Israel’s Eurovision Song About Love Is Being Met with Hate

Yuval Raphael, the 24-year-old Nova survivor representing Israel in this week’s Eurovision contest, shares a beautiful song about love, loss, and renewal.  Many Eurovision fans are ignoring her message and heaping hatred on Yuval’s shoulders instead, calling for her to be banned.

Surviving the Nova Massacre

“Hang up the phone and play dead.”  That advice from Yuval’s father saved her life.

On October 7, 2023, Yuval was attending the Nova music festival in the Re’im Forest, an idyllic wooded area near Gaza.  When Hamas terrorists invaded Israel early on that morning, the festival-goers were among their first targets. They shot, raped, tortured, kidnapped, and burned to death as many people as they could.  Ultimately 364 young festival-goers were massacred.

Yuval and her friends crammed into a fortified bus shelter with about 50 other people.

“The next thing I remember,” Yuval later recalled in formal testimony to the UN, “is that…one girl was just grabbing my hand really hard.  She was really scared and I was like ‘everything’s going to be okay.’”  Within minutes a Hamas terrorist stood at the entrance to the shelter and sprayed the inside with bullets.  Bodies crumpled to the floor.  “I turned around to the girl who was holding my hand,” Yuval recalled, “and she was no longer with us.  She was dead.”

Terrified, Yuval phoned her dad again, telling that many people inside the shelter had been murdered.  Yuval was pinned down with corpses lying on top of her. Her father told her to pretend that they were dead. All day long terrorists kept returning to the shelter and spraying the inside with bullets.

Suffering from a serious head wound and a broken leg, Yuval was inside the shelter for eight hours.

Finally in the afternoon, after lying underneath corpses, Yuval and the few other survivors from the shelter were rescued. Out of about 50 people inside the bus shelter, only 11 survived.

A New Day Will Rise

Yuval has always loved singing. After the massacre, she entered Israel’s popular Hakochav Haba (“Future Star”) television talent contest; the winner gets to represent Israel in the Eurovision contest. She dedicated her singing to “all the angels” who were murdered at the Nova festival. “Music is one of the strongest ingredients in my healing process,” she explained during the show’s finals. Yuval won.

She’ll be singing a new song titled A New Day Will Rise, written by the well-known Israeli songwriter Keren Peles, that conveys Yuval’s message of remembering and honoring the generation of youth Israel has lost. The song is sung in English, French, and Hebrew, the three languages Yuval is fluent in.

The song mourns those we loved and lost: “New day will rise / Life will go on / Everyone cries / Don’t cry alone / Darkness will fade / All the pain will go by / But we will stay / Even if you say goodbye.”  The song’s Hebrew lines quote the Song of Songs: “Vast floods cannot quench love / Nor rivers drown it” (Song of Songs 8:7).

Screenshot from Yuval’s music video

In her official music video, she sings the stirring anthem surrounded by friends in a wooded area that resembles the Re’im forest.  She and her friends walk through a field covered with red kalanitim, the red poppy-like bloom that’s the national flower of Israel, a symbol of remembrance for those who fell in battle.  In Israel, kalanitim have also become a symbol too for remembering those murdered in Hamas’ attacks.

Banning Yuval

Yuval’s moving song would fits perfectly with this year’s Eurovision theme: “Unity Shapes Love.”  She’s explained, “From the moment I heard Keren Peles’s song, it captured exactly the message that I want to share about resilience and unity.  The song is strong and is powerful, but also soft and loving. When I sing it I feel secure and open-hearted. All its lines are strong but, ‘Everyone cries, don’t cry alone,’ is beyond powerful. We all go through hard times, and because doing so is a shared experience, supporting and loving each other is crucial.”

But instead of embracing Yuval, many Eurovision participants and fans are directing hatred against her and Israel.

Several national broadcasters – including Iceland’s, Ireland’s, Spain’s and Slovenia’s – are calling for Yuval to be kicked out of this year’s Eurovision.  Twenty six members of the European Union Parliament issued a letter demanding that Yuval be removed from the contest.  (The letter blames Israel for fighting in Gaza without once even mentioning Hamas.)  Over 70 former Eurovision singers signed a petition insisting: “Israel must be excluded from Eurovision.”

Yuval has met with Eden Golan, Israel’s 2024 entry in the Eurovision contest, to discuss strategies for surviving the week-long contest.  Despite making it to the final top five in last year’s Eurovision, Eden faced death threats and hatred from fans and her fellow contestants.  Switzerland’s winning 2024 singer boycotted a Eurovision event rather than participate alongside Eden. She was also loudly booed every time she performed on stage, both during rehearsals and during the contest itself.

Recent events indicate that Yuval might face a similarly hostile environment: last week, Switzerland’s national fencing team turned their backs on their Israeli counterparts after Israel won the European Championships.

Screenshot for Yuval’s video

Amidst this surge of hatred, Israel’s National Security Council took the unusual step of warning Israelis traveling to watch the contest live in Basel, Switzerland not to display and Jewish symbols in public. Fans are being warned to avoid showing Israeli flags or even Stars of David, lest it lead to attacks from anti-Israel activists.

Supporting Israel – and Love

Eurovision 2025 starts on May 13 and concludes on May 17.  With 37 nations participating and an audience of over 150 million people, it’s a way to showcase the incredible beauty and resilience of Yuval Rafael and her entire generation of Israelis.

A New Day Will Rise is a powerful answer to the hatred that Hamas and their apologists spout. Let’s cheer on Yuval and Israel, and draw on the timeless words in her song: Vast floods cannot quench love.

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