¡VIVA ESPAÑA! A Win for Humanity

Ferran Torres scored in the 106th minute and Argentina was already down to ten men, Enzo Fernández gone for a second yellow, so that by the time the ball found the back of the net the only real suspense left was how many saves Emiliano Martínez could make in a match his team had already lost, and he made ten of them, a final record, while Spain finished the tournament the way it started, conceding once in seven games and asking nothing of the crowd but patience.

Two days before that whistle, Argentina’s ambassador to Israel handed Benjamin Netanyahu a national team jersey on camera, and Netanyahu called Javier Milei a real friend, a great friend, in the same week his air force was still counting Iranian targets. Gideon Sa’ar quoted a football anthem back at his own country. Danny Danon posted two words and then posted them again in Hebrew, as though the message might not survive translation. Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has spent a career deciding who belongs where and who doesn’t, shared a photo of Milei and Messi at the Western Wall and promised love to those who love Israel back. Bezalel Smotrich, banned from the United Kingdom for what he has built in the West Bank, joked that if he cannot get into London at least two goals got past England, and wished his friend Javier luck, the same Javier who has been thanking Netanyahu all week for a friendship measured in strikes on Tehran and Beirut. By Saturday an entire Israeli cabinet had turned a football match into a referendum on itself, and Argentina, without being asked, had agreed to be the ballot.

Spain’s prime minister recognized Palestine as a state two years ago, before it was fashionable, before most of Western Europe found the nerve. Lamine Yamal rode an open-top bus through his own city in May with a Palestinian flag in his hands, eighteen years old and already fluent in a gesture most men his age haven’t found the courage for. Javier Bardem carried the same flag into stadium after stadium this summer, the way you carry something you’ve stopped asking permission to hold. Diego Maradona told Mahmoud Abbas his heart was Palestinian, and people are still repeating it eight years after his death, in the same country whose sitting president spent this week thanking the architect of a famine and a bombing campaign for the privilege of his company. Two Argentinas exist inside the same jersey. Only one of them made it into Netanyahu’s group chat.

And somewhere in Gaza, under a sky that has not stopped producing the sound of strikes since long before this tournament began, people gathered around a borrowed generator and cheered for Argentina anyway, for Messi, for the boy from Rosario who has never once said their name out loud, because a flag on a bus in Barcelona and a jersey gifted in Jerusalem were never going to be the thing that decided who gets to love a game or who a game is allowed to love back.

The man who built those watch parties never made it to the final. Mohammed al-Wahidi spent his days doing the unglamorous work of a ceasefire that wasn’t one, clearing rubble, opening roads, resolving the small disputes of people living in tents, and in whatever hours were left he rigged screens across Gaza so a population under siege could sit on top of wrecked buildings and watch Egypt play like the rest of the world was watching too. He was fifty-seven, a father, and on the Tuesday before Egypt faced Argentina an Israeli strike hit his car on the way to that night’s screening and killed him along with two others, including a child. The screening happened anyway that evening, because that was al-Wahidi’s whole argument even after he was no longer alive to make it, that joy is not a luxury item to be repossessed on schedule. The military called him a terrorist in Hamas’s military wing and said the incident was under review, the same sentence assembled and reused so often now that it has stopped requiring a translator. He was buried the next day wrapped in the two flags he had spent the tournament trying to give his neighbors a reason to wave, Palestinian and Egyptian, while a stadium in New Jersey was still selling out its parking lots for a game he built entire evenings around and would never see the end of.

Torres scored, Spain became the first country to hold the men’s and women’s World Cup in the same era, and none of it moved a single truck of aid across a single closed crossing. But for ninety minutes plus extra time, a flag carried by a winger outweighed a jersey gifted to a prime minister, and everyone watching, in Tel Aviv, in Buenos Aires, in a tent with a borrowed generator, already knew which side of that they were on before the match ever kicked off.

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In 2024, I also wrote about how Israel plans their attacks when the western conscious is busy with entertainment - the politics of distraction:

“For many in the west, Palestinian lives seem to hold little value. There is a willing ignorance that prevents empathizing and sustaining interest in Palestinian death. It would mean confronting those hard questions about our lives and our government. It would also mean recognizing how the Israeli military strategically schedules its major bombardments during times when they know the western public is preoccupied and conditioned for distraction. They understand the reality that Palestinian life will not interfere with American comfort.

Historically, operations such as 2008’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza commenced shortly after Christmas, when western attention was still fixated on the holidays. The 2014 bombardment that created a generation of orphans in Gaza took place during the World Cup. Israel’s 2018 massacre of Palestinian protesters in Gaza began on the eve of the Met Gala that year.

This pattern was repeated numerous times over the last few months. Christmas of 2023 was one of the deadliest nights to that point, when refugees in the Maghazi camp were massacred on Christmas night. While holiday dinners were hosted in the west, the world forgot that people in the Holy Land bled – the third-oldest church in the world was destroyed due to indiscriminate bombardment. During the Super Bowl this year, Netanyahu ordered the military to submit their military plan to invade Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians were pushed as a “safe zone”, which we now know was invaded during the Met Gala this year.”