As Israelis anxiously awaited the results of one of the most crucial elections in history on Tuesday night, Gal Gadot, the Israeli-born Hollywood superstar, made an appearance on a special two-part broadcast of Eretz Nehederet (Wonderful Country) on Channel 12.
Gadot and the regular cast entertained a politically divided nation as the polls went into their final hour, and Israelis were unified at last in their shared suspense.
Her presence was a high point on an unusual broadcast, half of which was shown before the polls closed and the other half of which was broadcast after the exit polls showed an inconclusive result, which was far from the definitive victory both sides had craved.
In the first half, one sketch featuring Asher (Yuval Semo), the chatty cabbie who always says exactly what is on his mind, focused on a few of the 70,000+ Israelis returning from abroad to vote.
Asher is never speechless, but he was definitely shocked when Gadot stepped out of the airport and into his cab. Their upbeat and, at times, emotional conversation captured the euphoria and emotion of many Israelis who returned to vote after years abroad.
“So, did you come back to vote? Or to be an artichoke on The Masked Singer?” Asher asked Gadot, who had posted a story to her Instagram earlier in the day showing herself voting and saying that she had backed one of the opposition parties, although she did not reveal which one.
“No, I came to vote,” she said.
“Good for you! Good for you,” Asher responded.
“Absolutely,” she said.
“What a Zionist! What a patriot,” he said enthusiastically.
“If not now, when?” she said, echoing the famous quote from the Jewish sage, Hillel the Elder.
“Tell me, how long have you been living abroad?” Asher asked Gadot.
“Almost 12 years,” the actress, who has starred in two Wonder Woman movies and about a dozen others since she made the move, replied.
“So, I can scam you like a tourist!” he said.
Asking her who she was voting for, she agreed to whisper her choice to him. As soon as she did, being Asher, he grabbed his megaphone and started to announce her choice to all the cabbies from his station, but the name of the party was bleeped out and he promised the other cabbies wouldn’t tell anyone, as she laughed.
She also spoke candidly about the difficulty of being an Israeli and a Jew in Hollywood in a period of rising antisemitism. "It's hard these days to be an Israeli abroad," she said and even said that she often wore masks when she went out, as if it were still the pandemic era.
She said she often tried to give "context" that would help Americans understand the issues.
"There's a lot of hate. I try to explain to them, what you see from there isn't what we see from here. And what we see here, you don't see there." She said she planned to return to Israel with her husband and four daughters, three of whom were born in the US, and that they were building a house here.
Finally, frustrated by the Israeli traffic, she told Asher she would drive, since she had starred in Fast & Furious, and after some daredevil moves with his cab, she turned it into a flying car, heading up into the clouds in her quest to make it to a polling place in time to vote.
Eretz Nehederet featured sketches about election candidates
In the first, more optimistic first half of the broadcast, the show outdid itself with an opening sketch in which the political opponents were depicted as professional wrestlers in appropriately absurd costumes.
They fought each other in over-the-top wrestler-style, with weapons like a sawed-off shotgun wielded by Gadi Eisenkot (Yuval Semo), the former chief of staff and head of the Yashar party, and a huge gold suitcase of cash, thrown around by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Mariano Eidelman), a reference to how his government allowed suitcases containing millions of dollars from the Qatari government to be given to Hamas in Gaza.
In a panel discussion moderated by host Eyal Kitzis, Channel 12 political analyst Amit Segal (Roy Bar Natan) appeared distracted because he was busy writing a victory speech for Netanyahu, a reference to the fact that Segal is alleged to have given the prime minister advice on his campaign speeches.
Another panelist, Dana Weiss (Alma Zack), Channel 12’s political and diplomatic correspondent, ignored calls from an increasingly unhinged Tali Gotliv (Liat Harlev) from the Otzma Yehudit Party.
Netanyahu appeared at a shopping mall and tried to spark fear in voters, saying everyone would die tonight if they did not vote for him. He brandished a toy ceramic mushroom, saying it was a mushroom cloud, a joke about an AI image the prime minister actually released in the final days of the campaign that purported to show Tel Aviv destroyed by an Iranian nuclear bomb.
Eretz Nehederet ribbed Naftali Bennett (Eran Zarahovitsch), the head of the B'Yachad Party, for his campaign visits to “parliamentim,” informal political discussion groups of older citizens around the country. On election day, he had spent so much time with these groups that he realized he had missed his chance to vote and seemed forlorn. Eisenkot, in turn, looked terribly awkward courting the youth vote with a moronic influencer (Liat Harlev).
Expanding on this theme, Eretz Nehederet went back in time and showed AI commercials to a group of former prime ministers from past eras: Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, and Ariel Sharon, all of whom totally miss the point. Meir seemed especially mystified when she was given an e-cigarette.
Writers attempt to inject comedy into initial election results
In the second part of the show, after the likely results of the election were revealed, the writers had to try hard to find comedy in the fact that neither side had won enough seats to form a government.
One sketch showed the leaders of the three of the opposition parties, Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, and Avigdor Liberman (Sharon Taicher) of Israeli Beitenu, playing a game show called “Excuse the Promise,” trying to walk back their campaign promises not to collaborate with Arab or Ultra-Orthodox parties.
Ofer Winter (Yaron Berlad) and Yoseph Haddad (Eli Finish) showed up, upset that their People of Israel Party had not gotten enough votes to enter the Knesset.
Haddad was especially incredulous, saying he couldn't understand how he seemed to be the only Arab who had not gotten elected to the Knesset, a reference to the fact that the Arab parties did much better than expected.
Meanwhile, a grim-faced Netanyahu was shown in the defense headquarters, boasting he was starting up the war with Iran to cement his power as the head of state.
Eretz Nehederet’s staff of quick-thinking writers did what they could to make people smile despite the somewhat grim denouement of a divisive campaign, and the prospect of more uncertainty to come.
One unsettling element was that, instead of Kitzis's usual sign-off line about Israel being a wonderful country, the second broadcast ended with him simply handing the show back to Channel 12 news anchor Yonit Levi.