Death Is Never Out of Work

June 2022

The days dragged on, and the family rift was mirrored in a drama larger than itself. In Israel, the government of change – which had been a symbol of hope for Natalie and Alex – lost its majority, one Knesset member after another. On 20 June Bennett and Lapid announced that they were dissolving the Knesset. On 30 June the dissolution passed, and the next day Yair Lapid moved into the prime minister's office, until the election – the fifth in three and a half years – set for 1 November.

That same week Natalie had her final interview before the officers' course. Her commander went through the file, the assessments, the grades, and at the end asked a simple question: "And how are things at home?"

Natalie, who had passed every test, couldn't answer. She cried for twenty minutes in the room with the broken air conditioner, and her commander waited and didn't look at the clock. In the end she said quietly: "You'll make a good officer, Natalie. But not in July. Sort out home first. We'll put you on the winter intake."

In the flat, Natalie heard the news about the government on the television. "Everything's falling apart again," she told Irina, and Irina held her tight. They both cried – for the family, and for the country.

"The government's fallen," she wrote to Alex. "And the course has been put off till winter. And I don't know if we'll survive this."

"I'm coming back, Sis," he replied.

But he didn't come back. He took the last bus of the night down to the beach at Faliro, stood facing the dark sea and felt the world collapsing around him.

14 July 2022 · Tel Aviv

Natalie was nineteen. According to the plan, she should have been in the second week of the course by now.

Irina baked a medovik, the layered honey cake her own mother used to bake in Odesa, and the two of them ate it in the kitchen, beside the empty chair. Alex video-called from Apollon, and a table of tourists sang "Happy Birthday" to her in five languages. Natalie laughed, for the first time in weeks.

At twenty to midnight her phone buzzed. Vitaly: "Happy birthday, Natasha."

She looked at the word for a long time. Two blue ticks appeared beneath it. She didn't answer. In Florentin, someone sat in front of those two ticks until morning.

July 2022 · Shati camp

In July the Tawjihi results came out. Mehran got 97.6 in the science stream. In the streets of the camp people handed out sweets, honked their horns and fired into the air for other people's children, and Fatma cried in the kitchen, quietly, the way you cry for joy in a house that has grown used to crying for other reasons.

Ahmed hugged him hard, and then sat with him on the narrow balcony and did the sums out loud, like in a lesson. Tuition at Al-Azhar. Transport. Books. Of the salaries that had come in halves until they squeezed him out of the school, and of the lessons in the living room, not much was left.

"One year, Mehran," he said at last. "We'll save. You'll teach the kids on the channel, give private lessons, and next year you'll enrol."

Mehran nodded. He could solve any equation except this one. One year, he thought. What's a year, to someone who has spent his whole life waiting for Gate 5.

5–7 August 2022 · Shati camp

In August the tension in Gaza flared up again. On 1 August the IDF arrested Bassem al-Saadi, a senior Islamic Jihad figure, in Jenin. Islamic Jihad threatened revenge, and for days Israel closed roads near the Gaza fence, fearing anti-tank fire on communities and soldiers. On 5 August, on a Friday afternoon, Israel launched Operation "Breaking Dawn": the first strike killed Tayseer al-Jabari, Islamic Jihad's commander in the northern Strip. Three days. Some 1,100 rockets were fired from Gaza towards Israel, and the sirens reached as far as Gush Dan. According to UN figures, 49 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, 17 of them children. Israel said that some of them had been killed by Islamic Jihad rockets that fell inside the Strip. Hamas, this time, stayed out of it.

In Shati camp, Mehran sat with the family in the inner room while the ground shook beneath the explosions. Reem fell asleep on his lap, and Jana held his hand too tightly. He held his phone and scrolled through pictures of bombed-out houses and children crying in the smoke, and thought of Uncle Yusuf.

"They're breaking us again," he whispered.

On 6 August something came down on a neighbours' house two streets away – an Israeli missile or an Islamic Jihad rocket that had fallen short; nobody in the street knew, and to nobody in the street did it make any difference. The noise made him scream: "Enough! Enough already!" He ran outside. Clouds of dust rose over the ruins, small children were crying on the concrete, and bitterness filled his heart. The rift inside him deepened: the wish to defend his place, against the fear of a war that was tearing his soul apart.

That night, unable to sleep, he filmed a lesson by the light of his phone's torch: a quadratic equation, and two explosions in the background. He didn't cut them. The video got around, and within a week Math Gaza had passed ten thousand subscribers.

Then he wrote an anonymous post: "The world is silent, and the blood keeps flowing."

Those same nights · Israel

In Tel Aviv, Irina sat with the neighbours in the stairwell and messaged Alex every time a siren ended: "Fine. Fine. Fine." In the screen room at the base, Natalie was working a double shift. At three in the morning the post from Gaza passed before her eyes, no name, no picture. Something in the rhythm, in the grief without slogans, reminded her of the post from the previous May, and of the boy in the videos. She didn't flag it. Not this time either.

