The welcoming committee on the way into Backa Topola took the form of two Serb policemen who stopped our car and peered suspiciously at the passengers.
“Dokumenta?”
We handed over our passports for inspection. He took a quick glance and waved us on.
“What was that about?” we asked the driver.
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“Problem, Migrant.” Mee-GRANT. “Syrian … no passport.”
Backa Topola, a little town separated from Belgrade to the south by more than 100km of dead-flat cornfields, has been selected to host Ireland v Israel mainly due to its remoteness even from the rest of Serbia. Even here, the prevailing spirit is “where are your papers?”.
The Ireland team have played away games against Georgia in Mainz, Ukraine in Lodz and, last week, Israel in Debrecen, but this is the first time a game has been taken away from Dublin due to war. Ireland is involved only in the informational dimension of the current, diffuse, many-sided war, but even that is intense enough to overturn normality.
[ Ken Early: Why the discomfort over Israel fixtures? Because we know Ireland’s position is a fudge ]
That the Irish team was not harangued by a baying mob at the Aviva Stadium on Thursday has been interpreted in some quarters as evidence that the entire “boycott Israel” affair was a psyop by Ireland’s out-of-touch leftist elites aided by their propaganda drones in the (in this case sports) media.
Since many of these commentators seem new to the game, you would not expect them to be aware that more than 90 per cent of the Football Association of Ireland’s (FAI) General Assembly voted last year to back a motion calling for Israel to be suspended from football.
The vote obviously created uncertainty as to whether people would want Ireland to play the games against Israel once they were drawn against them in February. There was always going to be an argument about this.
The FAI’s case throughout has been that it’s one thing to express a view on an issue and another to back up that view with action that means incurring real material costs and possible further risks, for gains which are intangible and uncertain.
The Irish Government would recognise that approach, as it pretty well describes their own. If they were to back up their own rhetoric about Israel they would have stepped in to cancel the games themselves.
But then they would be the ones taking the heat. They preferred to leave it to football to sort out. Some 68 per cent of the same FAI General Assembly voted in the summer to go ahead with the games, indicating that a majority of the people who’d previously voted for Israel not to be in Uefa competitions nevertheless agreed that an actual boycott was too risky.
It was notable that on Thursday night, against Austria, there were far fewer Palestine flags to be seen at the Aviva than there were at the game against Greece in October 2023, which took place just six days after the Hamas attack on Israel.
How could this be? Maybe because in the first case the flags were understood to be signalling solidarity with the Palestinians, but in the context of Thursday they could be interpreted as signalling anger with the Irish players, and most fans did not want them to think they were blaming them for the mess.
Thursday was also notable for being the first Ireland Nations League match at which neither set of supporters chanted the initials of an armed group.
In Kosovo last week the chant of the night was “UCK!” (pronounced “uuh-cha-ka”). The UCK is known in English as the Kosovo Liberation Army or KLA, and the week before Ireland played there, four UCK leaders-turned-politicians had been sentenced to prison for war crimes committed during the struggle for Kosovan independence.
One imagines the Kosovo Specialist Chambers court did not convict them without seeing a lot of evidence, but all the locals I spoke to insisted their boys were not guilty, could not be guilty. UCK banners were everywhere in the city and nightly protests had been ongoing since the previous week.
Walking through the centre of Pristina the day before the Ireland game, I noticed the words “F**k Serbia” spraypainted on one of the monuments. I took a picture and by the time I’d finished sending it to a couple of groups I had been approached by two young women, who turned out to be students at the University of Pristina, one studying political science, the other architecture.
They pointed at “F**k Serbia” and said: “We just want you to know that not everybody in Kosovo thinks this.” They had recognised I was a foreigner and were concerned that I would spread the word among my fellow foreigners that in Kosovo they were all anti-Serb savages.
In American-inflected English they explained they wanted peace with Serbia and to join the European Union. But when I asked, it turned out that even they, walking exemplars of the American liberal nation-building dream, were unwilling to accept that the UCK heroes were guilty.
War crimes are what the other side does when they think they’re being heroes. As their team lost 3-0 to Ireland in Debrecen last Sunday, a small group of Israeli fans chanted for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “Sports and politics don’t mix,” the Israeli press officer had told a press conference before the game. He should try telling his own fans and players.
To much of the world, the IDF is the organisation that has killed more than 20,000 children in Gaza. To many Israelis and to Israel’s international supporters, they are the men who are doing what has to be done to save Western civilisation from barbarism. From that perspective, those who refuse to accept that sometimes it is necessary to kill 20,000 children in self-defence are moral cowards, whose virtue-signalling masks a hatred they dare not speak.
Now Ireland have arrived in Serbia where, last month, thousands of mourners paid their respects at the funeral of convicted war criminal General Ratko Mladic. He presided over the genocide of 8,000 Bosniak Muslims at Srebrenica yet remains a hero to many of his people not despite, but because of, his crimes.
The recently resigned Serbian president, Aleksandar Vucic, told the UN last month that, due to the deteriorating international situation, the outlook for small and medium-sized states was becoming more difficult. “The space for independent decision-making is narrowing, while pressure on states to choose sides is steadily increasing.”
Ireland, Kosovo and Israel are three quite different small countries, but they have something in common: an unusually close relationship with the United States. You could make a case that in varying degrees, all three countries owe their independence, such as it is, to US power. In the looming war, will we all end up on the same side?
