The perfect escape: Israelis need the World Cup like air to breathe

Mexico vs. South Africa. South Korea vs. Czechia. Canada vs. Bosnia. The United States vs. Paraguay. And there are another hundred matches, no less, in the greatest World Cup ever, a football festival stretching over more than five weeks across an entire continent and commanding the full attention of humanity. If something like “too much World Cup” is even possible, it will become clear beyond any doubt this summer, when Saudi Arabia and Cape Verde meet in the middle of the night and depress the real estate value of the world’s biggest sporting event.

48 national teams is simultaneously too few, since Israel is not one of them, and too many, because what do we care about Uzbekistan and Panama. But the 32 teams between 1998 and 2022 were 24 between 1982 and 1994, and 16 between 1954 and 1978. All it would take for the 48-team version to be considered ideal is to expand it to 64. The World Cup is too good an idea, too addictive an idea, for it not to grow and spread.

For us, probably, living on this patch of land that produces more rounds of war than world-class footballers, there is no such thing as “too much World Cup.” It is a shame it does not last six weeks and offer a few more esoteric, truly inconceivable encounters. Germany vs. Curaçao. France vs. Iraq. Brazil vs. Haiti. Twelve groups, you said? What is wrong with that? What would be better, the 13th group, into which we were drawn, who remembers when and who knows until when, together with Iran, Lebanon and the United States?

Behind every pairing such as “South Korea vs. Czechia” lies a synthesis of war, an alternative competition in which no missiles are fired, at most they are kicked. There are countries whose conflicts are sporting ones and last no more than 90 minutes, at most 120 with penalties. Football does not offer them an escape from reality, because reality is not so terrible that they need to escape from it. The World Cup simply becomes their reality.

For us, also because our inability to qualify for the tournament only deepens its strangeness and its allure, the World Cup offers the perfect escape from reality. It is a land of wonder into which we willingly sink until we are expelled from it with the awarding of the trophy, left, as much as possible, lonelier than we were at the start.

It is sad to discover how deeply the World Cup and wars are intertwined in our lives. The World Cup comes only once every four years, wars much more often. The overlap between the 1982 World Cup and the Lebanon War inspired a film, Final Whistle, Germany crushed Brazil in the semifinal just as Protective Edge was getting underway, and this World Cup finds us on the brink of the third round, or the fourth, depending on how you count, of the war with Iran.

War and football, it turns out, go well together, like chips and ketchup. War only increases football’s charm, and represents the sanity we would wish for ourselves, a sanity that deep down we understand is probably attainable only through artificial substitutes such as football matches featuring names like Argentina, the Netherlands, Brazil, Spain and England.

Israel, then, participates in every World Cup. It was the 33rd team in 2002, when, at the height of the World Cup in Japan and South Korea, 33 Israelis were murdered within 48 hours; it was the 33rd team when, three days after the final in 2006, the Second Lebanon War began; and it is the 49th team now, when every match, whether minor or major, offers an escape whose charm lies in the clear knowledge that one cannot really escape, that the World Cup will end all too soon and we will be required to stop being the children we once were, who followed the matches with sparkling eyes and a carefree soul, and return to being adults burdened to the bone with the hardships of life.

From today until July 19, every person in their fifth decade of life becomes again the child who watched the World Cup for the first time. This is the place we flee to when we are hurting. There is not always a World Cup when we hurt, but how good it is that it exists when we do.