September 2022

The darkness that came down on the broken flat in Tel Aviv in September was as heavy as a storm cloud. Silent rooms, the smell of tears and broken memories. Outside the window, the world went on shaking. The Ukrainians broke through around Kharkiv and took back great stretches of land, and more than seven million refugees from Ukraine had already been registered across Europe. Irina watched every report, every map, as if, by looking hard enough, she could make something change.

On 21 September Putin announced a partial mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of reservists, and within days long queues of young Russian men stretched along the borders with Georgia and Kazakhstan. In Florentin, Vitaly watched the queues on the Russian channel, which called them traitors. For the first time since February he switched the television off in the middle of a broadcast. He couldn't have explained to himself why.

Natalie asked for more shifts, and more. At the base there was no need to think about home. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah she and Irina sat alone at the table, with apple, honey and an empty chair, and Alex on the phone screen, propped against a bottle of wine.

In Athens the tourist season was starting to cool. Alex watched Hapoel open the new season with three points from five games, and for the first time felt that even football couldn't save him.

October 2022

In October the world began to come apart like a jigsaw no one remembered how to put together.

On 1 October, after hard fighting, Ukrainian forces entered Lyman – a small town nobody had heard of before the war, and a crossroads through which troops and equipment flowed east. The Russians had dug defensive lines there, trenches, and mines sown in the earth like seeds of death. But the Ukrainians, having learned from their victory at Kharkiv, knew that every fortress falls if you press in the right place.

That same night, in Indonesia, mothers waited for children who had gone out to watch a simple football match between Arema and Persebaya, at the Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang – and never came home. Arema lost at home, fans came down onto the pitch, and the police fired tear gas into the packed stands. The crowd panicked and ran for the exits, and more than a hundred and thirty people were crushed and suffocated to death. Among them were dozens of children. They knew nothing of the war in Ukraine, nothing of the tension between China and the United States. All they wanted was to see their team win.

Alex read about it behind the bar, and thought of the red stand, the flares, the narrow gates at Bloomfield. Of how little it takes for a home to become a trap.

On 8 October, in the early hours of the morning, the Crimean Bridge shook under a violent explosion. It was no ordinary bridge: it was Putin's lifeline to the annexed peninsula, a symbol of imperial pride that had cost billions of dollars. Flames rose from the structure, and black smoke stained the sky.

And the tension between Washington and Beijing kept coming to the boil, like a kettle someone had left on the hob. Since August, after Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, the Chinese military had been holding exercises around the island that looked more like rehearsals for war than a show of strength. The diplomats talked about "managing differences", and the armies prepared for the moment when words would stop working. Two economies woven into each other – China making everything, America buying everything – threatened to tear apart with one reckless step.

And then came Elon Musk.

On 26 October he walked into Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco carrying a white ceramic sink. "Let that sink in," he wrote. Within minutes the picture had gone viral. The next day the deal closed: $44 billion. He hadn't bought just a platform; he had bought the way humanity talks to itself. The employees looked at the South African-born billionaire and wondered what would become of them. Some were already getting their CVs ready. He came with plans for mass lay-offs, for changing the algorithms, for lifting restrictions in the name of "free speech" – to reshape the flow of information in a connected world.

The world at the end of October 2022 was not the world that had opened the month. Bridges broken, cities liberated, people dead for the sake of football, superpowers bracing for war, and one man who had bought the square where all of us talk. The broken collective, which had begun to crack in 2020, went on splintering. And now it was no longer clear who was pulling the strings.

Before the election

In the flat, Natalie sat on the living-room floor wrapped in a blanket, her eyes red. She had already voted, at the polling station on the base, and could still feel the ballot slip between her fingers. "Mum, what if everything goes back to how it was?"

Irina, her face as pale as snow, squeezed her hand. "I'm frightened, Natalie. Russia is breaking Ukraine, and Israel could fall back into his hands."

She meant Netanyahu. The name still echoed through the house like an open wound. Natalie remembered the cold nights at the protests, and her throat closed.

At Apollon, Alex got a message from her: "The tension here is insane. I don't know what's going to happen." He himself couldn't vote: Israel doesn't let its citizens vote from abroad, and a flight home to the ballot box cost more than a week of tips. He had heard about the polls, and about his father, who still quietly supported Russia. "If he comes back," he wrote to her, "everything we fought for is gone."

1 November 2022

The moment came. At ten at night the exit polls were released, and they struck like lightning: a majority for Netanyahu's bloc. By the end of the count, two days later, it was 64 seats.

Natalie sat in front of the television, her eyes wide. "No! It can't be!" she shouted, and threw the glass in her hand at the wall. Shards scattered across the floor.

