Michael Zantovsky: The Old New European

Apart from chess and a few variations of itself, tennis is the only individual sport that is adversarial yet not a contact sport, although sometimes it seems it is only the net that prevents the two players from getting at each other. Because it is there, however, each player is facing his or her opponent in a space of his own, separated and left alone with his own strategy and tactics, his own thoughts and insecurities, and his own self, which in fact gives him two opponents — the Other and the Self. Since all these factors come to be expressed in a player’s movements, his body language, and his face before they are finally expressed on the results sheet, a tennis match more than a chess game is a piece of theater, a drama both physical and psychological. As in any play, there are plots and twists, climaxes, setbacks, and denouements, the great turning points, the windows of opportunity — which, taken, lead to triumph; or, once missed, lead to an inevitable defeat. Although few people would confuse a tennis game with life, there is enough life-like quality in it to keep us in thrall.

There have been many positives and negatives at the Wimbledon this year. Since about one half of each Wimbledon has been regularly rained-out, the organizers built a magnificent moveable rain roof over the Centre Court, only to see hardly a drop of rain for the whole fortnight. Both the men’s and women’s finals were a bit of an anticlimax after the unforgettable Nadal-Federer final of 2008 and the equally dramatic Federer-Roddick final last year. This year, I am afraid, Tomas Berdych went under quite meekly, although it would have probably taken a full contingent of Pamplona bulls to stop Nadal. Still, both the finalists’ ambassadors get to sit in the Royal Box, so one should count one’s blessings.

The most remarkable match of this year’s tournament was thus neither the most beautiful, nor the most thrilling but certainly the longest ever. It was painful to watch John Isner beat Nicolas Mahut after 183 games of which the fifth set alone took 138 and more than eight hours. In fact, it was impossible to watch the whole match and one could not help feeling that neither of the two protagonists themselves had been present for the duration. Yet of all the hundreds of matches played at this year’s Wimbledon, it was this lowly first-round tie that turned out to be impossible to forget.

Maybe the most intriguing question about this nightmare experience was what kept the players going for three days of relentless, if uninspiring, slugfest, which resembled three days of service practice rather than a contested match. Certainly it was not the money, the difference between first-round and second-round losers adding up to merely a £7,500. As John McEnroe observed, they were both bound to lose at least six months of their tennis lives on account of the experience, and considerably more money along with it. Indeed, John Isner, the winner, won just five games in going down against an otherwise beatable opponent in the next round.

Apparently neither was trying to beat the other player, either. At the end of the second day of the match, the players seemed to be hardly aware of each other. They only made half-hearted attempts to return each other’s serves (if they could see the ball in the gathering darkness at all). And this was also the moment of the dramatic turn, one small glimpse of human weakness that guaranteed the next day’s result with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. For Mahut had the game won. His much bigger and heavier opponent was running out of steam with every passing shot. Isner, who had served in the practically unreturnable high 130s (mph) at the top of his game, came down to high 90s. He could not take a step to reach even the easiest ball and he seemed ready to fall over at the next one. And yet it was Mahut who suddenly insisted that the play should stop because of darkness. He was right but Isner was by that time so spaced out he made out he did not care. He was willing to play on. Predictably Mahut won the argument and lost the match the next day. Maybe that is why he looked so utterly desperate when it was over, like a man who realizes he only has himself to blame. It hardly mattered. They both looked desperate. Their embrace at the net was not the usual gesture of joy on the one hand and reluctant congratulation on the other. It resembled two shell-shocked soldiers clutching at each other after a losing battle that they somehow inexplicably survived.

So why did they play on? It was probably that they did not know otherwise, that they played because it was the only thing to do and were willing to continue for however long it took. In the end, there seems to be just one inescapable though unbelievable, marvelous explanation for this display of human endurance, spirit and ultimate futility: In the days of mega stars, endorsements, sponsors, huge awards and the accompanying hubris, the two tennis players seemed to be playing for honor.

And to think that the story of the assassination in Dubai of a Hamas official by people wielding tennis rackets with all kinds of faked passports stretched an average person’s credulity. Now we have a spy ring of more than ten alleged Russian illegals rolled up by the FBI after years of monitoring. There are the fake identities, the glamorous babe, messages written in invisible ink, brush passes, inane passwords, the works. Maybe this is all work of a Hollywood screenwriter, or a monstrous reality TV show with a name like Amateur Spies. If it happened ten days earlier, it would have been seen as a foul attempt to torpedo the bonding between Presidents Obama and Medvedev over a couple of juicy hamburgers. If it happened a couple of weeks later one would be tempted to discount it as a symptom of the cucumber season.

