Israel-Gaza War (2023- )

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    Yuval Raphael, Israel’s Eurovision Entrant, Survived the Hamas Attacks of Oct. 7

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    Not long after the attacks, Yuval Raphael said, she resolved to follow her long-held dream of becoming a professional singer.When Hamas attacked the Nova music festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Yuval Raphael went from dancing with friends to hiding in a bomb shelter.After attackers broke into the shelter and started shooting partygoers, Raphael played dead, then lay beneath bodies for eight hours until she was rescued.That experience, Raphael told the Israel Hayom newspaper earlier this year, changed her outlook on life. “When I was there, I realized that everything could be over in a moment, and you don’t want your life to end without experiencing it,” she said. Not long after the attacks, Raphael said, she resolved to follow her long-held dream of becoming a professional singer.Now, Raphael, 24, is representing Israel at Eurovision with “New Day Will Rise,” a ballad in which she sings, over twinkling piano, “New day will rise / Life will go on / Everyone cries / Don’t cry alone.”As Israel’s retaliation to the Oct. 7 attacks grinds on, some Eurovision fans have called on the competition organizers to expel Israel from the contest over the country’s conduct in the war.At last year’s final, some audience members booed Israel’s singer as she performed, though others cheered her. Raphael told the BBC this week that she was expecting a hostile reception during her performance and that she had been rehearsing with distracting sounds playing in the background. Indeed, on Thursday in Basel, a small group of protesters blew whistles and waved flags to disrupt one of Raphael’s public rehearsals.But, she told the broadcaster, she was trying to avoid the furor and stay focused on winning. Eurovision’s slogan is “United by music,” she said, adding, “That’s what we are here for.” More

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      Can Eurovision Avoid Politics in Neutral Switzerland?

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      The competition is run by an opaque Swiss organization that wants to sidestep controversies that could spoil the fun.At the Eurovision Song Contest, one rule stands above all others: no politics.That order is enforced by the competition’s organizer, the European Broadcasting Union, an opaque federation of nearly 70 public service broadcasters, based in Geneva. It scrutinizes performers’ lyrics, their outfits and even their stage props in hopes of bringing some Swiss neutrality to the contest and avoiding anything controversial that could spoil the fun.Yet when the Eurovision final takes place this Saturday on the European Broadcasting Union’s home turf in Basel, Switzerland, politics will still be bubbling in the background, even if the organizers manage to keep such topics off the stage. At a time when the effects of Israel’s war in Gaza are still rippling through cultural life, and Russia and Belarus are pariahs because of the invasion of Ukraine, the question of who gets to compete in Eurovision brings politics to the fore. And the question of what is actually political can be slippery, and one for which the European Broadcasting Union sometimes lacks a consistent answer.In recent weeks, broadcasters in Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have called for a debate on Israel’s participation, rehashing a furor that threatened to overshadow last year’s competition. Before the last final, in Malmo, Sweden, some Eurovision performers signed petitions and made statements calling for Israel’s exclusion because of its actions in Gaza. Some crowd members booed Israel’s singer during the final, though others cheered. Yuval Raphael, representing Israel, at a Eurovision rehearsal in Basel. Broadcasters in Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have called for a debate on Israel’s participation.Alma Bengtsson/EBUEurovision officials responded with a line that the competition has clung to at previous moments of tension: Eurovision, it said, is a contest between broadcasters, not nations. That means a government’s actions should have no bearing on the contest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Why Tot Celebrity Ms. Rachel Waded Into the Gaza Debate

