My Take on the Odeya / Bad Bunny Controversy

On September 1, the controversy around Odeya Azoulay’s album cover erupted in both Israel and Puerto Rico. Accusations of colonization, cultural appropriation, and other seemingly outlandish things were thrown at the Israeli singer. But more than one month later, after some more research and reflection, I am ready to give my interpretation of these events.

I want to note that I am an American Jew. I have never lived in Israel, and I have never lived in Puerto Rico. This editorial is about a culture war between the two countries, but it is more of an attack on Jews than an attack on the Israeli state.

It was about 9 pm on September 4. I had opened Spotify and I was making a playlist to listen to, as I did every night. This time, I wanted to listen to lots of Mizrahi music, by artists like Omer Adam, Sasson Ifram Shaulov, and, of course, Odeya. Then I noticed that the song פאפי (Papi) was gone. In its place was a grayed-out box with a music note, as I see in lots of songs that had been taken down. I assumed it was due to a licensing issue, and it was no longer available in the United States. This happens a lot with Israeli music, and I don’t need to go into a lot of detail about how annoyed it makes me.

I decided to deal with it tomorrow, and, as a last resort, try to illegally download it. (I never do this, as I greatly respect artists, but this was one of my favorite songs.) I tried to go to sleep, and figure out the mess in the morning. I had no idea what was in store for me.

The first thing I saw was a TikTok. This TikTok, to be precise. For those of you who don’t want to watch it, I will give you a description.

The account is called @genzxelcambio, whatever that means. I assume it is a Latino or Hispanic commentary account, and on their homepage I see several videos. Each video features a different person, all of whom appear to be Latino, talking about an issue affecting Latin America or immigrants in the US (e.g. ICE raids, colonization, etc.) The account also features some anti-Israel conspiracy theories and other unsupported accusations, such as “ICE uses Israeli spyware” or “Spot the difference: ICE or Israel”, or things along those lines. Now back to the video.

A young woman with auburn hair starts off by saying “I feel like Reggaeton is really missing Israeli influences.” After a pause, she leans into the camera and says “Said no one ever.” Then, she gives some “background”. She says Odeya, the Israeli singer, thought it “would be cute” to steal the “iconic cover” of a Bad Bunny album. Then she continues by accusing Odeya of “performing for IDF war criminals”, showing a picture of Odeya singing for Israeli soldiers after they returned from war. The fact that this person immediately assumes all IDF soldiers are war criminals, the most serious accusation in modern geopolitics, is very disturbing. This is followed by referring to Odeya as an “artist”, which is of course put in quotes, and using a selection of completely random clips of Odeya in which she looks the least flattering, which seems to serve no purpose other than to mock her as a person.

Now, about the album cover. Here’s more information. Bad Bunny released the album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS”, or “I Should Have Taken More Photos”, in January of 2025. The album is about Puerto Rico, colonization, and the culture of the Caribbean.

Odeya, who is well-known to be a fan of Bad Bunny, wanted to make a tribute. So, in the song Papi, a single which she released on June 29 this year, she decided to honor the singer. The song can be interpreted in several different ways, but as I interpret it, she is experiencing some sort of drama with a relationship. And the chorus features the following lines:

“You think of me again

You don’t show respect

You don’t take off your shades

You think you’re Bad Bunny”

Now, you may interpret this differently, but I assume it to be a compliment. (Although, as you are about to see in a few paragraphs, others definitely do not.)

Then comes the album cover. Odeya decided to use the cover of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (often abbreviated as Dtmf) for her single. She took Bad Bunny’s cover and Photoshopped herself into it, which was definitely a mistake. I can’t embed an image because of copyright concerns, but here is a comparison on X.

Following the backlash from Bad Bunny’s fanbase, Odeya posted an explanation on Instagram, and other of her social media accounts. What she said is paraphrased below.

