fedayeen groups that are fighting on Mount Hermon. It would be out of place to ask for his name or any details connected with his identity. He is from Galilee, let that suffice.

They have to dress warmly on the front, in down coats and ear-flaps, because Hermon is a mountain the same height as Mount Olympus, covered in snow and raked by icy winds. People die of exposure at night. And sometimes, when the shelling is heavy during the day, they lie motionless for hours and freeze to the rock. Unfortunately, they cannot get used to the snow or the cold; they might as well be fighting on an alien planet. The mountain keeps changing hands. Whoever takes the summit plants his flag there. Then another battle takes place, and, usually, a change of flags. Whoever dies, stays on the mountain, but it is worst for the wounded: there is no way to carry them down and they suffer a lot, because cold magnifies pain.

The fedayeen are waging their Palestinian war in the snows of Mount Hermon. The fiercest fighting takes place on the mountain, at short range, face to face, with both sides on the same piece of rock, on a narrow ledge from which one pushes the other over the precipice.

At the foot of the precipice stretches softly folded country, grey, naked, ruined country: this is the Golan Heights. There, the war between Israel and Syria goes on.

The commander from Mount Hermon asks me what I think about the battles on the Golan Heights, what I think about this war.

I tell him that I have never seen such a war.

Our war looked different and it ended long ago, in Berlin, in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 1945. It was a war of millions and millions of people. The trenches stretched for an unending number of kilometres. Even today, you can find traces of fortifications in every Polish forest. Each person made an enormous effort to survive that war; we dug up our whole country with our own hands. When the order to attack came, the soldiers broke out of the trenches like ants, and a great human mass covered the fields, filling the forests and the roads. You could meet people carrying guns everywhere. In my country, the war did not pass anyone by; it went through every home, it smashed its rifle butt against every door, it burned dozens of cities and thousands of villages. The war wounded everyone, and those who survived cannot cure themselves of it. A person who lived through a great war is different from someone who never lived through any war. They are two different species of human beings. They will never find a common language, because you cannot really describe the war, you cannot share it, you cannot tell someone: Here, take a little bit of my war. Everyone has to live out his own war to the end. War is the most brutal of things for a simple reason: it demands horrendous sacrifices. The people from my country that made it to the Brandenburg Gate can say how much victory costs. Anybody who wants to know how much you have to pay to win a war should look at our cemeteries. Anyone who says that you can achieve a lasting victory without great losses, that you can have the war without the cemeteries, does not know what he is talking about. I want to emphasize the following: the essence of war lies in the fact that war gathers everyone under its black wings. Nobody can remain on the sidelines, nobody can sit drinking coffee when the moment comes to be throwing grenades. Every Algerian took part in the Algerian war. Every Vietnamese took part in the Vietnam war. The Arabs have never waged such a war against Israel.

Why did the Arabs lose the 1967 war? A lot has been said on that subject. You could hear that Israel won because Jews are brave and Arabs are cowards. Jews are intelligent, and Arabs are primitive. The Jews have better weapons, and the Arabs worse. All of it untrue! The Arabs are also intelligent and brave and they have good weapons. The difference lay elsewhere — in the approach to war, in varying theories of war. In Israel, everybody takes part in war, but in the Arab countries — only the army. When war breaks out, everyone in Israel goes to the front and civilian life dies out. While in Syria, many people did not find out about the 1967 war until it was over. And yet Syria lost its most important strategic area, the Golan Heights, in that war. Syria was losing the Golan Heights and at the same time, that same day, that same hour, in Damascus — twenty kilometres from the Golan Heights — the cafés were full of people, and others were walking around, worrying about whether they would find a free table. Syria lost fewer than 100 soldiers in the 1967 war. A year earlier, 200 people had died in Damascus during a palace coup. Twice as many people die because of a political quarrel as because of a war in which the country loses its most important territory and the enemy approaches within shooting distance of the capital.

The front line soldier might be better or worse, but every soldier is: a person. A young man runs a particular risk, because his full life is just beginning. And now the whole world crashes down on this person. Death attacks him from all sides. Mines go off under his feet, bullets whistle through the air, bombs drop from the sky. It is very difficult to endure in such a hell. We know that, aside from the worst enemy, there exists an even worse enemy: loneliness in the face of death. The soldier cannot be alone; he will never hold out if he feels like a man under a sentence, if he knows that his brother is sitting in a nightclub playing dominoes, his other brother is horsing around in a swimming pool, and somebody else is worrying about how to find a free table. He must have the feeling that what he is doing is necessary to someone, that it is important to someone, that someone is watching him and someone is helping him, is with him. Otherwise, the soldier will throw everything down and go home.

War cannot be a matter for the army alone, because the burden of war is too great and the army itself will not manage to support it. The Arabs thought otherwise and — they lost. I told the commander from Mount Hermon that I was struck in the Arab world by the drastic gap, by the complete lack of contact between the front and the country, between the life of a soldier and the life of a shopkeeper during the war — they existed in two different worlds and they had different problems — one of them was thinking about how to live through another hour, and the other was thinking about how to sell his merchandise, and these are very different worries indeed.

We went out into the city. Our hotel stood near the main post office and the train station in the busy centre of Damascus. A long line of shoeshine boys sat in front of the post office building. This place is green with soldiers’ uniforms. The fighting on the Golan Heights lasts from daybreak until dusk, and in the evening the soldiers drive into Damascus. They walk the streets in groups, buy something in a shop and usually go to a movie. But before, they stop in front of the post office to have their boots shined. The Golan Heights are dust, which is why the soldiers’ boots are always grey, always in need of the brush. The boys that bestow elegance on the soldiers’ boots know everything about the war. Terribly dusty boots — there was heavy fighting. Dusty boots, but, ach, only so-so — quiet on the front. Wet boots, as if they’d been pulled out of the water — the fedayeen are fighting on Mount Hermon, where there is snow. Boots stinking of diesel oil, smeared with grease — there must have been an armoured clash, and the tank crews have had a rough day.

Boots — these are the war communiqués.

The commander from Mount Hermon remarks that you can see so many soldiers at once only in Damascus, and on the other side probably in Haifa or Tel Aviv, because the army is not visible on the Golan Heights. Both armies are dug into the ground, in bunkers or shelters, or buttoned up inside the armour of their tanks. Nobody walks along the Heights, nobody runs there, you cannot meet a soul on the roads, and the villages are destroyed — an emptiness like the surface of the moon. Whoever wants to see soldiers fighting like in the old days has to scramble up Mount Hermon.

Times have changed now, and the face of war has changed. Man has been removed from the field of vision on the battlefield. We see equipment. We see tanks, self-propelled artillery, rockets and aircraft. Officers push buttons in a bunker, observe the jumps of a green line across a screen, manipulate a joy-stick and press another button: a boom, whistling, and somewhere in the distance a tank disintegrates, somewhere in the sky an airplane flies to pieces.

The ordinary human face has disappeared from the image of war. ‘Hey, Dick!’ the chief of the Camera Press office shouts over the telephone to his photographer, who is working on the Golan Heights, ‘quit sending me rockets all the time. Send me a picture of the living mug of one of those guys that are slugging it out up there!’

But the living mugs are hidden behind the view-slits of the tanks.