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      Facing criticism, Rachel Accurso defends making the plight of children in Gaza a primary focus on her social media feeds.With her pink headband, denim overalls and permanent smile, Ms. Rachel has become a mainstay in the households of preschool-aged children who are drawn to her good cheer and singalongs. Parents revere her pedagogical practicing of skills like waving, clapping and pronouncing consonants.The former music teacher’s YouTube videos became such a sensation — 14 million subscribers, one billion views — that in January, Netflix began licensing episodes.Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Griffin Accurso, at times presents a different side of herself on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where the content is geared less toward toddlers and more toward their parents. There her millions of followers will also find impassioned videos touching on current events. These focus on the push for universal child care and geopolitical crises that have led to suffering children — above all, the ongoing war in Gaza.In March, for instance, Accurso posted a video of two children watching a Ms. Rachel video amid rubble. The caption read: “My friends Celine and Silia in what used to be their home in Gaza. They deserve to live in a warm, safe home again.”On Monday, Accurso posted to her Instagram account photos of a meeting she said she had last week with Rahaf, a 3-year-old girl from Gaza who lost her legs in an airstrike, and the child’s mother. The meeting was arranged through the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.Last week, Accurso posted to Instagram pictures of meeting with Rahaf, a 3-year-old fan from Gaza who lost her legs to an airstrike.MsRachelWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘No Other Land,’ Whose Politics Deterred Distributors, Wins Best Documentary

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      Accepting the Oscar for best documentary feature on Sunday night, two filmmakers behind “No Other Land,” which chronicles Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the southern West Bank, called on the world to work to help halt the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians, free the remaining Israeli hostages captured in “the crime of Oct. 7” and chart a more equitable path forward for Palestinians.“When I look at Basel, I see my brother,” said Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist and one of the filmmakers, referring to his fellow director, the Palestinian activist Basel Adra, who had just spoken. “But we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws, that destroy lives, that he cannot control.”Adra said that their film “reflects the harsh reality we have been enduring for decades and still resist, as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”The selection of “No Other Land” for best documentary feature represented a landmark and a rebuke. Despite a string of honors and rave reviews, no distributor would pick up this film in the United States, making it nearly impossible for American filmgoers to see it in theaters or to stream it. This shortcoming made “No Other Land” part of a broader trend in recent years in which topical documentaries have struggled to secure distribution.The film is often brutal, featuring disturbing images of razed houses, crying children, bereft mothers and even on-camera shootings. (Israel’s Supreme Court ruled the government has the right to clear the area depicted in the film.) And it entered a perennially supercharged political climate at an especially sensitive moment, debuting within months of Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s response in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.The politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are especially prominent in Hollywood. Last year, the entertainment executive Ari Emanuel, who is Jewish, drew boos after criticizing Israel’s conservative prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while accepting an award from a major Jewish group in Los Angeles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      “No Other Land” Is the Oscar-Nominated Film That No Studio Will Touch

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      “No Other Land,” about the destruction of a village in the occupied West Bank, is one of the year’s most acclaimed films. Still, U.S. studios are unwilling to distribute it.No documentary this season has been more talked about or acclaimed than “No Other Land,” which chronicles the besieged community of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank as Israeli forces demolish residents’ homes and expel families from the land they have lived in for generations, claiming the area is needed for a military training ground.Directed by the Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal alongside the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, “No Other Land” has received critical acclaim and collected many honors on the festival circuit. After winning the best documentary award at its Berlin International Film Festival premiere last February, the film also earned the same prize at the Gotham Awards and from major critics’ groups in New York and Los Angeles. Just weeks ago, it received an Oscar nomination.Still, no American studio has been willing to pick up this hot-button film, even though distributors typically spend this time of year eagerly boasting about their Oscar-nomination tallies.“I still think it’s possible, but we’ll have to see,” Abraham told me last week. “It’s clear that there are political reasons at play here that are affecting it. I’m hoping that at a certain point the demand for the film will become so clear and indisputable that there will be a distributor with the kind of courage to take it on and show it to the audience.”In the meantime, the directors have embarked on a self-distribution plan that has put “No Other Land” into 23 U.S. theaters; on the back of strong box office, it will continue to roll out into additional cities over the coming weeks.Adra and Abraham are not just part of the film’s directing team, but its two primary subjects. The 28-year-old Adra was raised in Masafer Yatta and has been documenting the forced expulsion since he was a teenager. Over the course of the film, he builds a strong but tense bond with Abraham, who lives in Jerusalem but travels frequently to Masafer Yatta to write about the situation there for an Israeli audience.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Festival d’Automne in Paris Honors Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie

