Times of Israel – Yuval Raphael is focused on the music – even if she’s the only one.
When the young singer takes the Eurovision stage in Basel, Switzerland, next week, she’s expected to face protests, jeers and lofted Palestinian flags from Israel critics unhappy with the country’s ongoing participation in the annual song contest. But she asserts that she is not letting it affect her.
“I’m 100 percent focused on the music, I’m 100 percent focused on my song,” Raphael told The Times of Israel in a sit-down interview last month in south Tel Aviv. “There are things that I can control and things that I can’t control. Ultimately, there’s no point investing energy in something I can’t control… the most important thing to me is to bring honor to my country and do the best I can.”
The 24-year-old from Ra’anana was unknown in Israel until she won the Hakochav Haba (Rising Star) reality TV contest earlier this year, awarding her the honour of representing Israel at the Eurovision.
The win marked an unthinkable milestone for a singer who a little over a year earlier had barely escaped the Hamas massacre at the Nova music festival near the Gaza border on October 7, 2023, hiding for hours under dead bodies inside a bomb shelter until she was finally rescued.
There’s little doubt that Raphael – who will bring her powerhouse vocals to the haunting ballad New Day Will Rise in Basel – won the Israeli public’s heart in part due to her unimaginable story of survival.
But amid the controversy of Israel’s participation in the contest and the Eurovision organisers’ insistence that the contest be free from even a hint of geopolitics, the Israeli delegation is being exceptionally careful not to connect Raphael’s experience to her performance, nor the song itself to the October 7 attack or the ongoing war. (Israel was forced to rewrite last year’s song when it was deemed too political.)
Reporters were told not to ask the singer about anything political, nor to request she recount her horrifying experience at Nova.
Back in January, before she’d been selected to compete at the Eurovision, Raphael said in an interview that her near-death experience pushed her to pursue a musical career and to audition for the reality competition, after years of fearing she wasn’t good enough.
“I went through a situation of death and I flipped it to start living the life I want, as much as possible,” she told Israel Hayom at the time. “When I was there [in the bomb shelter] I realised that everything could be over in a moment, and you don’t want your life to end without experiencing it. Suddenly the fear of failure was no longer a fear but a privilege.”
Asked in April about her decision to pursue music for the first time after surviving the massacre, Raphael avoided drawing a link.
“I wanted it my whole life, I dreamed of being a singer and an actress my whole life,” she told The Times of Israel. “True, I was very afraid and I always kept it behind closed doors. But even behind closed doors I always imagined myself on a huge stage or at my own concert.”
This year, said Raphael, “I felt like I really want to give my dreams a chance. To go and do what I love most in the world, and that’s to sing.”
While she still fears failure, she said, she told herself that “there are always fears, particularly if it’s something we want to achieve, there’s always a fear of failure. But I realised that I don’t need to stop being afraid in order to try something.”
New Day Will Rise is the first song Raphael has recorded professionally, written by Keren Peles.
The lyrics are chiefly in English, with some French sprinkled in and a Hebrew line taken from the Song of Songs.
The chorus – “New day will rise, life will go on/ Everyone cries, don’t cry alone/ Darkness will fade, all the pain will go by/ But wе will stay, even if you say goodbye” – has been widely interpreted within Israel as a reference to overcoming the devastation of October 7 and the ensuing war, but officially the song is simply about “hope for better days,” according to Israel’s Kan public broadcaster.
“From the first moment I heard the song, I felt that it was sending exactly the message I wanted to send,” said Raphael. The line that stuck out to her the most, she said, was “Everyone cries; don’t cry alone.”
“We all go through hardship,” she said. “We all go through ups and downs in life, and I think that one of the most beautiful things is to deal with it together, to support each other… I hope the message I can send to the world is [one of] hope and unity and love and support.”
From Geneva to Nova to Basel
Born in Pedaya, a central Israel moshav, in 2000 Raphael and her family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, when she was 6, and stayed there for three years. That makes the upcoming trip to Basel a homecoming of sorts for the young singer.
The French passage in New Day Will Rise nods at her connection to Switzerland, as well as to Eurovision’s second official language.
“[Switzerland] holds a really, really big place in my heart,” she said. “It was my home as a child… it was three short years but three very significant years.” For those few years, she said, “I would think and dream in French… it was my primary language.”
Upon returning, she and her family settled in Ra’anana, a well-to-do town north of Tel Aviv, where she grew up, focusing her high school studies on theatre and dance. After graduating, she completed her mandatory military service, stationed at security checkpoints around Jerusalem.
