This year's participation of Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest is political, in the communicative sense of course. But it does not concern LGBTQI+ rights, as one would assume considering the context of this particular pop fiesta, since the Netanyahu-Trump relationship does not allow for such... experiments at the present juncture, which is crucial for the future of the Middle East. The political aspect of the matter concerns the singer Yuval Raphael herself. She is a nice girl, 24 years old, who has suffered the horrific experience of October 7, 2023 as a target of Hamas. She managed to escape under thriller conditions. And now in Basel she will sing on behalf of the Jewish state.
Η Corriere della Sera wrote that Yuval receives various types of insults on social media, because of Gaza of course, which foreshadow her aggressive if not hostile "reception" from the phileomonous public. The Milanese wrote very correctly that if you have been saved from the teeth of Haros in a war episode, well, then there are not many things that can scare you. "Yuval prefers to ignore those who wish her or promise her the worst just because she is Israeli, and she even answers them with "hearts". She says that she is sure that the people will cheer her at Eurovision, but at the same time she declares that she will withstand the boos. And some overt threats, like the one seen in the video below HERE.
At October 7th Yuval was at the concert campsite where Hamas struck, just four kilometers from Gaza. "They had Kalashnikovs, grenades and shouted ''alaahu akbar'' starting the massacre," the Italian recalled. "By nightfall the number of dead at the scene and in the surrounding area had risen to 360. That day, Yuval, under a pile of corpses, pretended for eight hours that she was also killed. That's how she survived." Corriere reported that the young singer, originally from a village near Tel Aviv, had cultivated her voice since she was a little girl, while at the same time studying Arabic and Theater. Of course, she also wore the Israeli "khaki."
The description of how the girl managed to survive in the hell of war is shocking. Yuval hid with other young people, about fifty in total, in a concrete shelter, above ground, on the road, next to a bus stop. Many Israelis were killed in such shelters, after Hamas threw grenades inside. In Yuval's shelter, they started shooting, killing everyone in the front row. They fled, came back, fled again. Yuval came out from under the bodies of her friends as soon as the Hamas had finally left. She called her father.
The young woman has said in her statements that for so many hours covered by the bodies of the killed, she felt paralyzed by the weight: "My knees were melting, my legs were breaking." But when shesubmitted to the UN Human Rights Council, representing her country, recounted her worst moment, her deepest fear: "I thought over and over again that they would return, that my turn was coming too. And as soon as I thought about such things, the pain would go away..." Stepping on the dead, she stepped out into the sunlight. The blue sky that day seemed like an insult to her, she said.
On the official Eurovision website, Yuval appears in a rather ordinary photo by the standards of the contest – her pose is relaxed and her style slightly sexy, her boots are not “military”, but on her black top there is a photo of the excellent Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen and the title of his song “Lover Lover”. Is the pop singer claiming the laurels of serious artistry? Not exactly. This is a targeted reference to the song that (Jewish) Cohen wrote in Sinai, in 1973, when he played for the Israeli army fighting in the Yom Kippur War…
listen up HERE the Israeli entry song for Eurovision & HERE Leonard Cohen song “Lover Lover”