 The song also went to the top of the Israeli charts, despite being shunned by the Eurovision voters.The artistic director of the band, the film director Eytan Fox defended the performance despite noting the protests ― "As soon as we got off the stage, the faxes started coming from Israel saying not to appear with the Israeli and Syrian flags".He refused to back down claiming that the song was a peace message ― "The song is about love and peace so we thought it would be a good idea to use Syrian and Israeli flags, because we would like to have peace with Arab countries,".