Not suprisingly, everybody seems to be having fun. Even Russian officials, normally not known for their sense of humour in such situations, make witty remarks. After all, not much harm seems to have been done. Presumably no official secrets changed hands; people have not been murdered, tortured, or blackmailed. The illegals all seem to have been an inept lot generally enjoying the American dream too much to bother about ferreting out nuclear secrets or some such thing. They are thus accused of conspiring to be a foreign government’s agents rather than spies. This is what Billy Carter was alleged to have done for Libya before he registered, not a big deal.Or is it?

Since the whole affair is pictured as an obscure echo of a bygone era, a little history of the Cold War espionage might be in order. Generally, there were several kinds of agents involved. The first were agents under official cover, posing as diplomats and enjoying immunity against prosecution. Their position was rather comfortable but their capability to collect information was somewhat limited. They were invevitably the focus of attention of counterintelligence services in the countries where they operated, subject to surveillance, monitoring, and bugging. Mostly, they were used to control other agents, who were not so constrained. These agents, often nationals of host countries, took the severest risks, often paying with their lives for their services to a foreign country. Then there were the illegals. Many of them were sent abroad on short-term, one-off, high-risk missions, equipped with a basic cover story (the “legend”) designed to last only for the duration of the operation. A number of such Soviet agents had been sent to Czechoslovakia prior to the Soviet invasion in August 1968 to pass information, spread disinformation, and demoralize the society.

And last, but not least, there were the sleepers and the moles, people sent under deep cover to infiltrate host countries and work there undetected for the interests of the country that sent them. Of these, only some were agents of espionage,whose life span — given that they were regularly tasked with passing official secrets  and conducting acts of sabotage or assassinations — was less than that of an average person. The rest were agents of influence whose job was less conspicuous and risky but equally important: to build careers, assume decisionmaking positions, and help steer their host country in the directions plotted by the country that sent them. By definition, it follows that the effectiveness of such a long-maturing investment for an intelligence service  is measured in decades rather than years. For the time being, we may be allowed to laugh.

In one of the notorious demonstrations of American exceptionalism, most Americans associate the word football with a prolate spheroid moved around a gridiron by two teams of people resembling the Michelin man. Most other people use the term for what the Americans call “soccer,” unaware they are copying 19th century Oxford University snobs who abbreviated the unwieldy “Association Football” by first aspirating the “A” in “Association,” then replacing the frog-eaters’ “-ation” ending with a good, Anglo-Saxon “- er,” adding another “c” in the process to emphasize the right pronunciation, and finally dropping “football” altogether. Nevertheless, it is estimated that this exotic game, thought to be a harmless exercise for American schoolchildren, is played by about a quarter of a billion people — roughly the size of  the able-bodied U.S. population — in the rest of the world, and watched by perhaps ten times as many.

The popularity of the sport, in which not much happens most of the time, is hard to explain, but probably has to do with the fact that practically anyone can do it as badly as anyone else. The few people who can do it well then acquire, justifiably, the status of demi-gods and meet every four years in a month-long orgy of mass hysteria called the World Cup.

In the euphoria of the moment it is perhaps worth noting that a few eccentrics have taken a jaundiced view of the game and its paraphernalia, detecting a connection between football and hubris, nationalism and violence. Foremost of these was George Orwell, who famously did not see much sense in “encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.” Arguing in his 1941 essay “The Sporting Spirit” that “sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will” he was appalled not so much by “the behavior of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe — at any rate for short periods — that running, jumping, and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.”

It is not difficult to understand Orwell’s concerns at the time, with nationalism at its all-time high. International competitions, not just in football, served to demonstrate a nation’s prowess, readiness, willpower, and sometimes also its aggression and superiority. The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin were a case in point, as were many international competitions during the Cold War era. When the Czechoslovak ice hockey team crossed their sticks with the Soviets, the contest involved many things of which ice hockey was the least important. Not much of an athlete himself, Orwell could thus be forgiven for thinking that sport is “war minus the shooting.”

Of all sports, football has probably been the one most closely associated with nationalism, brutality, and violence. Again, it was invariably not the players, but the spectators and nations who did the most damage. There has been at least one football war between two countries, and many football riots, massacres, murders, and stampedes, not to mention countless drunken fights among rowdies in almost every stadium.

