This Sunday, March 9, Israel released its entry to the Eurovision, Europe’s biggest song contest and televised event. Nova festival survivor Yuval Raphael, Israel’s representative chosen in a televised singing competition called “The Next Star… to the Eurovision,” will sing “New Day Will Rise,” a ballad reminiscent of the French chansons that are still widely beloved in Switzerland, where the competition will take place this spring. (The contest’s location changes every year — it’s almost always the home country of the previous year’s winner, and last year’s was Switzerland’s Nemo).
The song, written by Keren Peles, who wrote Israel’s entry last year, “Hurricane,” even has a line in French, a language Raphael learned when her family lived in Switzerland in her youth. The song echoes others like Jacques Brel’s dramatic “Ne Me Quitte Pas” and features a line from what I would call the original love song, King David’s Song of Songs: “Vast floods cannot quench love, nor rivers drown it.” It is the tune’s only Hebrew line.
The song is currently number three in the betting odds to win the contest, which will be held on May 17, 2025, with semifinals taking place on May 13 and 15. To qualify to participate in the main competition, Israel will have to place in the top 10 in one of those semifinals.
In the music video, Raphael, 24, can be seen with a group of young people driving through a verdant scenery to a picnic. It’s a reminder of the way she and countless other young people drove through nature to the Nova Festival in October of 2023, hoping to dance and celebrate their love of the outdoors and their passion for music. Instead, 360 of them were brutally slaughtered by Hamas in that day’s terrible attack, with dozens taken into Gaza as hostages. Some, like Hersh Goldberg-Polin, were murdered in Hamas tunnels in the strip.
Raphael survived the attack by hiding under piles of bodies and since then has dealt with her trauma through music and advocacy for her country, two passions she’s hoping to combine on the Eurovision stage where last year’s representative, Eden Golan, sang through jeers, hostility and threats. In the video, Raphael also lies on the ground and looks at the heavens, in the same way she did that day in a shelter.
The song is about moving on and healing, while also acknowledging and living with trauma and pain.
“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,” Raphael sings in the chorus. “Even if you say goodbye,” she sings, as the young people around her dance together, play guitar, fall on the ground and run through a green field.
