The song “The Final Countdown” played in the promos for a special edition of the Eretz Nehederet (Wonderful Country) comedy show on Channel 12 on Tuesday night, the last episode before the elections on October 27.
The show focused on the many ups and downs in the final days of arguably the most contentious election in Israel’s history.
But it also made time to welcome a special guest from Britain, the former Culture Club frontman and rock icon Boy George (Tom Yaar), who has been an outspoken defender of Israel for years.
Boy George danced to the strains of Culture Club’s hit “Karma Chameleon” and announced, “I’m not a haredi, I’m a hare-diva.”
Host Eyal Kitzis said Israelis were very happy to welcome the singer, who replied, “It’s not like you had other options, darling.”
Asked about the cost of his support for Israel, Boy George said, “Oh, yes, I’ve paid a heavy price, darling, no decent song has touched me in years.” The rest of the skit focused on “Karma Chameleon” as the one song for which he is remembered, though he later sang a few bars of “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” and Kitzis conceded he had other hits.
Boy George meets Yoseph Haddad in Eretz Nehederet election parody
Boy George flirted with Kitzis a bit and then was joined by Yoseph Haddad (Eli Finish), the successful pro-Israel influencer and IDF veteran from the Arab Christian community who went into politics and is in second place on Ofer Winter’s People of Israel list. The wildly energetic Haddad has become a controversial figure in the last few weeks of the campaign because an interview he gave five years ago resurfaced, in which he said he supported a Palestinian state, a position he has subsequently disavowed.
On Eretz Nehederet, Haddad kissed Boy George, saying he was a huge fan of the rocker, then launched into a rant mixing English and Hebrew, mentioning the riots in France and speaking so fast that Kitzis couldn't keep up. Finally, he joined Boy George in singing a song about how there is no genocide in Gaza, to the tune of “Karma Chameleon,” with the refrain, “You hypocrites/You hypocrites,” instead of “You come and go.”
Besides the rocker’s appearance, the show’s writers had plenty of material. A key skit featured the most outrageous story of the previous week, that Yinon Magal of The Patriots show on Channel 14 called Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the Yashar party, which currently leads in the polls, “a Moroccan monkey” and claimed he was a puppet of the Ashkenazi elite.
Eretz Nehederet mocks Channel 14's racist slur against Eisenkot
The next day, a Channel 14 panelist, Yotam Zimri, repeated the slur during a discussion of US President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu. Zimri said Trump had told Israelis to "choose Bibi, not the monkey.” The other panelists, who included Magal, laughed. Faced with this reality, Eretz Nehederet depicted Magal (Eran Zarahovitsch) and Zimri (Dor Muskal) doubling down on the outrageous insult as a deadpan Kitzis asked them to defend their disgusting words, and Eisenkot (Yaniv Biton), speaking calmly, offered a rebuke.
This was a case where the racist mentality of some of the prime minister’s most ardent supporters was a parody of itself that lowered the level of Israeli political discourse when that did not seem possible. Just this once, the show was almost a documentary rather than a comedy: the writers couldn't come up with anything more absurd, cartoonish, or offensive than what was actually said.
The government’s too-little/too-late efforts to distance itself from these racist commentators were a theme throughout the show, which opened with what host Kitzis said would be a summary of the previous term of the Netanyahu government. It turned out to be a rollicking folk-song parody, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Mariano Eidelman) and his highest-profile cabinet ministers in traditional Mizrahi garb singing about how great everything is, as disasters erupt all around them, ending with a zoom out to show the pickup truck the prime minister and his ministers were riding in going past burned-out houses destroyed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. It then cut to Netanyahu at his desk, grim-faced, asking, “Who can replace me? Give me one name.”
Throughout the evening, Netanyahu appeared next to a photo of the late Babi Sali, a renowned Moroccan spiritual leader. The photo dominated the frame as the prime minister called Trump to complain that he wasn’t getting enough support despite the president’s endorsement. His aide, Yonatan Urich (Omer Ribak), was sitting beside him. Urich has been accused of accepting money from Qatar to forward Qatari interests, and last week, allegations surfaced that during the war, he used AI to try to soften the image of Qatar in the media. As he sat there, Eretz Nehederet broadcast a purported dialogue between Urich and his AI chatbot.
Eretz Nehederet mocks opposition infighting in 'Come Dine With Me' parody
There was also a parody of the popular series, Come Dine With Me, with the opposition leaders preparing meals to eat together and bickering and backstabbing all the while. “We all have one thing in common,” Naftali Bennett (Eran Zarahovitsch), the leader of the B’Yachad (Together) party, pointed out, trying to get the group to agree on something. “We all want to be prime minister.” But when Mansour Abbas, the head of the Ra’am party, showed up with baklava for dessert, they wouldn’t let him in, a reference to how most of the leading opposition parties have pledged not to partner with any Arab parties.
Moshe Feiglin (Roy Bar-Natan) and Bezalel Smotrich (Guya Beer Gurevich) of the Religious Zionist Party appeared on the show, with Smotrich initially covering his face with a black mask, like the Jewish terrorists who have been attacking Palestinians on the West Bank have been doing. Kitzis quizzed them about the attacks on a Washington Post photographer and European diplomats this week. But the two drank olive oil they said they took from Arabs and laughed it off.
Benny Gantz (Lior Ashkenazi), the once-popular politician who finally called it quits this week after his Blue and White Party failed to cross the electoral threshold in polls for the past few months, made what is likely a farewell appearance. It was a nice moment in the spotlight for Ashkenazi, a serious actor who has displayed a great talent for imitations on Eretz Nehederet. Portraying Gantz as decent but somewhat clueless, the show presented a montage of Gantz’s funniest moments on the show. Kitzis suggested perhaps he was not cut out for politics, and Gantz held up a sign saying, “We didn’t choose him, but he chose up,” which pretty much summed things up.
Had it been any other week, the riots in Paris would have been front and center, but they were mentioned in one brief sketch about the Israeli influencer and reality star, Irit Rahamim (Shani Cohen), who was attacked in Paris and who described fighting off 50,000 rioters single-handedly.
Cohen returned in a skit asking citizens all over who they support in the elections. Playing the same Netanyahu supporter she portrayed the previous week, “Just Bibi,” was her mantra, she went through the same mental gymnastics she had before, claiming that Bibi didn’t know anything about anything negative, but was totally in control of everything important at the same time.
This was a fitting way to end the show. Before telling the audience, as he always does, that, “We have a wonderful country,” Kitzis reminded everyone to go out on Tuesday and vote, “So we will have a wonderful country.”