Prologue

In an age when every touch of a screen connects us to countless people, it seems we have never been further apart. Civilisation, which promised connection and sharing, is coming apart before our eyes like a cracked mirror. The reality of the early 2020s did not collapse in a single day – it cracked slowly, until the fractures became routine. A pandemic turned breathing into a weapon, lockdowns turned cities into ghost towns, and politics crumbled until no trust was left. Wars broke out in homes and on screens, borders hardened, and international alliances became weapons. Every generation hoped to be different, and in the end each inherited the same chaos – this time in a digital wrapper.

Inside this world stand three young people, each carrying a small dream against an enormous reality that insists on crushing it.

Alex (Kozlov) Ben-Gurion, born 7 May 1998. The son of an immigrant father who tried so hard to prove his Jewishness that he changed the family name – a forced tribute to Ben-Gurion. A discharged combat soldier from the Golani Brigade, twenty-one at the start of 2020, dragging a backpack with a red Hapoel Tel Aviv scarf, memories of trenches and firefights, and a heart broken by Neta – a first love that left a scar deeper than any battle. A rebel with a sharp tongue, he loathes the colour yellow and everything Maccabi stands for in his eyes, loves football like a private religion, and is looking for his way in a world that seems to hate him for simply being who he is.

Natalie (Kozlov) Ben-Gurion, his younger sister, born 14 July 2003, still called Natasha at the start of 2020 – only sixteen when the Covid lockdowns close in on her and on the city. Her beauty is quiet, but behind it rages a hidden rebellion: she chooses dangerous boys, looks for boundaries to kick against, and begins to discover that life in a country torn between ideologies can turn her, too, into someone she never imagined she would be. She supports Hapoel Tel Aviv out of loyalty to home and family, and that red is a comfort against a world that paints her in new fears.

Mehran al-Ghazi, born 23 March 2004, a son of the Shati refugee camp in Gaza. The son of Fatma – a nurse whose smile is rare but stubborn – and of Ahmed, a maths teacher who prefers adapting to leading. A boy whose surname means "the conqueror", though all his life he has known only siege, humiliation and survival. He grows up facing a grey sea and ruined buildings, teaches small children maths to plant some order in a chaotic world, and spends his nights with technical ideas that bloom in his imagination – from blueprints of machines that will never be built to number puzzles that become his anchor. In secret, in front of a small flickering screen, he follows Hapoel Tel Aviv, tying his red heart to a place he can never reach.

None of them knows yet that the coming years will tear their world to pieces. They will have to choose between hatred and reconciliation, between running away and facing reality, between survival and the belief that something beyond blood and smoke is still possible.

This is not only their story – it is ours. The story of a generation that watches catastrophes through screens but lives them in its own flesh. Three young people who, instead of growing up free, had to grow up between walls, checkpoints and hatreds, joined by a thin red thread: football, love, and the search for freedom in a world drifting ever further from the simplest idea of all – to be human.

Each season of this book is a year of our recent history. Each chapter captures a moment when the world shifted on its axis – a pandemic and wars, politics and assassinations, networks and disconnection. And at the centre: three young people who only want to live, divided by walls and borders, and bound together by shared dreams of football, of freedom, and of a future that keeps getting harder to imagine.