Israelis came to the World Cup in Qatar expecting to find a new atmosphere of friendliness and warmth among Arab fans. Instead, they found that a handful of dictators in the UAE and Bahrain could not change the hearts and minds of the people of not only Qatar, but the entire Arab world, including the UAE and Bahrain.
The support at the World Cup for the rights of the Palestinian people, and the concomitant disdain for Israelis who thought that the apartheid policies that they have, through electoral processes, installed and reinforced, was clear and very well publicized throughout the World Cup. But it is worth noting that Israelis believed it would be otherwise, that they bought the nonsense that the Israeli and American governments and too many leaders of Jewish institutions were and still are peddling; that the Abraham Accords, a deal that was nothing more than a mutual benefit pact between apartheid and autocracy, had magically brought about the acceptance by the Arab world of Israel’s dispossession of and denial of rights to Palestinians.
I take a deep dive into this in this piece for Mondoweiss.