In every sport played with a ball, football, baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey (the puck counts), golf, volleyball, handball, the oldest piece of coaching wisdom is also the best: “keep your eye on the ball.” Look away for a moment, and the game slips through your fingers.
Is Israel keeping its eye on the ball? Sadly, no. And the ball here is not hard to spot. It is the war. Israel is fighting Iran and its three proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and a nation in that position has precisely one thing to watch. Yet, its gaze keeps wandering off.
Look at the evidence. With the country at war, an Israeli singer spent the season touring Europe. Here is a description from the coverage of that event: “Israeli singer Noam Bettan represented Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 in Vienna, finishing second, behind Bulgaria’s DARA.”
One man and a microphone, you might say. No big deal. Surely, he can be spared. Except he did not travel alone. He brought a support staff of some three dozen Israelis: the state broadcaster’s delegation, managers, crew from the reality show that crowned him, backup dancers, security, and our personal favorite, specialists hired to boo him during rehearsals so he could practice singing through a hostile crowd. Read that again. A country under fire flew people to Vienna to jeer at a tenor. You need a professional heckler now? Who knew.
Exhibit two is the World Cup. Israel’s opening match against Ireland had to be shifted to neutral ground because Dublin could not be trusted to host it without the protests boiling over. The team and entourage, players, coaches, assorted staff, came to roughly 50, and that is before the security detail, which no Israeli squad has gone without since Munich in 1972.
Put the two together, and you have at least a hundred fit, mostly military-aged Israelis abroad, crooning and chasing a ball, not the right ball either, while the sirens go off back home.
Now, for the question that answers itself. Did Britain, France, the United States, or the Soviet Union dispatch singers and footballers on European tours between 1939 and 1945? They did not. Did Germany, Italy, or Japan? Nor did they. Did Israel do anything of the sort in 1948, with the outcome genuinely in doubt, or in 1956, or in 1967? It did not. Nations that intend to win wars do not run talent contests or sports events in the middle of them.
Here is the deeper trouble. A country reveals how seriously it takes a threat against it on the basis of what it is willing to give up to defend itself. Forgo nothing, carry on with the songs and the matches as though it were any other year, and you have told the world, and worse, told yourself, that the emergency is not quite real. But it is real. It is indeed real. It is very real. The ball is very much in play, and Israel keeps looking everywhere but directly at it.
So, does the Israeli military want to win this war thing, or not? Israel would be well advised to pick up its toys, its microphones, its soccer balls, and take them all home. Then, when this war is won, and Israel is, finally, safe, or at least lots safer, then and only then restart gadding about the world in such a manner.
POETICA JUSTICE: WHY THIS JEW-HATING COFFEE SHOP OWNER DESERVES A ZIONIST THANK YOU
But foreign adventures are not the only example. Recently, this country held a Gay Pride march. Nowhere else in the Middle East is anything like that tolerated. Gay people are, instead, put to death for the mere crime of adult sexual preference. The Hebrew state is to be congratulated for joining other civilized nations in allowing such occurrences.
But in the midst of a war? C’mon, keep your eyes on the ball, Israel. The important ball. Not the soccer ball. Hint: the war.
Walter E. Block is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar endowed chairman and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Oded Kohn Faran holds degrees in law from Sha’arei Mishpat College in Israel. He is the general director of Faran & Co. International Translations and lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.