A song in Arabic, presented on an Israeli television channel by activist artist Noam Shuster-Eliassi, pokes fun at the warm relations forged between Israel and “the Arabs who have millions” and that “forget Palestine”. In the Arab world, we rub our eyes.
“It’s really important for me to send a message of love and peace to all Arabs. Especially if they live more than 4 000 miles from here.” This is how the committed Israeli actress Noam Shuster-Eliassi introduced her new song, presented on January 14 on Israeli television.
Speaking in Arabic, she presents herself as Haifa Wannabe, a pastiche of the name of the Lebanese starlet Haifa Wehbe. After a “peace and love” simpered at will, she draws a text where she makes fun of the honeymoon between Israel and the United Arab Emirates since the signing of agreements to normalize their bilateral relations, at the end of 2020.
“They forgot that we put the blockade on Gaza”
“There is a light at the end of the tunnel/If all Arabs are like those in Dubai, Dubai, Dubai…, she hums. Nothing more beautiful than these rich Arabs with millions” and “who have forgotten Palestine”.
“They forgot that we put the blockade on Gaza. Ah! If only all Arabs could be like Dubai! I stop you at a checkpoint, and then I take a selfie at the top of a tower”. such as the Burj Khalifa tower, the emblematic skyscraper of this emirate which attracts tourists from all over the world.
This kind of criticism is common among Palestinians, notes the Israeli daily Ha’Aretz. But the fact that it came from an Israeli woman and was featured on an Israeli television channel gave it a huge following in the Arab world, notice Al-Jazeera.
A netizen thus commented, sarcastically, that he hoped that the singers of the Arab countries would not want their Israeli colleague too much to attack Dubai, a city whose glitter they themselves adore.
Others, on the other hand, perceived this song in a more surprising way. Far from welcoming this expression of solidarity with the Palestinians on the part of an artist who, for example, also defended the cause of the Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem, a certain Abdelaziz Al-Khazraji Al-Ansari accuses him: “This ridicule of the Emirates is a huge humiliation.”
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