The cabals around the ESC final in Malmö 2024 are hardly refurbished, the anti-Israeli protests on the streets and also hardly faded out within the candidate table. There is another escalation with the once harmless European “Schlager competition”.
With 24-year-old Yuval Raphael, the winner of the 11th season of the singing contest “Rising Star” was chosen to represent Israel at the ESC final in Basel.
Raphael is a survivor of the Israeli Nova music festival, at which hundreds of party people were killed by Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023.
The singer selected by the local broadcaster Keshet 12 is a classic discovery, a vocalist without professional experience. Their victorious set consisted of versions of Abba’s “Dancing Queen” and Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall” from the James Bond film “Specter”
Wicked under corpse
The 2018 ESC winner Netta and Eden Golan, where the protest spirits ignited in 2024, came to the ESC final through this state contest.
As the US specialist magazine “Hollywood Reporter” reports, not only their vocal arts played a role. To harmonize in her lecture, she told how she survived the massacre on the Gaza area of the Nova Music Festival.
Raphael managed to flee protection to a public bunker on the edge of Kibbutz Be’eri. There she hid in the back corner of the tight concrete construction, trapped under corpse.
Yuval Raphael stood dead for around eight hours before being recovered by the father of another festival visitor. This had driven independently into the terrorist zone to save the life of his daughter and others.
In March 2024, she presented her terrible experiences in the name of the Jerusalem Institute of Justice to the UN Human Rights Council: “We thought that the terrorists would take the corpses with them. It was not clear to us that it was due to the grenades that chased their bodies in the air. “
In a first comment on her nomination, Raphael said: “Music is such a wonderful way to keep a message on and compete at this moment feels just right”.
You don’t have to be a prophet to expect a restless climate beyond music at the ESC in Switzerland.