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      A retrospective in Paris honors Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué, whose theater works have examined the region’s troubles for decades.The theater-makers Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué have grown accustomed to life in exile. In 2013, the duo, who are creative as well as life partners, left their home country of Lebanon, to settle in Berlin — out of “fatigue,” Majdalanie said recently.The corruption and the frequent crises that rocked the Middle Eastern country had become too draining, she added. “When you see the same problems repeating themselves over and over again, you need distance to find peace,” she said.The move worked — until the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel last year. Israel’s subsequent offensive in Gaza had a devastating knock-on effect on its relations with Lebanon, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.Majdalanie and Mroué, who have long investigated Middle Eastern conflicts onstage, were critical of Israel’s retaliation. That made life uncomfortable in Germany, where many artists who find fault with Israel have, since Oct. 7, faced an increasingly hostile environment and accusations of antisemitism.“Lebanon was home, then Berlin was home for a decade,” Majdalanie said. “Now, every day, we ask ourselves: Where to go now? Because we don’t know where home is anymore.”For the next three months, they will have a temporary refuge in France. Through December, the Festival d’Automne à Paris, a long-running multidisciplinary event, is hosting a retrospective that showcases Majdalanie and Mroué’s longstanding commitment to grappling with contested political narratives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘We Will Dance Again’ Review: Remembering Oct. 7

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      In this documentary by Yariv Mozer, Israelis who attended the Nova music festival near the Gaza border describe how they survived the attack last year.“We Will Dance Again” reconstructs the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 from the perspectives of attendees of the Nova music festival. At least 360 people were killed at the event that was near the border with Gaza, according to Israeli authorities. Directed by Yariv Mozer, this documentary opens with an acknowledgment of the fraught subject matter. “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” the text says. Citing death tolls from both sides of the conflict, it adds, “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”That caveat also hints at why assessing “We Will Dance Again” as a movie is so difficult. Impassioned viewers will undoubtedly have their own opinions, and it would be disingenuous to say that a film released in advance of the attack’s anniversary — and in the middle of an active war — could somehow be seen apart from the divisive politics surrounding the region.Through phone videos, interviews with festivalgoers and, eventually, footage attributed to Hamas fighters, “We Will Dance Again” assembles a timeline of how the attack was experienced at the festival, where people had gathered to attend a multiday rave. Some remember spotting rocket fire as the sun rose on the morning of Oct. 7. “Wow, Lali, there’s fireworks!” one interviewee, Liel Shitrit, known as Lali, quotes a friend as saying. “They really went all out this year!” Soon after, over images of streaks in the sky, we hear an off-camera voice speculate that “the drugs are kicking in.”But the interviewees explain how the reality of the situation became clear. As the film’s narrative unfolds, we hear from witnesses like Noa Beer, who recounts a harrowing escape by car and a call to the police, who she says didn’t yet understand the situation. Elinor Gambarian, a single mother, hid inside a refrigerator.Two of the interviewees, Eitan Halley and Ziv Abud, recall a grenade attack on a roadside shelter where they had taken refuge; both commend efforts by Aner Shapira, who was killed, to toss back grenades before they exploded. Halley says he saw Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage by Hamas and whose body was later recovered, in the immediate aftermath of the blast.While the fluid editing of such disparate source material is impressive, some of Mozer’s aesthetic choices tend to cheapen the testimonies. (The rave-like electronic scoring as Shitrit describes looking for circling birds to see where gunfire was coming from seems particularly unnecessary.) But if the shock of that day’s violence has faded after a year, “We Will Dance Again” aims to keep it visible, and to memorialize it viscerally.We Will Dance AgainNot rated. In Hebrew, English and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      in Music