And yet, Orwell seems to have been proven wrong. The violent expressions of tribalism have been subsiding for some time, certainly at the top international level. In some places football has evolved into family entertainment — comparable to an MLB game. Some of it has to do with better policing and surveillance at stadiums, preventing incidents and barring the bad apples from attending. Some of it may have to do with the social unacceptability of expressions of hatred and xenophobia in many developed societies. Much of it has to do with the multi-billion dollar business football has become. Violence is bad for business, bad for attendance, bad for television, bad for sponsors, and bad for advertisers. The politics of football may be dirty, but its outward appearance has become much cleaner. And it is also kind of difficult to engage in full-blown tribalist frenzy when most of the players on “your” team have not even been born in your country, let alone your city. All for the best, most likely.

There is just one problem. Most of the above holds true for football in rich, developed countries, which, having learned the hard way in their national histories, have become relatively immune to the excesses of mass psychopathology. For the first time in history, the World Cup just starting will take place in a young, emerging country in the process of nation-building with all its accompanying difficulties and problems, of which endemic violence is perhaps the most serious. The next thirty days constitute a monumental social experiment, in which Orwell may yet be proven right. Let us hope not. But let us also not forget that the rallying cry of the South African national team, which is the title of this piece, could also be paraphrased as “Boys will be boys.”

Regardless of the justifications provided and regardless of the provocations before and during the operation, the assault of Shayetet 13 on the convoy of ships trying to breach the Israeli blockade of Gaza shows beyond any doubt the fundamental hopelessness of the Israeli strategy. In dealing with people for whom the human life is not the highest value, Israel is condemned to either back down in a confrontation and face a reinvigorated, better-armed, and ever more aggressive Hamas, or use force and face an international opprobrium. Hamas will be at liberty to choose the place and timing of the confrontation and in doing so scuttle any number of peace initiatives, summit meetings, and good will gestures.

There is no question that the latest confrontation, which ended in tragedy, had been deliberately planned by Hamas and its supporters. The size of the flotilla, the presence of the leader of the Northern faction of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Salah, who never misses an opportunity to expose his supporters to the Israeli armed might, and the battery of photographers and media who stood ready to record the bloodshed, all testify to a degree of cynicism in letting the ships go forward in the face of explicit Israeli warnings. Regardless of all that, the blame for the bloodshed will go to Israel — and rightly so, for anybody in his right mind could see that the booby trap would go off sooner rather than later.

Does that mean that Israel should give up and let Hamas do as they please? No Israeli government will do that given Hamas’s determination, in words and deeds, to destroy Israel. But Israelis should start using their brains, something they have an ample supply of, and realize that in trying to contain Hamas, unlike in some of their other fights, they do not necessarily have to go it alone. No one except the militant Islamists wants a stronger Hamas, not the US, not the EU, not Egypt, and certainly not the PLO.

The prevailing opinion of the international community, and of most Israelis I know, is that Hamas needs to be contained and not allowed to import missiles and weaponry for the terrorists, but that the ordinary Gazans should not be made to suffer for things which are beyond their power to control. Gaza should not be subject to a general blockade but to an enforceable arms embargo, including imports of dual-use material. Other things, not only humanitarian aid but all things that will enable Gazans to get on with their lives, should be allowed to go through, either through Rafah or through the maritime border. (Contrary to conventional wisdom, this writer does not believe Israel should be asked or obliged to trade with people who preach its destruction.)

There are proven and technically feasible ways to conduct such an embargo. Between 1993 and 1996 the NATO Operation Sharp Guard inspected 6,000 ships at sea and diverted 1,400 to port and checked them in order to enforce the UN-mandated arms embargo in former Yugoslavia. Surely a much smaller operation would be sufficient to ensure that non-lethal supplies would reach Gaza while missiles, weapons, and explosives stay out.

There are at least three serious obstacles to such a solution to the Gazan dilemma. One is the traditional Israeli unilateralism, which does not put much faith in multilateral recipes for Israeli problems. The glass of evidence on similar previous attempts is, depending on the observer, either half empty or half full. Since 1974, the presence of a UN observational force (the UNDOF) contributed to the Israeli-Syrian frontier being the quietest and most stable border between Israel and any of its neighbors. There is, however, a question as to whether it would be sufficient without the clear presence of an Israeli military deterrent.

The observational force established by Israel and Egypt, the MFO, has been an enormous help in keeping peace and building confidence on the Sinai border between Israel and Egypt. But because the MFO forces are co-owned by Egypt, Israel, and the US, rather than by the UN or another international organization, this is clearly an impractical solution for Israel and Hamas.