On October 7, 2023, Raphael attended the Nova music festival near the Gaza border with friends. When Hamas began firing rockets out of Gaza at 6:29am, she and a friend fled via car, but found their way blocked by an endless line of vehicles. With rockets screaming ceaselessly over the south, they decided to seek safety in a roadside bomb shelter not far from Kibbutz Be’eri.
At 7am, a group of Hamas terrorists found the shelter and opened fire on the dozens of partygoers huddled inside, killing many of them, and wounding Raphael, who had shrapnel lodged in her leg.
“They shot everyone that was in the pathway, and then they came inside and they started shooting everyone inside,” she recounted in a video interview with the Jerusalem Institute of Justice in July 2024. “I looked to my friends, they were alive, and then I looked to my left to the girl that was holding my hand, she was lifeless, she was dead… I looked at my leg and I had this dead body all over my leg.”
She called her father, who urged Raphael to play dead, which she did, throughout the hours and hours in which successive groups of terrorists showed up and opened fire on whoever was left inside, trying to ensure nobody would make it out alive.
“I started asking myself when is this going to end, is this going to end, am I going to die?” she said last year. Later, the terrorists threw grenades inside the shelter: “Every time I opened my eyes, I could see there’s less and less people and I didn’t understand… but now, like, [I realised that] it was because people exploded.”
Ultimately, after eight hours, she was rescued by the father of another partygoer inside the shelter and handed off to Israel Defense Forces troops: “I had to step on top of the dead bodies. I looked up and I saw daylight.”
An ambassador of music
A week after the attack, Raphael did her first interview with Israeli media about her experiences. Within a few months, she was speaking around the world and telling her story, including at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
In Basel, Raphael is taking on a different ambassadorial role, representing Israel musically and trying to share a message of harmony.
“I feel an immense privilege to represent my country,” she said. “It’s a huge honour and a great privilege. What I want most is to bring them as much pride as possible – I want to give the best performance I can, to reach my maximum in order to bring as much honor as I can, and I feel a huge privilege to do so through music, something that is a universal language… that is so positive and enlightening.”
Raphael will take the stage near the end of the second semifinal on May 15 (screening in Australia on SBS from 5am on Friday May 16), hoping to win one of 10 spots to advance to the final two days later.
Oddsmakers have her positioned in fifth place, a prediction that most analysts believe is driven more by pro-Israel sympathy than the music. Last year, a swell of pro-Israel voters pushed Eden Golan and her ditty Hurricane to second place in the public vote and fifth overall in the contest.
“I get messages from around the world,” said Raphael. “Support from Switzerland and support from many other places, there’s an outpouring of love, and it warms my heart to receive it,” she said, noting also reaction videos posted online where people “are crying and emotional from the song and connected to the lyrics.”
But she knows she will also face a tide of Israel critics rooting for her to fail. Ahead of last year’s competition, many artists and participating public broadcasters called for Israel to be barred over its war against Hamas in Gaza, pointing in part to the suspension of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, but the European Broadcasting Union rejected the comparison and said Israel would be allowed to compete.
Similar sentiments abound this year, with the Spanish public broadcaster calling for Israel’s inclusion to be “debated” and thousands signing a petition in Finland demanding the Jewish state be banned from the contest. In a change to the longstanding practice of banning flags from non-competing countries, spectators this year will be allowed to wave any flags not banned by Swiss law — which includes the Palestinian flag — in the arena during the contest.
Raphael dismissed the predictable torrent of online hate aimed at her as “background noise,” repeating that she is “so, so focused on this thing, that I feel like nothing can throw me off.”
Her team, she said, “is handling everything that needs to be handled so that I can be 100 percent focused on what matters most. Ultimately we’re coming to sing, we’re coming to open our hearts.”
Last year, Golan — who will return this year to award Israel’s jury points during the live grand final on May 17 (screening in Australia on SBS from 5am on Monday May 18)— faced loud boos during her performance and was largely confined to her hotel room due to threats against her and the Israeli delegation.
Raphael said she has talked with Golan about what to expect at the contest and how to deal with the unparalleled experience.
“We’ve spoken, mostly because it was nice for me to have another person who can share with me the same feelings of preparing for this year and being 100 percent in it,” she said. “It’s nice to talk with someone who experienced the same thing and knows what it is to invest 100 percent of yourself.”
Throughout the interview, Raphael stayed on message, responding to questions about anti-Israel provocations or calls for boycotts by saying that she is only focused on the music. But asked if she had any final thoughts, she answered straight away:
“I want to say that what is really, really important to me is the hostages,” she said. “They should have already been home a long time ago, and they need to be returned home now.”
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