"The change is dead, Natalie," Irina wept beside her. "Everything's going back into the night."

Natalie remembered the protests – the cold, the singing, the flags – and felt a deep betrayal, as if her whole struggle had been trampled underfoot. She collapsed on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably.

In Athens, Alex heard the news on his phone. "Bibi's won," he muttered, and hurled a bottle at the floor behind the bar. He remembered the protests with Natalie, the laughter under the flags, and suddenly it was all far away and lost.

In fury and despair he went out into the alley, held up the Hapoel flag in front of the floodlit Acropolis, took a photo, and opened Instagram. A story: a red flag flying in front of the Acropolis, and across it in huge letters: "FUCK BIBI ONLY HAPOEL".

That night · Shati camp

In Gaza, Mehran sat in his room by candlelight, after yet another power cut, scrolling through Instagram. For months he had been following Hapoel fans' accounts – ultras pages, stand photographers, supporters from the gate. Alex's account, with old photos from Bloomfield and a red scarf on a wall in Athens, was one of them. He knew nothing about him beyond that. He didn't know this was the brother of the girl who had liked his comment a year and a half earlier.

Suddenly Alex's story came up on the screen. The words struck him like an echo of his own pain, and he smiled for the first time in days.

Without a second thought, he replied to the story – a reply that lands only with the person who posted it, far from any other eyes: "FUCK HAMAS ONLY HAPOEL – from a red fan in Gaza!" and added a red heart.

He leaned back. A tear ran down his cheek. Football, he thought. The only shelter in the middle of the chaos. Then, out of habit, he deleted the conversation from his phone.

2 November 2022 · Athens

Alex saw the reply the next morning, and read it three times. A Hapoel fan. From Gaza. The profile was almost empty: three photos of the sea, and a sunset from a roof. He answered in English, something short and full of feeling, and Mehran sent him back a voice message:

"Ahlan, red brother. I'm Mehran. I understand Hebrew and I speak OK, but writing is hard for me, so I'm recording, sorry. I love Hapoel Tel Aviv like you, and I hate my government like you. We were born to suffer, my brother. We are Hapoel."

A shiver of hope ran through Alex's body. Such a small gesture, from someone everyone around him defined as the enemy. But the shared love of the red outweighed everything.

"Ya habibi," he recorded back, "Hapoel Tel Aviv are bigger than Israel and Palestine. We're family. We are Hapoel. You're my brother, because you're Hapoel."

For Mehran, that message felt like a winner in the ninety-third minute. For the first time in his life, for a moment, he had an Israeli friend.

9 November 2022

Eight days after the election, Hapoel hosted Beitar Jerusalem at Bloomfield. It was the first game they watched "together": Alex behind the bar at Apollon, Mehran on the roof in Shati, more than a thousand kilometres and two pirate streams between them, and voice messages sent every few minutes, broken up, full of shouting.

Hapoel won 2–1. At the final whistle a seven-second recording arrived, just one long scream, and then Mehran's voice, hoarse: "We beat Beitar, brother! We beat them!"

"The racists," Alex replied.

"This week," said Mehran, "it's the only win we've got."

December 2022

The league stopped for the World Cup in Qatar, and they moved on to watching that "together", in voice messages. Mehran loved Morocco, like all of Gaza, like the whole Arab world. On 6 December, when Morocco knocked Spain out on penalties, he sent Alex a video of horns and flags in the streets of the camp. On 10 December, when Youssef En-Nesyri rose above Portugal's keeper and headed Morocco into the semi-finals, he sent nothing for a whole hour. When the message came, it was just noise: fireworks, drums, and someone crying with laughter.

That night Alex wrote to Natalie: "I've got a new friend in Gaza. A Hapoel fan, his name's Mehran. Tonight he's celebrating Morocco like we've won the league. It's insane. I'm trying to come back, but I'm scared."

"Come," she answered, in tears. "We need you. And this story gives me hope."

She didn't tell him that she already knew the name. That she had been watching him for more than a year, through a different screen. And that his friend request was still waiting on her phone, a small grey button.

That same week the call-up arrived: the officers' course, winter intake. Natalie read it in her room, in the flat where her father no longer lived, and felt, for the first time in months, that at least one thing was moving forward.

Irina sat alone in the living room, gazing at the family photograph from the beach at Bat Yam, feeling the rift with Vitaly and the pain of Ukraine. And Alex, for all his promises, didn't book a ticket. He felt he had finished with Israel the day Bibi came back. He was torn inside, his family was torn apart, and his whole identity was in upheaval.

The world had split. Russia and Ukraine sank into blood, Israel went back into the shadows, and Natalie and Alex's faith in a better future faded away. And yet, between Athens and Shati camp, a single red thread had suddenly been drawn tight.