Eretz Nehederet returns with sharp election satire, Sydney Sweeney, flydubai spoof

Sydney Sweeney (Mishel Pru) singing “Ha Tikvah” was one of the few bits on this week’s episode of Eretz Nehederet (Wonderful Country), Israel’s popular sketch comedy show on N12 news site, that didn’t involve politics. The series, on hiatus for a few months, returned just in time for the October 27 elections.

Sweeney, the Hollywood star/spokesmodel, appeared on the first episode of the show’s new season because she is rumored to be converting to Judaism so she can marry her boyfriend, the American-Jewish music manager, Scooter Braun.

As host Eyal Kitzis pointed out, during this time of rising antisemitism, having the wildly popular sex symbol join the tribe would be a publicity coup.

She entered singing the Israeli national anthem because in a recent commercial for the sports betting platform, Novig, in which she appeared nearly nude, fans thought they detected the strains of “Ha Tikvah” at the end, which was true. In the last seconds of the ad, Anderson Paak’s, Come Down, a 2016 song that samples “Ha Tikvah," played in the background.

Sweeney walked across the set singing in Hebrew, mangling the lyrics and singing “Cute freckle, ship,” which rhymes with the real words “A Jewish soul yearns,” along with other malapropisms. Despite her errors, she told Kitzis she was serious about converting, that from now on she would be modest in her commercials, and that she planned to appear in a new campaign, this time for the grocery chain Rami Levy. She showed a pair of jeans she would wear in the campaign, which was covered with chicken parts, and she said the slogan would be, “Rami Levy has great wings,” a play on her American Eagle commercials with the motto, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

To no one’s surprise, the show ended with a sketch based on the flydubai attempted hijacking, which was made for Eretz Nehederet: The incident featured lots of drama and action, but no one died, and it was perfect for one of their periodic Fauda spoofs – plus, one of the main Israeli heroes who saved the day was a plumber. So Lior Raz (Eran Zarachovitz), playing his Fauda character, reconfigured as the real-life passenger Yaniv Hayoun, who helped foil the hijacking. As the Fauda theme wailed in the background, the plumber, armed with the tools of his trade, asked for various wrenches to subdue the terrorist, then told the woman helping him he had to go to his car for a part he needed, a typical plumber habit. Once he had the plane under control, he drew a Jewish star with the plane’s contrails.

But in between, the show was all about the elections, and it poked fun at each major candidate and some of the minor ones, starting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Mariano Eidelman) and his main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot (Yaniv Biton) of the Yashar Party, who is currently leading in the polls. Eisenkot has challenged Netanyahu to a debate, which the prime minister has refused to take part in, and Eisenkot ribbed him, saying he was only 10 minutes late to the show, not 10 hours late as he was on October 7.

Netanyahu, for his part, said had he taken Eisenkot’s advice, the war would have ended before Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other terror leaders were killed, and he included Dolly Parton on the list of terrorist casualties, then corrected himself, saying her death was merely “collateral damage.”

Eretz Nehederet also joked about recent reports of warnings Netanyahu ignored about the deadly Hamas massacre, and showed the Israeli leader supposedly in the days before the attack, being told even by a host on Master Chef and by a song on the radio that an attack was imminent – and doing nothing.

In response, he kept accusing Eisenkot of “sitting with Arabs,” meaning that he suspected that the Yashar leader would renege on his promise to create a government of only Zionist parties.

Miri Regev (Yaniv Biton), the country’s transportation minister, came under fire for her handling of foreign pilots flying into Israel, which led to an Omani pilot being allowed to fly to Israel. Kitzis asked her to take responsibility for the tragedy that almost happened when the attempted hijacking was foiled, but she laughed and said she wasn’t going to take responsibility for something that “almost” happened. Finally, she reluctantly agreed to look over some pilots’ passports as she sat by a pool on one of her many work-related trips and mistook a pilot from Oman for someone from Uman, Ukraine, the final resting place of Rabbi Nachman of Breslau and a popular pilgrimage spot for Hasidim.

There was much more about politics, and in fact the show opened with a pointed piece of political satire, an elaborate parody of the big summer movie, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. In this case, Odysseus was a beleaguered reserve-duty soldier (Omer Etzion) trying to get home after 500 days of service. Sitting dazed on a beach, he struggled to remember home and was approached by a robed figure, the prime minister (Mariano Eidelman), as Apollo. The prime minister said it all started when a Qatari statue of a camel – like the Trojan horse – that was filled with cash and weapons was dragged into Gaza. But the soldier was confused about how long the war had taken. “All of Gaza is the size of the IMAX in Rishon,” he said.

The soldier then recalled an adventure where he and his men were menaced by an ultra-Orthodox Cyclops figure and hundreds of haredi men. Maybe some of these men could help them out, replacing them on the battlefield, the soldier suggested, but the Cyclops figure was unmoved. Among his other adventures, he was addressed by a trio of sirens, one of whom was MK Tally Gotliv (Liat Harlev) and two of whom were the directors of NAZA, the award-winning documentary that asserts that the Israeli military callously disregarded civilian casualties in Gaza, who hurled accusations at him from both left- and right-wing perspectives. 

As he traveled, his family went broke and lost everything. When he finally arrived home, dressed as a beggar, he learned that he really was a beggar – and was greeted by Sara Netanyahu (Alma Zack), instead of his own wife. Instead of a welcome-home gift, she handed him a notice that he had to report for reserve duty, again.

This Odyssey skit was funny, absurd, bitter, topical, and right on target for the many weary reserve-duty soldiers and their families, and it was a perfect example of Eretz Nehederet at its best. Expect the satire to get even sharper as Election Day approaches.