Gal Gadot Joins Eretz Nehederet Election-Night Special as Israelis Await Results

As Israelis waited anxiously for the results of a pivotal election on Tuesday night, the satirical program Eretz Nehederet (Wonderful Country) aired an unusual two-part special on Channel 12. Israeli-born Hollywood star Gal Gadot made a guest appearance alongside the regular cast.

The broadcast was split in two. The first half aired before the polls closed, and the second followed exit polls that produced an inconclusive result, far from the clear victory either side had hoped for.

In an early sketch, Asher, the talkative cab driver played by Yuval Semo, picked up passengers among the more than 70,000 Israelis who returned from abroad to vote. He was stunned when Gadot climbed into his cab. Earlier in the day, Gadot had posted an Instagram story showing herself voting and saying she had backed one of the opposition parties, without naming it. "So, did you come back to vote? Or to be an artichoke on The Masked Singer?" Asher asked. "No, I came to vote," she replied.

Gadot said she had lived abroad for almost 12 years. When Asher pressed her on her choice, she whispered it to him, and the party's name was bleeped out when he tried to announce it over his megaphone. Echoing the sage Hillel the Elder, she said: "If not now, when?"

She also spoke candidly about being Israeli and Jewish in Hollywood at a time of rising antisemitism. "It's hard these days to be an Israeli abroad," she said, adding that she often wore a mask when going out. She said she tried to give Americans "context" and noted that "what you see from there isn't what we see from here." Gadot said she planned to return to Israel with her husband and four daughters, three of them born in the US, and that the family was building a house here. The sketch ended with her taking the wheel, citing her Fast & Furious role, and turning the cab into a flying car.

The first half also opened with the political rivals portrayed as professional wrestlers. Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of staff and head of the Yashar party, wielded a sawed-off shotgun, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threw around a gold suitcase of cash, a nod to Qatari money transferred to Hamas in Gaza with his government's approval. Another sketch had Netanyahu brandishing a toy mushroom as a mushroom cloud, mocking an AI image he released late in the campaign that purported to show Tel Aviv destroyed by an Iranian nuclear bomb.

The show also teased Naftali Bennett, head of the B'Yachad Party, for his visits to informal discussion groups of older citizens, depicting him so absorbed that he missed his chance to vote. Eisenkot was shown awkwardly courting young voters alongside an influencer. A further sketch showed former prime ministers Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon baffled by AI commercials.

In the second part, writers had to find humor in a result where neither side appeared to have won enough seats to form a government. One sketch cast Eisenkot, Bennett and Avigdor Liberman of Yisrael Beytenu as game show contestants trying to walk back promises not to work with Arab or ultra-Orthodox parties. Ofer Winter and Yoseph Haddad of the People of Israel Party appeared upset that their party had missed the Knesset threshold. Haddad marveled that he seemed to be the only Arab not elected, a reference to the better-than-expected showing by Arab parties.

One unsettling note came at the close. Instead of host Eyal Kitzis's usual 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.