PARIS — Two countries at war – one of them with itself – had a date on a soccer field. It was a humid evening in the Bois de Boulogne and in the middle distance the Eiffel Tower was sparkling like a firework, celebrating the return, after a century of absence from the City of Light, of the great French invention, the Olympic Games.
Speaking strictly of sport, the group D match between the under-23 men’s sides of Mali and Israel carried little gravity. The Israeli playboys had lost six exhibition matches in a row. The Africans, who finished third at last year’s Africa Cup of Nations tournament, managed to beat a French fourth-division club in a tune-up last week.
Israel’s regular goalkeeper was out with a leg injury. Neither team was likely to advance very far in the competition, of which France, 3-0 winners over the United States on Wednesday, is the heavy favourite. But since the two countries have not enjoyed diplomatic relations since Mali broke off ties with Israel in 1973, it could hardly be dismissed as a “friendly.” (Still, let us be careful not generalize about geopolitics. One of the Malians is on the Penn State varsity. One of the Israelis plays professionally in Lvov, Ukraine.)
If there was any importance to the game at all, it was as a conspicuous cavalcade of firepower by the French security machine — the caravans of black-suited gunwomen and men; the steel barricades throttling a quiet neighbourhood on a sultry summer night, the angry choppers overhead. Yet all of this could not deter a lone jihadist at the George V with TNT in his suitcase, or a 20-year-old sniper on a rooftop with a former, future head of state in his sights.
Patted down and detoured a dozen times a day, it is easy to abjure the police presence at these Olympic Games as toxic and theatrical, until you realize that all of us over here are actors in the same play. The main attraction of the Mali-Israel game may have been to see whether someone would try to murder the blue team.
Then – completely by chance, while waiting at the Porte Maillot terminus for the bus to the Parc des Princes – I met one of this city’s most celebrated heroes: the Muslim who saved the Jews.
Nine years ago, two days after Algerian fanatics gunned down journalists from the Charlie Hébdo satirical broadsheet for lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, a man named Amedy Coulibaly entered a Kosher market in the Porte de Vincennes, shouted “You are the two things I hate the most in the world: you are Jewish and French,” and began a killing spree of his own. Four Jewish shoppers were killed immediately. But a teen-aged cashier, Lassana Bathily, who had come to France illegally to escape the Sahel’s poverty and violence, shepherded 15 other customers into a cold-storage room in the sub-basement, where they huddled for four hours while he went back upstairs.
The shooter, who was killed by police, had come to France from its ex-colony of Mali. So had Lassana Bathily. Their home villages, it soon was discovered, were only 15 kilometres apart.
“I should like to meet his mother,” Bathily said in 2020 of the terrorist/countryman. “I feel like she must be suffering. I want to know more about what Coulibaly’s relationship with his mother was like, because I think you can learn a lot about a person by understanding what their relationship is with his or her mother.”
Within a week of the massacre, the Muslim who saved the Jews had been granted French citizenship by government decree. He soon was hired by the city to speak in schools as an exemplar of human decency. Last weekend, Bathily carried the Olympic Torch through the heart of locked-down Paree.
But while the hero is hailed in a First World capital, the decade-long Islamist siege of his homeland continues without cease. Earlier in July, 21 celebrants had their throats slit at a wedding at a place called Djiguibombo; last week, 26 farmers were slaughtered in their fields. But that is far away and the army helicopters over the Bois de Boulogne drown out the ricochet.
On Wednesday evening, in Malian kit and with an Olympic credential that identified him as an honoured guest, Bathildy was heading to watch his benighted mother country battle against Zion.
“We dressed all in white when we carried the flame,” he told me at the bus stop. “White is the color of peace.”
He said that not a single day had passed when he did not think of that day at the Kosher mart.
“Peace is one-to-one,” he said. “Two people can make peace. But it requires only one person to make war.”
When I arrived at the Parc des Princes, the Minister of the Interior of the French Republic was embedded in a cluster of reporters, saying that “We owe this security to the whole world. The threats to our country are the threats that concern the Western world.”
Inside, at the half-filled home of Paris Saint Germain, I could see five times more Malian tricolors than Israeli flags. We rose for the national anthems and thousands, lucky not to be in Mali, sang lustily of their faraway home.
A ton appel, Mali,
Pour ta prospérité
Fidèle à ton destin
Nous seron tous unis . . .
But when the loudspeakers followed with Hatikvah, there came a crescendo of booing and whistles. There were a few people with Palestinian flags, then some taunting and shoving, but in 2024, taunting and shoving is the best-case scenario.
(At the same moment, Benjamin Netanyahu was addressing the U.S. Congress in Washington while thousands rampaged on Capitol Hill. “Iran’s useful idiots,” Netanyahu called them.)
A man named Raphael Salmon was high in the terraces with an Israeli flag draped across his knees. He said he was an executive of a technical-support company.
“Here we feel safe,” Salmon said. “When we leave the stadium, we hide it again.”
Raphael Salmon well remembered the killings at the kosher grocery – calling his wife and urging her to get their children inside – the teen-aged boy from Africa who saved so many lives. He said that there were three hundred thousand Jews in Paris, many of them clustered in the 17th arrondissment and in the near suburb of Neuilly, where, he said, “we feel safe, and we have the police, and we have our own security forces.”
“Have you thought about moving to Israel?” I asked him. (His own parents had fled Tunisia when the French imperial project in North Africa came to an ugly close.)
“It is not so simple to leave,” Salmon replied. “We are French. In culture, in life, we are French.”
Now to football. After a spirited but goal-less first half, Israel took the lead in the 56th minute when, lunging to clear the ball from a scramble ten metres from the Malian goal, a defender named Diallo toed the ball into his own net and then sprawled, eye covered, in shame.
Seven minutes later, the Africans equalized on a pretty header and that is how it ended, a 1-1 draw, a reasonable result in every way. So we filtered out into the darkened Bois, another day in the City of Light survived.