Raphael was one of several participants on the selection show, called “Rising Star,” and received national acclaim for her performances of Abba’s “Dancing Queen” and Sam Smith’s “Writing’s On The Wall.” Israeli songwriters will now have until March to write an original song for her to perform at Eurovision, taking place in Basel, Switzerland, in May of this year.
The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual event in which participating countries – most of which are from Europe, but also include outliers such as Australia and Israel – send performers to sing original songs and a panel of experts, along with an audience vote, crowns a winner. The event is considered to have significant prestige and star-making abilities, as many past winners have gone on to enjoy global career success.
Last year’s Eurovision contest – held in Malmo, Sweden, a city with a significant Islamic population – was marred by months of protests against Israel’s self-defense operations in response to the October 7 attack. Swedish artists demanded the ouster of Israel’s contestant, signer Eden Golan, and fellow contestants disparaged, “bullied,” and otherwise ostracized her at the event. The Israeli delegation complained of ill-treatment but Golan nonetheless obtained an impressive fifth-place result; Israel came in second place in the public vote to Croatia and defeated the ultimate winner, Switzerland.
Raphael, this year’s winner, arrived at the selection contest after over a year of processing intense trauma following her survival at the Hamas attack. Hamas terrorists killed an estimated 1,200 people on October 7, the vast majority of them unarmed civilians, many in their homes and sleeping when terrorists entered residential communities and slaughtered people. At the Nova music festival, terrorists stormed the grounds and engaged in widespread atrocities including torture, executions, and gang rape. Witnesses later recalled seeing terrorists gang-rape victims and execute them during the rape. A report published in February by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI) described acts of torture and mutilation at the music festival:
Many of the rapes were carried out as a group, with the participation of violent terrorists. Often, the rape was perpetrated in front of an audience – partners, family, or friends – in a manner intended to increase the pain and humiliation of all present. Hamas terrorists hunted young women and men who fled the Nova festival, and according to testimonies, dragged them by their hair amid screams. The actions targeted women, girls, and men. In most cases, the victims were killed after or even during the rape. […]
Many of the bodies of sexual crime victims were found bound and shackled. The genitals of both women and men were brutally mutilated, and sometimes weapons were inserted into them. The terrorists did not stop at shooting; they also cut and mutilated sexual organs and other body parts with knives.
Raphael was one of over 40 people who fled into a bomb shelter near the festival grounds and hid under a pile of bodies, pretending to be dead, until Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops rescued her.
“Out of more than 40 people packed inside the shelter, only 11 emerged alive. Raphael said she still has shrapnel from the attack embedded in her head and leg,” the Times of Israel recalled.
“I want to tell them the story of the country, of what I went through, of what others went through,” Raphael said prior to her performance, explaining her reasons for competing. “I want to tell the story, but not from a place of seeking pity. I want it to be from a place of standing strong in the face of this, and in the face of the boos I’m 100% sure will come from the crowd.”
Prior to seeking a place in the song contest, Raphael represented the victims of the October 7 attack at a United Nations event in March.
“I am not here today to make a political statement,” she told the notoriously anti-Israel U.N. Human Rights Council at the time. “I am here today to open my heart to you all on behalf of the 364 souls brutally murdered during the Nova festival. On October 7, I was with my friends at the Nova music festival, five kilometers away from the border of Gaza.”
“Trapped and fearing for my life, I witnessed unspeakable horrors – friends and strangers alike were injured and killed in front of my eyes. When the bodies of those murdered fell on us, I understood that hiding under them was the only way I could survive the nightmare,” she narrated.
Raphael will not be allowed to perform a song specifically about the October 7 massacres, as the Eurovision song contest maintains a strict “no politics” rule about the contents of the participating compositions. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which administers the contest, forced 2024 Israeli contestant Eden Golan to change the lyrics to her song, originally titled “October Rain,” on the grounds that it too explicitly referred to the slaughter.
The EBU reportedly found the lyric, “they were all good children, each one of them” – a reference to Hamas’s child victims – as particularly offensive to the “no politics” rule.
“October Rain” was rewritten as “Hurricane” and maintained only vague references to a tragedy.
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