Israeli singer Yuval Raphael at ESC: The Fight of the Survivors

There are still a few months until this year’s ESC final, which will take place from May 10th to 17th in Basel. But there is already a very special story about this event, which is decidedly not political, but is a political issue year after year. At the final of the Israeli ESC casting show “Hakochav Haba” on Wednesday evening in Tel Aviv, singer Yuval Raphael, who is no more a musician than the other three co-finalists Daniel Weiss, Valeri Hamati and Red Band and Moran Aharoni, won outside Israel is known.

Raphael became famous for a completely different reason, which is a terrible one: Yuval Raphael survived the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023 after attending the Nova festival. “I witnessed unspeakable horrors – friends and strangers injured and killed before my eyes,” she told the UN’s Jerusalem Institute of Justice in Geneva in 2024. “As the bodies of the murdered fell on us, I realized that the only way to survive the nightmare was to hide among them.”

Raphael was hiding in a roadside bunker with about fifty other young people. Groups of Hamas terrorists came one after another and shot into the bunker to make sure that everyone was dead. She hid among the corpses after her father advised her over the phone to play dead. Of the people in the bunker, only eleven or twelve survived. “I can’t explain how heavy a body becomes when it’s dead.” She was finally freed by Israeli troops after eight hours.

Raphael, who was born in 2000 and comes from Ra’anana, a suburb of Tel Aviv, only began her singing career after the terrible events. For her, singing and publicly recounting her survival and the events of October 7th are, if nothing else, therapeutic measures to help her cope with the trauma of that day.

Raphael expects boos in Basel

At the ESC contest in Tel Aviv, she sang, among other things, a cover version of “Anyone”, a song by the American singer Demi Lovato, and one of Abba’s smash hit “Dancing Queen”. After her victory was confirmed, Raphael sang “Dancing Queen” one more time with an Israeli flag wrapped around her body, dedicating the piece to “all the angels murdered at the Nova Festival and the others murdered.” Including the father of her fellow competitor Daniel Weiss.

What Raphael also said in an interview before the final: “Music is one of the most important parts of my healing process.” And, with regard to Basel and the ESC audience in Europe, as she had done very impressively in Geneva and elsewhere in front of other auditoriums: “I would like to tell them the story of the country and what I went through what others have been through. But I don’t want to tell you this from a position of pity. But from a position where I am strong in the face of this situation and in the face of the boos that I am 100 percent sure will come from the crowd.”

There were anti-Srael demonstrations in Malmö

Yuval Raphael is alluding to the events at the ESC in Malmö a year ago. At that time there were numerous protests against the performance of the Israeli singer Eden Golan because of the Gaza war; Over ten thousand people came to various demonstrations under the slogan “Exclude Israel from Eurovision” in Malmö, the city with the largest Palestinian community in Sweden.

On posters, the demonstrators described the Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip as “genocide”. But even when Golan sang her song “Hurrican” in the hall and thus reached fifth place, boos rang out throughout the audience.

Weeks before Golan’s performance, the original title of her song was a controversial topic. It should actually be called “October Rain” in reference to October 7th. But the European Broadcasting Union saw this title as a political statement that was not permitted for the ESC.

It has not been decided which song Yuval Raphael will sing in Basel; nor whether she will even end up in the final, because she first has to qualify in a semi-final.

“It’s a way to defend yourself against them,” Yuval Raphael said back then in Geneva. One can assume that she also sees her participation in the ESC in Basel as a kind of fight – so that a massacre like the one on October 7th may never happen again.