Jerusalem’s big day before the big mess: 7 things to know for May 13

1. It’s nice to kick off a week being hyped as the most explosive in decades with some good news, and Israel got some in the form of Netta Barzilai’s Eurovision win in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

• Barzilai told the audience, “Next year in Jerusalem,” a sentiment echoed by many excited for the international song contest to be hosted in the city.
• The Ynet news site crowns Barzilai the “queen of Europe.” “Douze points Netta,” reads a banner on the Walla news site, a slangy phrase (“douze” is 12 in French). “She did it,” crows the Kan broadcaster on its website.
• Both tabloids Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth manage to get the win into their late editions, splashing their full page 1s with “Next year in Jerusalem” and “She won,” respectively
• Barzilai may have won the song contest, but The New York Times wins the headline contest:

Netta Barzilai of Israel Wins Eurovision With a Chicken Dance https://t.co/LZ49V5PbXh

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 13, 2018

2. Many are seeing the win not just as a nice pick-me-up, but also as a chance to change Israel’s face to the world.

• Shortly after the win, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdam tweeted out a cartoon of Barzilai putting down a BDS protester.

I love my country pic.twitter.com/Yx5NWEy60j

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— Ambassador Gilad Erdan גלעד ארדן (@giladerdan1) May 13, 2018

• But that is not a given, with the song contest giving those who boycott Israel a bigger target and bigger stage than normal.
• Not surprisingly, the backlash started right after the win was announced, especially with the prospect of Jerusalem hosting the contest next year, given its political overtones. Kremlin propaganda outlet Russia Today, which went as far as to call Barzilai’s words a form of propaganda and a “political jab,” collected a bucketful of idiotic tweets, including one chiding Barzilai for not knowing “Tel Aviv is capital of Israel.”

Netta made it clear her music is for Israel’s propaganda. And she declared 2019 to be in Jerusalem. How can @Eurovision celebrate diversity and inclusion when steps away Palestinians are getting shot in the head? #Eurovision is about to get very ugly.

— SR (@shartzie) May 12, 2018

3. In Yedioth, music critic Raz Shechnik notes that being overtly “Israeli” is still verboten in the song contest.

• “It’s no coincidence that we won last time with Dana International and only managed to repeat with Netta Barzilai. In order to get around all the political and diplomatic minefields in the Eurovision voting, Israel unfortunately can’t anymore make do with great songs like “A-Bi-Ni-Bi” and “Hallelujah,” but needs to create something that actually lowers the Israeli identity aspect, dims it, and shows cosmopolitanism.”

4. Jerusalem won’t have to wait until 2019 for a world stage, with Monday bringing international attention to the city when the US moves its embassy.

• Israel and the US are pretty much the only ones celebrating the move and will kick off the festivities with an event hosted by the Foreign Ministry Sunday.
• In The Times of Israel, Raphael Ahren takes a glass-half-full approach, noting that four EU envoys will attend the event: Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania.
• Haaretz, on the other hand, reports that most of the EU envoys are skipping the event, and only “about 30 of the 86 ambassadors in Israel accepted the invitation.”
• Those skipping the event will miss out on getting to see Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, as well as Treasurer Steve Mnuchin, all of whom have RSVP’d yes.

5. Donald Trump- and Benjamin Netanyahu-backing Israel Hayom prints pictures of Jerusalem getting gussied up for the big day, including a garden planted with flowers in the shape of an American flag near the embassy-to-be.

• Unsurprisingly, the embassy being moved is subsumed into Jerusalem Day celebrations Sunday, the anniversary of Israel’s capture of the city from Jordanian forces in 1967, mostly ignored by everyone but the religious right.
• The day has become most well known in recent years for the flag march through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter, which has become a magnet for right-wingers and a tense flashpoint. In Israel Hayom, Meir Indor, one of the organizers of the march, writes that by moving the embassy Trump “has joined the giant march and our joy in breaking through the walls.”

6. Jerusalem Day tensions are small potatoes, though, compared to fears of massive protests at the Gaza border this week, which overshadow even bigger jitters over a confrontation with Iran in the north.

• Haaretz reports that troops are gearing up to face off against up to 100,000 protesters in Gaza on Monday and Tuesday, to say nothing of likely protests in the West Bank.
• Yedioth says the army is also girding for a situation in which the protests descend into all-out war, “preparing plans to immediately beef up its forces from military academies, reserve units, female soldiers in training, and even a partial emergency reserves call-up.”
• The paper also reports the air force may get involved, “drawing up plans for … especially strong strikes.”
• “The point is to prevent an escalation in violence and to manage the events,” the paper’s Yossi Yehoshua writes. “The estimation is that Hamas will try to bring a record number of people to the protests — like hundreds of thousands — in order to get to the fence and break through it in several places.

7. Already on Friday, volunteers were enlisted to man drones used to try to take out flaming kites sent from Gaza, writes Haaretz’s Amos Harel, recounting the somewhat ridiculous scene.

• “Within a few minutes a drone was seen downing a burning kite by ramming it, and another drone stuck a hook into another kite and brought it down. The solutions, as usual, were improvised very quickly. A major in the career army suggested using drones to ram the kites; the commander of the Gaza Battalion camp, who likes to fish on his furloughs, thought up the drone with the hook,” he writes.
• CBS News, also on the border, writes about following firefighters on motorcycles racing to put out the fires before they could spread.
• “All big fires start from small one – if you are in the right place in the right time – you can close it with a glass of water,” one tells the broadcaster. “So, we are the glass of water.”