Each song undergoes a review process, and a few minor adjustments were requested by EBU officials, which the Israeli songwriters agreed to. In 2024, Israel\u2019s initial song submission, \u201cOctober Rain,\u201d was rejected because its lyrics were deemed too political, a violation of the EBU\u2019s rules.<\/p>\n
The lyrics referred to the Hamas massacre of 1,200 people, which started the current war. After some negotiations, a revised version of the song, renamed \u201cHurricane,\u201d was approved just before the deadline.<\/p>\n
Yuval Raphael, who was Israel\u2019s representative to Eurovision<\/a> in 2025 and finished second overall, co-wrote this year\u2019s song, along with Nadav Aharoni and Tzlil Kalifi. Noam Bettan, Israel\u2019s 2026 representative, will perform it at the 70th Eurovision Song Contest<\/a> in Vienna in May.<\/p>\n It has happened before that a previous Israeli Eurovision representative has written a song for another contestant. This was the case in 1983, when Avi Toledano composed a song, \u201cChai,\u201d for Ofra Haza, after he was a Eurovision contestant himself.<\/p>\n Bettan won the television talent contest, Kochav Haba (The Next Star) for Eurovision. The song will be revealed in a special broadcast on March 5 on KAN 11, Israel\u2019s government broadcaster.<\/p>\n Bettan is scheduled to perform in the first semifinal on May 12. The second semifinal will be held two days later, and the grand final will take place on May 16.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Each song undergoes a review process, and a few minor adjustments were requested by EBU officials, which the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,10569,10495,10570,85,46,411,18103],"class_list":{"0":"post-298012","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-european-broadcasting-union","10":"tag-eurovision","11":"tag-eurovision-song-contest","12":"tag-il","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-tv","15":"tag-yuval-raphael"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}