There are no half measures towards Eden Golan. The Israeli singer, booed on and off the stage at the Eurovision in Malmö, was welcomed like a national heroine on her return from Sweden this morning, with loudspeakers playing her song “Hurricane” in Tel Aviv airport. of the hurricane of October 7, the cursed day of Hamas’ terror against Israel.
Applause and controversy for this twenty-year-old pop star with over 760 thousand listeners on Spotify. The Malmö curtain has fallen, after the political controversy linked to the opportunity to have a representative of Israel participate in the singing event, another one was added linked to the story of this singer who was just twenty years old. Golan came under attack not only because of its origin, but also because of its relations with Russia: born 20 years ago in Israel to Jewish parents who immigrated from the former Soviet Union (Ukrainian mother and Latvian father), she then spent most of her life in Moscow and has Russian citizenship. Not only: she was recently included in the list of supporters of the pro-Moscow separatist cause. In fact, his name appears in the database managed by the Ukrainian Center Myrotvorets, a site regularly consulted at Ukrainian checkpoints, which led to the arrest of around a hundred pro-Putin collaborators.
Golan finds itself on this list due to events preceding the large-scale invasion of Ukraine. In particular, his participation in a music festival in Crimea in 2016 attracted attention, thus legitimizing the Russian presence in occupied Ukraine: at «New Wave» she performed a duet with the Russian singer Niusha. She was 13 years old and had been living in Moscow with her parents for 7 years. In 2018 you reached the final of the Russian competition «The Voice Kids of the Country». In 2022, with the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Golan left Russia to return to Israel.
But in his Instagram profile there is no trace of this war.