The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL+) operation has worked better than the original UNIFIL and, so far, managed to keep the Hezbollah and Israel Defense Forces apart, but has hardly succeeded in preventing Hezbollah from rearming itself and becoming stronger still. As for the EU’s Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM), it had not been very effective to start with and has not been operational in Rafah for the last three years, but the EU believes it might yet come in handy one day. In sum, international attempts at peacemaking in the conflict have been hardly an ironclad guarantee of peace, but not a recipe for disaster either.

In the event of a well-functioning Gaza border international maritime operation, the military risk to Israel would be small, even compared to the risks stemming from the smuggling through tunnels on the land border between Egypt and Gaza. The relief, on the other hand, brought about by not having to police the maritime border, would be enormous, both in terms of the use of military capacities and in terms of public relations.

The second obstacle would be securing a UN Security Council mandate, without which any international peacekeeping operation would be a nonstarter. A number of countries would probably object to an asymmetrical embargo. Some would possibly try to argue the “right to resistance to the occupation” for Hamas just as they did for the Hezbollah. If, however, Israel handed over the control of the Gaza maritime border to an international organization, the “resistance” argument would lose much of its force. The Security Council resolution could also include demands made to the other side, such as directing Israel not to interfere with the operation and the deliveries of humanitarian aid and civilian supplies. All in all, it is conceivable that the five permanent members might see the wisdom of such a course of action.

The third obstacle would be finding someone to implement and enforce the resolution. NATO, an obvious candidate, with the tested know-how and capacity to conduct such an operation, has been loath, thus far, to go anywhere near the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the recommendations of the group of “wise people” led by Madeleine Albright on NATO’s New Strategic Concept mention for the first time NATO’s readiness to help implement peace agreements in the conflict.

Admittedly, an international operation to prevent arms smuggling to Gaza and to ensure deliveries of civilian supplies to the Strip would not bring peace to the Middle East. But it might be a small step.

An old Jew comes to a bookstore and asks for a globe. After intensely peering at various spots on its surface, turning it around and back, studying it from close by and from afar, he finally asks the assistant: “Would you have another globe?”

Richard Haass has been an astute observer of geopolitics for decades. His condemnation of Europe to the garbage heap of history in a recent Financial Times op-ed piece (“Goodbye to Europe as a high-ranking power”) is therefore not to be taken lightly. In fact, some of the points he makes, painful as they might be, are difficult to rebut. It is an objective fact that if the current trends continue Europe will represent an ever-diminishing part of the global population and of the global economy. (It is not necessarily because the population or the economy of Europe would be shrinking but because other populations and other economies would be growing faster.)

Europe finds itself in a tough spot at the moment, shaken by the winds of the global financial crisis and stunned by the long suspected but rarely talked about imbalances between and within the economies of the member countries of the euro zone. European defense spending has also declined in both relative and absolute terms — and what little expenditure remains has not always been very rational from a continental perspective, with wasteful overlaps on the one hand, and gaping holes on the other. Some Europeans think that the root of the problem is the lack of real European governance, while others believe that it’s a lack of realism about the project itself. Be that as it may, the expectations of the EU emerging as a heavyweight in the international affairs of the 21st century have failed to materialize so far.

It is good to be reminded of our shortcomings by friends. It is also good to be reminded that Europe has international obligations. But it is hard not to notice a hint of a Schadenfreude in Haass’s concluding observation that “Even before it began, Europe’s moment as a major world power in the 21st century looks to be over.” For an American realist, to dance on Europe’s grave would not only seem tactless but also quite shortsighted. Before he is through with NATO and the Atlantic partnership, he might do well to consider what is going to replace them. It is all very well to talk of coalitions of the willing as the future modus operandi of US foreign policy, but for all NATO’s failings it is hard to think of an alternative coalition for the war in Afghanistan. It may have taken too much time to convince the Europeans of the need for effective sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, but it is hardly more fun to try to persuade the Chinese, the Russians, or the Brazilians. In fact, sometimes the convincing itself seems to lack conviction.

If the idealists are sometimes short on common sense, the realists are often short on imagination. The current state of the Atlantic relationship may leave something to be desired but it is arguably more solid and friendly than in the years just prior to World War II. The current state of affairs only appears deeply unsatisfactory when compared to the golden standard of the Atlantic bond in the Cold War era. It is against that standard that Americans are right in thinking they could use a little more European support when facing some very tough challenges of the present, and it is against the same standard that Europeans are right in thinking they could use a little more of the American leadership. At the moment we can probably still afford to feign indifference to each other. The deep common foundations of free individuals, free markets and free thought will only stand out in their clear outline when threatened. We may wax nostalgic about them when they are not. But we will be hard put to find them on another globe when they are.