The Eurovision Song Contest, often shortened to just Eurovision, is a major annual music competition.
The contest, organized by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), sees countries from across Europe and beyond - including Israel, Azerbaijan and Australia - submit an original song and select an artist to perform the song in a live television and radio broadcast.
The competition has been held almost every year (barring 2020) since 1956 and is extremely popular around the world, and has helped launch the careers of some of the world's most iconic musical artists.
Overall, the songs tend to be cheerful and the event prides itself on being apolitical, though it has come under criticism for some controversies in the past.
Golan's song "Hurricane," which is slated to be performed at the contest in May, has receive numerous streams and ranks in sixth place in terms of Spotify streams among the 2024 contestants.
With a boring and uninspiring Eurovision song that doesn't stand out, Israel is planning to embarrass itself on one of the world's biggest stages.
It wasn’t easy to get Israel’s song choice approved this year, but “Hurricane” finally received the thumbs up from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs the annual contest.
As Israel faced a rocky path to the 2024 Eurovision in Sweden, facing issues in song approval, Israeli public broadcast Kan 11 revealed the video for Eden Golan's "Hurricane."
Eden Golan will perform “Hurricane” at the competition in Malmo, Sweden, in May. The approved song has the same melody as “October Rain,” which was rejected.
Israel has already agreed to revise the lyrics of its potential submission to the song contest after EBU took issue with verses that appeared to reference Hamas' October 7 attack.
KAN will change the lyrics to Israel's 2024 Eurovision song submission, "October Rain," and its runner-up "Dance Forever" in order to allow the country to participate in the song contest.
Alon Amir was slated to be a judge before the Estonian pre-Eurovision contest, a position he has held multiple times, but was rescinded the offer due to being Israeli
The Eurovision is scheduled to take place in May in the Swedish city of Malmo, which has a large Muslim immigrant community and a dwindling Jewish one, chased out by antisemitism.