Eurovision and tunnel vision
As I watched Noam Bettan belt his way to second place in Vienna last week, I thought about the gulf between his real self and the avatar of the invented Israel he represents to some. After a week of lies and libels even more outrageous and numerous than usual, I offer a reality check to those who booed and boycotted him.
Bettan is the 28-year-old son of French immigrants to Israel. Why would French Jews immigrate to Israel? The story of Ilan Halimi may be instructive. In 2006 the 24-year-old Jewish cellphone salesman was abducted by a self-named ‘Gang of Barbarians,’ who believed the antisemitic trope that all Jews are rich. They attempted to extort a ransom from Halimi’s family, who were not rich, so unable to pay. After 24 days his hideously tortured, burned and naked body was dumped in a field. He died on the way to hospital.
This marked the beginning of a Reign of Islamist Terror across France which has included the murder of a teacher and 3 infants at a Jewish school (2012); the rapes of a 19-year-old Jewish girl and her 21-year old boyfriend (2014); the horrific Bataclan and Charlie Hebo massacres, hostage-taking at a kosher supermarket and stabbing of Jewish community centre guards (2015); stabbings and machete attacks on six Jews (2015-6); the murders at home of elderly Jewish women Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll (2017-8); stabbing of a Jewish woman (2023) and man (2024); gang rape of a 12-year-old “dirty Jew” girl (2024); assault of a 13-year-old Jewish boy and 14-year-old Jewish girl (2026).
Like many French Jews, Noam Bettan’s family is of Algerian origin. Others are Moroccan and Tunisian. Bettan’s booers and boycotters would not even know to ask why there are Jews from North Africa.
The bigger picture excluded by their tunnel vision is that the first exile of Jews from their homeland in Judah happened in the 6th Century BCE, when the Babylonian Empire conquered the capital Jerusalem (also called Zion in Hebrew), destroyed its Jewish temple, and took most of its inhabitants into captivity.
That’s the origin of the biblical verse “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, there we wept when we remembered Zion”. Over the following centuries some of those Jews moved from Babylon (modern-day Iraq), down the Arabian peninsula and across North Africa.
Almost a million of their descendants were expelled by Arab governments after the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the ancient homeland in 1948. Two thirds of them settled as refugees in the new state of Israel, returning after a 2,500-year exile. My parents in law, both born in Yemen, were among them.
Like many French Jews of North African origin, Noam Bettan lives in Ra’anana, a town north of Tel Aviv. He went to school there with my oldest nephew and served in the same army unit as my middle one.
And like every town in Israel, Ra’anana had its tragically unfair share of young people murdered, taken hostage, and raped on and after October 7, 2023, including:
Laurie Vardi, 24, and Uriel Baruch, 35, both murdered while fleeing the Nova Festival
Guy Illouz, a 26-year-old musician who died in captivity of wounds he sustained during his abduction
Almog Sarusi, a 27-year-old engineering student, one of the ‘Beautiful Six’ who were starved then murdered in the tunnels (also a friend of my oldest nephew)
Yuval Raphael, now 26, who sang about October 7 as Israel’s 2025 Eurovision contestant
and Na’ama Levy, now 22.
Na’ama was 19 when most of the world saw her being shoved into a jeep by Hamas terrorists. The backs of her ankles were slashed to prevent her escaping. The back of her pyjama pants was soaked in blood.
If Hamas’ own bodycam footage broadcast to the world wasn’t enough to show us what that blood was from; if their videoed confessions weren’t; or Premila Patten’s UN’s report; or Sheryl Sandbeg’s movie Screams before Silence; or the Dinah Report; now the Civil Commission’s ‘Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity’ tells us in excruciating detail.
Na’ama Levy went to school with my nephew who served with Noam Bettan. Each only 2 degrees of separation from me and probably from many Jewish people across the globe.
As I watched Noam last week, and as I read the Civil Commission report cover to bloody cover, and as I read the foul comments on Eurovision posts, I saw all of the context above.
I know that the booers and the boycotters and the regurgitators of lies and libels and calls for global intifadas see none of it. Their ignorance, whether simple or wilful, is terrifyingly dangerous. It led us to Bondi Beach, December 15, 2025.
In my testimony at the Royal Commission I mentioned this “incredible historical illiteracy in Australia, which has a white history of 250 years, and a lack of context or understanding of the sweep of history that my people, all the people of the Middle East, have front and centre in our understanding of the world.”
I ended saying, “I’m so sorry that this Commission exists at all, that we have to be here discussing these matters and I’m so hopeful that it will take us forward and I am so hopeful that we, as Australian Jews, will be able to go back to making the contribution to this country, to building again the way we have and the way we want to build in future.”
What one woman took away from my half-hour testimony, according to her comment on our social media, was “Why do we waste on taxpayer $ on a RC where time is wasted listening to a 70 year old women [sic] complaining about something that happened when she was 8 years old at brownie camp?”
And here was I thinking that the Commission was a light at the end of the tunnel, aimed at preventing Australia turning into France.
