Thank you for being here, thank you for helping us report a story that is unlike any other

story we have done on this show. I was hesitant to do this episode not because I didn't think it was

like genuinely genuinely fascinating, but because I'm always mindful of the ways in which sometimes

you know sports outlets they just want to shoehorn sports until like the serious news story

and sometimes it just feels both flimsy and forced in terms of the connection that they're drawing.

This one though does not feel that way to me. I've reported on the way the sports and

politics interact for a long time and just for me as someone trying to understand the news,

you know I've always felt like it's a way to get closer to the way people actually interact

with the news. Yes, with this one with Israel and this these soccer teams that we're going to

talk about it's just what was on my mind. Okay, so this has been on my mind for a very long time

now this basic dilemma. What are we supposed to do on our show which is technically a sports show

about the biggest story in the world? We are a newsroom I say this tongue in cheekly sometimes

and I wanted to actually think about how we're supposed to touch the thing that pretty much nobody

if they don't have to wants to touch in public and I get why. This is the most generous version

of this motive I suppose but lots of people just don't know enough. It is a complicated story,

it is sad, it is controversial in the most obvious ways and so I get it but I've been reading

the work of Amos Bar Shad for more than a decade now. Amos is a writer who is at Grandland,

the Washington Post, the New York Times magazine, all these places and he is now working for the

lever an independent reader supported news site at levernews.com where you can go read a companion

version of the story that we assigned Amos to report for us here today because of all the topics

he has covered. The one that stuck out to me ever since I first read it his reporting from there

10 years ago was Israel and specifically it was about the Israeli government

...