      How the Politics of the Gaza War Engulfed the Melbourne Symphony

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      The orchestra faced criticism for canceling a performance by a pianist who spoke about the war. Now a top leader has departed and the ensemble has opened an inquiry.The pianist Jayson Gillham was performing Beethoven’s “Waldstein” sonata and Ligeti’s études at a concert hall in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this month when the concert took an unexpected turn.When Gillham, 38, returned to the stage after intermission, he announced that he would depart from the printed program and play a world premiere: a piece called “Witness” by his friend, the composer Connor D’Netto, dedicated to journalists killed in Gaza.Speaking to the audience, Gillham blamed Israel for the deaths of more than 100 Palestinian journalists over the past 10 months, and said that “the killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.”The next day, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, which had presented Gillham’s solo recital, informed him it was removing him from a planned concert with the orchestra a few days later, replacing his Mozart piano concerto with a Beethoven symphony. The ensemble said in a letter to audience members that Gillham had made “unauthorized statements” that represented an “intrusion of personal political views” on a piano recital.“I was really surprised,” Gillham said in an interview. “It felt like an overreaction.”A backlash followed: Artists, journalists and music fans in Australia denounced the Melbourne Symphony for canceling Gillham’s performance and defended his right to free speech. The orchestra backtracked, issuing a statement saying it had been wrong to cancel Gillham’s appearance and that it would work to reschedule it. It wound up canceling the Beethoven performance, citing “safety concerns.”But the fallout has continued.On Monday, the Melbourne Symphony announced that its managing director, Sophie Galaise, was departing. The ensemble said it was commissioning an outside investigation into the incident, to be led by Peter Garrett, the former lead singer of the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, who has also been a government minister.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marvel Changes Israeli Superhero Sabra in Captain America Movie

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      The studio said Sabra, a Mossad agent in comic books, will be “a high-ranking U.S. government official” in its next Captain America movie.When Marvel Studios announced two years ago that it had cast the Israeli actress Shira Haas to play Sabra, a superhero Mossad agent, in its next “Captain America” film, the news was cheered by Israelis and denounced by Palestinians.The studio said at the time that the makers of the film, “Captain America: Brave New World,” would be “taking a new approach to the character,” but did not elaborate.The contours of that reimagined character became clearer on Friday when Marvel released a trailer of the upcoming film. The accompanying announcement made no mention of Sabra as an agent of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, as she is depicted in comic books, but described her as “a high-ranking U.S. government official.”The change drew criticism from some who saw it as diminishing Israeli and Jewish representation onscreen. A headline in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, proclaimed, “‘Sabra’ Superhero in Marvel’s ‘Captain America’ Stripped of Israeliness Amid pro-Palestinian Backlash,” and one in The Jerusalem Post said, “Marvel removes Jewish superhero Sabra’s Israeli identity for new Captain America movie.”The American Jewish Committee said on social media that Marvel’s “decision to strip the Israeli identity of Sabra is a betrayal of the character’s creators and fans and a capitulation to intimidation. Sabra is a proud Israeli hero, and should be portrayed as such. Taking away such a central part of her identity would be like making Captain America Canadian.”It was not clear whether Sabra — alter ego: Ruth Bat-Seraph — still has Israeli origins in the movie, as her superhero name suggests. “Sabra” is a Hebrew word for a local cactus bush that doubles as an affectionate term for native Israelis. It also the name of a refugee camp in Lebanon where Palestinians were massacred in 1982 by a Christian militia while Israeli troops stood by, though the superhero predated that event. Haas appears only briefly in the new trailer, and a Marvel spokeswoman declined to comment.When Marvel said Sabra would be introduced in this “Captain America” movie two years ago, the prospect drew criticism from Palestinians and their supporters who argued that the comic book character, which dates back to 1980, unduly glorified Israel. The hashtag #CaptainApartheid began to appear on social media.“The bottom line is that to Palestinians, Marvel having an Israeli superhero whitewashes the occupation,” Sani Meo, publisher of This Week in Palestine, a magazine about Palestinian issues, said at the time.In the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, and Israel’s war in Gaza, questions arose anew about how Marvel Studios, which is owned by Disney, would handle the character. Newsweek wrote in October that “Marvel’s Israeli Superhero Poses Huge Headache for Disney.”Just what kind of character Sabra will be in the film, which is set to be released in February, remains to be seen. More