Escaping Reality: Because We Deserve a Little Escapism

Although the World Cup is an event that accompanies you throughout your life in fixed, measured milestones, it has the ability to catch you a little differently each time. There is, of course, your first World Cup, which chronologically is actually the third or fourth since you were born, but still the first since you decided to get interested in this whole story with the grass and the ball and the two rectangles at the sides. A little later there is the World Cup you could not really follow properly because of basic training or military service or regular service, or even a post-army trip, and that is still better than the World Cup you had no head for because of little kids, and making a living, and leave me alone, man, who has the energy now for Scotland against Canada. 1 View gallery World Cup 2026 Mexico (Photo: Oz Mualem)

Fine, but all of this is only on an individual level. This time it feels like the 2026 World Cup is grabbing us not only personally, but also a little collectively, or even as a people. Since the last time that happened, we have accumulated here a number of events that, in a normal country, would take some 450 years to fit in. Back then, in 2022, the host country was just that entity in the Gulf that somehow managed to convince FIFA to hold a soccer tournament in the middle of the desert, and even move it to November because in the summer in Doha Messi and Harry Kane would have blown a gasket after at most a quarter of an hour. But since then, Qatar has become for Israelis something that is mentioned in completely different contexts, and none of them are positive in any way.

The World Cup that opens tonight will, probably more than ever, have to be much more than a soccer celebration for the people watching in Zion. This time we need it as a national project of pure escapism, straight into the vein. Just look at how invested we get every year in the bizarre competition called, in our parts, Eurovision, to understand how strong our need is to flee reality here for a while into the global village. To let the background noise from the stadium drown out the constant cacophony that is our lives here in recent years, and to fully accept the knowledge that, just like in a midday game in Miami, the Israeli soul sometimes also needs water breaks.

There is nothing to worry about. After the final whistle of the championship game, the social networks will go back to highlighting for you the extreme posts that will be pushed a little to the side until at least the knockout stage. Oh yes, and no need to apologize for getting swept up in it. To fully embrace the possibility that for a little more than a month, we will open our phones not to check what “Momo Updates Without Filters” is reporting on his Telegram, but to find out what the odds are that tonight we will rise to the top of the standings in the guys’ World Cup betting app. To stretch the small talk in the office coffee corner as long as possible, because it is much more fun to talk about what Modrić did yesterday than about what Smotrich said yesterday. To become totally addicted, as long as the Middle East allows it, to the special studio before Belgium-Costa Rica, as if it were another panel led by Yonit Levi and starring Benny Sabti. To remember that there is probably no people on the globe that more deserves to enjoy, each time, 90 minutes plus stoppage time of complete detachment from current affairs.

To laugh at the fact that around the world they criticized the decision to hold a World Cup with 48 national teams, but of those there are barely seven with whom we have some issue that we have invented and nurtured only since the beginning of the year. That is fine too, there is nothing to worry about. After the final whistle of the championship game, the social networks will go back to highlighting for you the extreme posts that were pushed a little to the side until at least the knockout stage, and Israeli reality will be waiting for us outside, sweaty, stressful and exhausting as always. I have a feeling that from July 20 we will again feel worn out, but not because we got up at four in the morning to watch Brazil against Ghana.