Last night, Spain defeated Argentina to win the World Cup. Ordinarily, for those of us with no national connection to either country, the choice of whom to support would have been gloriously trivial. We might have chosen the team that played more beautiful football, the player we most admired or simply the side whose colours we preferred.

But these are no ordinary times.

Gaza and Palestine have changed the way many of us see the world. It has become a moral prism, refracting our judgments not only about governments and political leaders, but about institutions, universities, media, corporations and public figures. We have watched people and institutions we once respected avert their eyes from the destruction of a people. We have watched others discover elaborate vocabularies of qualification and equivocation when confronted with horrors that, in another place and against another people, they would have condemned without hesitation.

And we have remembered those who refused to look away.

That is why, last night, I was Spanish.

Of course, a football team is not a government. Spanish footballers are not responsible for the policies of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, any more than Lionel Messi and his teammates are responsible for the politics of Argentinian President Javier Milei.

But sport has never existed in the hermetically sealed apolitical world we sometimes pretend it inhabits. We bring ourselves to sport. We bring our histories, our identities, our sympathies and, inevitably, our moral judgements. We decide whom we want to win for reasons that often have very little to do with formations and statistics.

And so, for many people of conscience, Spain has come to represent something larger.

At a moment when much of the Western political establishment has twisted itself into moral and linguistic........

© Al Jazeera