The boos started almost immediately in Basel (the same city, ironically, where Herzl held the First Zionist Congress in 1897). As Yuval Raphael stepped onto the Eurovision stage last year, in May 2025, portions of the crowd made clear that she was not welcome. Flags waved. The room echoed with the jeers with which we’re all now familiar. The point of the protesters was clear — no one from Israel was welcome.
It was ugly, just as it was this year when Noam Bettan sang and was booed and still came in second. Strangely, though, it was also, by any reasonable measure, not even close to the worst of what the still very young Yuval Raphael had endured.
Israelis have long “known” about what happened to her on October 7, but now she’s discussed it in detail, in an extensive interview with Channel 11 (the interview is in Hebrew, but you can set your browser to provide English subtitles—more on all that below).
Eighteen months earlier, on the morning of October 7, 2023, Raphael was doing what 24-year-olds do and what thousands of other Israelis were doing that dawn. She was dancing at a music festival — the Nova festival, in the fields near Re’im, not far from the Gaza border. Then, as we all know too well by now, the rockets started. She and a friend ran, found a roadside bomb shelter, squeezed in alongside dozens of others who had the same desperate idea.
But the terrorists, of course, found them and opened fire. They threw grenades. Then they came back and opened fire again. Raphael survived, but in the sort of way that haunts survivors for the rest of their lives: she lay still, beneath the bodies of the dead, and did not move. For hours. When it was over, she and roughly ten others walked out. Dozens did not.
It might seem obvious, but the survivors deserve that we remind ourselves:
“Sh/e wasn’t injured and s/he wasn’t kidnapped” in no way means “S'/he’s OK.”
This is a country of amputees, of broken bodies, of shattered families, of exhausted soldiers … and of resilience that’s simply impossible to describe. Hear Yuval Raphael’s interview, and then ask yourself if you think Israel has what it takes to survive.
Yuval Raphael grew up in Ra’anana, north of Tel Aviv, the kind of Israeli kid who listened to Led Zeppelin and Beyoncé with equal passion, who loved theater and studied Arabic in school, who then — like most Israelis her age — served in the IDF. She was stationed at checkpoints around Jerusalem. Then she came home, and she was quiet about her singing, until she wasn’t.
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She entered Ha-Kokhav Ha-Ba — Israel’s version of “A Star is Born” — and won. She had never recorded professionally before. “New Day Will Rise” was her first song. It was written for her, lyrics in English and French and Hebrew, with a well known verse from the biblical book, The Song of Songs, woven in.
Here’s the song, and her performance.
If you listened to “New Day Will Rise” or watched her performance without knowing what she’s been through, you might think, “nice song.” Or you could think whatever you think.
But if you do know about her past, then hearing her sing about hope is an entirely different experience.
Kan 11 put a short clip of her interview on Hebrew social media. to which we’ve added subtitles (the clip is here on Instagram and here on Facebook, though the FB link doesn’t always work).
The full interview is below. It’s in Hebrew, but if you use the settings on your browser correctly, it can auto-generate English subtitles.
In Chrome, it looks like this:
This is the link to the full interview:
In Basel, when the hall dripped (at least partially) with Israel-hatred, Raphael did not flinch. It’s been said in the Israeli media (though I obviously can’t vouch for the veracity) that she had spent months rehearsing with recordings of booing crowds playing in the background, preparing herself for precisely what unfolded. If that’s true, it worked.
Even if she didn’t “win,” she won. The judges gave her second place. The public — the ordinary people watching from their living rooms across Europe — voted her first.
Some things, it turns out, are still recognizable across borders. Some things, it turns out, can still be heard through the chorus of hate.
