Imagine booing a survivor of a fascist attack. People actually did that this week. Pro-Palestine activists heckled and insulted a young woman who survived Hamas’s anti-Semitic butchery of 7 October 2023 by playing dead under a pile of bodies. Take a minute to consider the depravity of this, the sheer inhumanity of tormenting a woman who experienced such terror.
It was a spectacle of cruelty masquerading as protest
The woman is Yuval Raphael. She’s the 24-year-old singer who’s representing Israel at Eurovision. The last big music event she attended was the Nova festival in the desert of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. What she witnessed there almost defies belief. Mass murder. Heaps of corpses. The infliction of the most unforgiving violence on young people whose only ‘crime’ was that they were Jews in Israel. It is a miracle she survived.
In a normal world, in a world that was not so riddled with the sickness of Israelophobia as ours is, Ms Raphael would have been given a hero’s welcome in Europe. She’d have been celebrated as a symbol of Jewish defiance, of Jewish survival in the face of the armies of anti-Semites that are hell-bent on destroying this valiant people. Not in 2025, though. The moment Ms Raphael touched down in Switzerland for Eurovision, the boos rang out.
The taunting of the terror victim really kicked off during the Eurovision parade in the host city of Basel, where contestants waved to onlookers from trams and buses. Angry activists lined the route to jeer at the Israeli. They waved the Palestine flag, the banner under which more than a thousand of Ms Raphael’s fellow Jews were slaughtered 18 months ago. It was a spectacle of cruelty masquerading as protest.
Some spat in her direction. One man in a keffiyeh even made a throat-slitting gesture towards her. Israel’s public broadcaster has filed a complaint about this incident with the Swiss police. It heaps shame on Europe that a young Jew who survived a neo-fascist carnival of murder should now have violent threats made against her here. What was that gesture-making man saying exactly? That he’d like to finish what Hamas started? It is beyond grim.
Raphael was booed during her rehearsals too. She says she knew she’d be booed and even ‘practised’ for it. How awful is that? That in the 21st century a young woman from the Jewish State is forced to prep herself for public jeering? It’s like when black civil-rights activists in the American South would train for the inevitable roughing they’d receive when they defiantly sat in the ‘Whites Only’ section of a diner.
Let’s leave to one side the daft debate over whether Israel should be allowed to compete in Eurovision. (My view: of course it should.) Let’s just focus on the fact that a survivor of 7 October is being mocked and demonised in Europe. Imagine how dangerously adrift from basic decency you would need to be to taunt a victim of fascist terror. If this persecution of Ms Raphael doesn’t open people’s eyes to the hatred and hysteria of Israelophobia, nothing will.
This is a woman who witnessed the most grotesque outrages against her people. When the massacre at Nova started, she took refuge in a concrete bomb shelter along with 50 others. Hamas, determined to kill as many Jews as possible, repeatedly fired into the packed shelter and threw hand grenades in too. Raphael survived under the crush of dead bodies. She laid there for eight hours. She was one of only 11 people to make it out of the shelter alive.
It was an act of racist savagery, echoing the pogroms of mid-20th century Europe when Jews were likewise forced into buildings or town squares and massacred. And now one of the survivors of this modern-day pogrom is booed. She’s gobbed at. She’s threatened. To my mind this is every bit as vile as if an elderly survivor of Kristallnacht or the death camps were to be harangued and menaced on the streets of Europe.
Surely everyone can now see the bigotry that courses through the veins of anti-Israel activism. Europe’s gleeful persecutors of Ms Raphael are essentially rubbing the salt of Israelophobia into the wounds left by the pogrom she survived. They are Hamas’s little helpers, continuing its sick mission of hunting down the young Jews of the Nova festival, only this time for humiliation rather than death.
Even in the face of all this, Ms Raphael seems incredibly upbeat. She is admirably free of self-pity and is determined to do her best at the Eurovision final tomorrow night. I’ll be voting for Israel, because what better embodies the human spirit than a young woman coming through such horrors to sing her heart out on stage?
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