“I intended the cover of Papi as a tribute to Bad Bunny. I never wanted to anger his fanbase in Puerto Rico. I literally said his name several times in the song. (Who would say the name of where they stole something from?) I’m sorry for offending anyone, and I would like to thank my fans who stood up for me in the comments section and fended off the anti-Semitic comments on my posts.”

This was followed by a slideshow of several similar “tributes”; artists such as Tate McRae and Sabrina Carpenter using album covers or costumes from classic artists who inspired them.

However, the examples she used are inspirations, while her album cover is extremely similar to Bad Bunny’s. I believe this was way too similar, and was a mistake on her part. However, some people took everything way too far.

“Once a colonizer, always a colonizer.”

“Oh, wasn’t that album cover promised to you 3,000 years ago?”

“Is it not enough to steal land from Palestinians? Do you have to steal album covers from Latinos too now?”

“Being creative is hard I guess. You stole his album cover. Is stealing other people’s stuff just something you do in Israel?”

“Puerto Rico stands with Palestine!”

The above comments were repeated over and over again. I don’t know if they were just copying each other, or if hundreds of people thought they were being “creative” when they posted the same antisemitic comment thousands of times, but that’s not really the issue.

After Odeya posted her message, which I referenced above, this stirred some more backlash. When she described these comments as antisemitic, which many of them clearly were, it angered lots of Bad Bunny’s fans. If they don’t want to be accused of antisemitism, I suppose they could try legitimate criticism, instead of just throwing hateful insults based on their own grievances and prejudice against Jews and/or Israelis.

But the most disturbing facet of this entire controversy is that people are misusing the word “colonization”. Throughout the Israel-Hamas war, and, to a lesser extent, before October 7, many people in the Pro-Palestinian campaign have been rampantly throwing around accusations.

They have taken words such as “Colonization”, “Genocide”, “Indigenous”, “Cultural Appropriation”, and “Apartheid”; all of those words have a very specific and important meaning. Or at least they used to. Now, it seems that they have been corrupted as a way to bash or attack the State of Israel, or, more accurately, Jews.

Colonization, in its simplest definition, refers to foreigners moving civilians to a country or society and settling amongst the indigenous peoples. For example, Europeans colonizing Africa or the Americas. (Which is a very well-documented and almost universally recognized example.) But now people have been accusing Israel of being a “settler colonial state” and “colonizing Palestine”. This takes out the most critical part of the definition: “Settling amongst Indigenous peoples.” This brings us to the word Indigenous.

Indigenous people, or peoples, are the first ethnic group to have inhabited a place. In the case of the land of Israel, or Palestine, as some might call it, the Jews are well-known to be Indigenous. The Romans exiled Jews to various foreign lands, and Muslims, to a lesser extent, killed or exiled Jews who still lived in Israel throughout the next few hundred years.

But now, it has become increasingly acceptable to call Palestinians the Indigenous people. This is not only incorrect, but nonsensical. The concept of “Palestinians” is a very new one. Before around 1948, almost no-one would refer to themselves as a “Palestinian”. The Arabic people who lived in the land that is now Israel were called “Arabs”, “Palestinian Arabs”, or the “Arabs of Palestine”. In around the 1960s, Yasser Arafat, and potentially others, created the “Palestinian identity”. This identity was mostly centered around being oppressed by Israel. It was part of a narrative that Israel is evil; a fascist state that kills babies, commits war crimes, or is just generally bad.

Then comes accusations of apartheid and genocide. These are the most serious and inflammatory accusations against Israel, and are used by some as legitimate accusations intended to bring about justice, but by many others as a means to stir anger or hate, create divisions in society, or perpetuate hatred against Israelis.

Apartheid has various definitions, but it became a well-known concept in the 1980s or so, when South Africa was “committing apartheid” against Black people. It is often defined as systematic oppression and segregation, particularly by a ruling ethnic minority against the majority. Accusations against Israel fail to take into account the fact of demographics. In both Israel and Palestine combined, there are many more Jews than Arabs. A quick Google search can confirm this.

