A-Ba-Ni-Bi: Israel's First Crown

MAY 15 1978 · 12:10

Izhar Cohen & the Alphabeta · "A-Ba-Ni-Bi" · Israel · 1978 Placement: 1st · Score: 157 · Language: Hebrew · Composers: Nurit Hirsh, Ehud Manor · Venue: Palais des Congrès · Host: Paris, France · Type: winner · Broadcast: color crt On April 22, 1978, at the Palais des Congrès in Paris, an Israeli singer named Izhar Cohen and his five-member group the Alphabeta performed 'A-Ba-Ni-Bi,' a disco-inflected pop song whose chorus hook was built on the Hebrew children's language-game 'B-language' (in which the syllable 'B' is inserted after every vowel, turning 'ani' — 'I' — into 'a-ba-ni-bi'). The song was bright, commercial, unmistakably 1970s in its production, and delivered with a polished pop-group staging that matched what had become the contest's commercial-winner template. Israel had participated in Eurovision since 1973 — five years — without a top-five finish. 'A-Ba-Ni-Bi' won with 157 points. Cohen became an instant national celebrity in Israel, the song dominated Israeli radio for months, and Israel was required to host the 1979 contest. The 1979 host logistics required substantial production infrastructure — a Middle East Eurovision was new territory — and the country used the hosting duty to assert Israeli broadcasting sophistication to a pan-European audience. Context Eurovision 1978 was hosted by France and arrived at a particular moment of Israeli geopolitical visibility — six months after Anwar Sadat's historic November 1977 visit to Jerusalem and in the middle of the Camp David negotiations that would produce the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace accord. Israeli Eurovision participation was itself politically charged; several Arab-region broadcasters refused to transmit Eurovision contests during Israeli participation, and Jordanian state television famously cut away to a picture of flowers when Izhar Cohen was declared winner rather than broadcasting the result. The Alphabeta group had been assembled specifically for Eurovision; the 'B-language' choice was a deliberate Israeli-cultural reference designed to be playful rather than linguistically opaque. Legacy Izhar Cohen's 1978 win was the first of Israel's four Eurovision victories (1978, 1979, 1998 Dana International, 2018 Netta) and the beginning of Israel's distinctive Eurovision identity — pop-production maximalism combined with Hebrew-language insistence. The 'B-language' hook became permanently associated with Eurovision's willingness to reward linguistically-specific entries. For Israel, 1978 accelerated public-broadcasting infrastructure investment that enabled the 1979 Jerusalem hosting. Jordanian television's flower-cutaway moment has become a permanently-cited Eurovision-politics anecdote, referenced in every subsequent Israeli-Arab contest-broadcast discussion. Mythology The 'B-language' is sometimes described as a religious-linguistic reference; it is a children's-game language variant unrelated to religious Hebrew. Cohen is occasionally credited as a solo performer; he performed with the Alphabeta group. The Jordanian-flowers story is sometimes exaggerated into multi-nation Arab-broadcaster refusal; Jordan's was the most prominent and visible response, but other Arab states simply did not carry the broadcast.