But finally: genocide. The worst possible crime a country can commit. The systematic and ethnically motivated destruction of an entire ethnic population. For example, the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, the Khmer Genocide, and the Rohingya Genocide. And, as some now claim, the Palestinian Genocide. Israel’s campaign of destruction against Palestinians in Gaza. This is a very contentious topic, and has been covered in-depth in other articles and editorials on the Times of Israel, so I don’t want to go very in-depth. But, whether Israel is committing genocide, or whether they are not, one thing is very important.

I have seen many comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany. This is not only racist and hateful, but terrifying. Comparing a Jewish state to the country that slaughtered at least 6 million Jews, a huge portion of Europe’s Jewish population, is awful. There are so many ways to criticize the actions of Israel. If you think Israel is committing genocide, you can do your research, find a community of scholars, and present your findings to a court. If you think an Israeli military unit is committing war crimes, conduct an investigation and prosecute them for crimes against humanity. But do not use a source of trauma like the Holocaust for shock value, or to further your cowardly agenda of hate.

You may be asking, what does any of this have to do with a Mizrahi pop song? Why do I need to go in-depth about international law, war crimes, history, or any of this? The answer is that I need to. It’s not a good thing in any way, but modern music, and Israeli culture in general, is always conflated with history or politics by fanatics, activists, or other people on the Internet. Anything Jewish will always be turned into a culture war.

Finally, I want to explain how this controversy ended. After a few days of Internet drama and a giant “narrative war” in the comments sections, this came to a resolution, or as much of a resolution as you can call it. Odeya’s team was able to re-upload the song “פאפי” with new cover art. This time, she used a more original design. Instead of a cover honoring Bad Bunny with an interpretation of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, she used a more “Israeli” cover. In the center, Odeya sits on a golden throne, decorated with the Star of David. She is wrapped in an Israeli flag. Behind her is a desert landscape, typical to the Negev region. Military tents and IDF vehicles  can be seen in the background. And right behind her is a ring of flagpoles, each one flying the flag of a different IDF brigade.

Ironically, this one sparked even more outrage than the original. The main objections to the first album cover were its “appropriation” of Puerto Rican identity. The new one is about as Israeli as you can get. But the backlash abruptly changed from accusations of cultural appropriation to accusations of genocide. Apparently, anything related to the IDF is now “genocidal in nature”, as we’ve seen many times before.

This was never about cultural appropriation. It was never about genocide. It was never about human rights. The whole time, it was about hatred against Jews. The backlash didn’t end when Odeya changed her cover, just like Bad Bunny’s fans wanted. Instead, it shifted. The accusations changed. The hatred was now directed at whatever Odeya was doing.

We see this all the time. People now want to change the definition of genocide, just because Israel’s war in Gaza doesn’t qualify. They don’t care about the violence that Palestinians commit against their homosexual brothers and neighbors. Because they can’t blame Israel. They don’t care about Syrian Arabs massacring Druze communities. Because they can’t blame Israel. Nobody pays any attention to the slaughter of Rohingyas in Myanmar, to the murder of women in Iran for refusing to wear the hijab, to the oppression that women across the Muslim world face just for being women. Nobody cares about the Uyghurs in China, who are being exploited as free labor. Because they can’t blame Israel. Nobody cares about the families who are being murdered in Sudan, or the millions of refugees across the region. Hardly anyone cares about Ukraine anymore. Because they can’t blame Israel.

This is in part because of the media. The media focuses on Israel, because it will give them more money. Organizations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, which are funded by private donors, focus disproportionately on Israel, because that’s what the wealthy donors want. So to most unsuspecting Americans, or people across the world who have grown up in the age of social media algorithms, the atrocities committed against people across the world are irrelevant. Many don’t even know what’s happening. And this needs to change. For the sake of the families living in refugee camps without basic amenities like clean water. And for the sake of Jews, who are being villainized and scapegoated for the world’s problems.

Thanks for reading my interpretation of this culture war. Once again, please note that I am an American Jew, so my perspective on this is that of such. As always, peace.

Am Israel Chai.