Eurovision celebrates differences by putting them all in one place, says Fleet Street Fox. It does more to improve the world than booing people does
In southern Spain there is more than one British ex-pat who voted for Brexit. Why not sit outside their hacienda shouting “ARE YOU HAPPY NOW” through a loud-hailer?
On Tyneside there are bound to be some gay men who hold season tickets for Newcastle United. Get yersel’ down St James Park, and whenever their side has the ball chant: “HAWAY THE LADS OFF THE ROOF.”
Or maybe you’d like to find a half-Palestinian singer at the Eurovision Song Contest and decide they should be held responsible for the October 7 massacre by Hamas, and are going to boo him for the genocide they promote?
Ah no. Thought not. Just the Jewish lady then? I see.
Everyone’s got a perfect right to criticise a government, or question whether its trying to wash away its sins with participation in an international singing contest. Well, everyone who’s not living in Russia, or Palestine, or Iran, or a bunch of other places where anything that might be known as ‘The Gay Olympics’ would never be allowed.
But having a pop at Eden Golan, the Israeli entry this year who is powerless to change her country’s military policy, serves no purpose beyond letting those who feel short of attention jerk their knee and feel like they’ve done something useful. It’s just as fruitless as governments labelling suffragettes or climate protesters as “terrorists” in the hope that will somehow make the opposition erode. It doesn’t. It won’t. This has never worked.
In the same way that ganging up on Greta Thunberg didn’t change weather patterns, Thunberg wrapping herself in a keffiyeh to protest an Israeli singer does nothing to alter the Middle East. Nothing much has changed there for 5,000 years, despite lots of very clever people doing far more than wave a placard. It’s unlikely a sit-in going to achieve more than millennia of massacres and peace treaties.
Which is no reason not to protest, of course. Feel free. Knock yourselves out. Raise some awareness, make the arguments. You never know, rational behaviour could yet become fashionable. But when those protests ignore a Palestinian celebrating their ethnicity, and criticise a Jew for not even going that far, then some ethnicities have become more acceptable than others.
Serbian nationalism led to war and genocide, and the splintering of a country into separate states where Muslims are still treated appallingly. Yet no-one asks about the Serb entrant’s political views, even though her song is about war and death, and takes its title from the Serbian equivalent of our Remembrance poppy.
Booing the lady singing a song about living in a metaphorical hurricane seems… well, pretty stupid. The lyrics are anodyne, and there are no overt political gestures. In the absence of Golan marching on to the stage in jackboots, or pretending to spray the audience with bullets, there’s nothing to be offended by, unless it’s her very existence that offends.
Which is what this all boils down to – the problem is that she is Israeli. That Israel has citizens, institutions, a recognised government, and acceptance into international song contests while Palestine has only victims, rubble, terrorists and a missile blitz.
There are many Israelis who wish that weren’t so, not least the hostages still held by Hamas as bargaining chips. There are thousands of men and women who serve in the British military who don’t agree with government defence policies, and nobody screams in the streets that every member of the armed forces was complicit in this war or that atrocity. When it’s our people, we are a lot more reasonable.
Jews are different, though. They’ve been ‘other’ people in lots of countries for millennia, and even after the world gave them a home of their own there are still idiots who think they’re ‘other’, not least their next door neighbour. The pro-Palestine protests never seem to take into account that the rest of the Middle East – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia – accept and co-operate with Israel, because that’s the humane, and indeed Islamic, way of behaving. Iran alone wants it bombed off the face of the Earth, and a hard, callused rump of Palestinian lunatics who cheerfully forget they were offered a state of their own in 1947 and said no because it meant living next door to Jews.
They’re living next to them anyway, and it’s not going too well for either side. And it’s very complicated for a I’m-a-progressive-me student who loves Eurovision to get their head around, so rather than make the effort they boo the Jewish lady, then wonder why they get called anti-Semites. They cannot say where else the Jews should live, do not know why Palestine doesn’t already have a country, and have not worked out that if they want a patch of rock to have a new, previously non-existent state imposed upon it by popular opinion, then that’s EXACTLY what they’re cross about already.
If Eurovision has any purpose, it’s to celebrate what makes us all ‘other’ to someone else. That Israel and all its people should live in peace and freedom shouldn’t be a difference, when it is what we all expect for ourselves. To make a singer an emblem for irrational loathing does not win any arguments or solve the fundamental problem: the raging, ancient Jew-hate of a small bunch of knuckleheads, who have done nothing to grant peace to the people of Palestine.
If ever this horror comes to an end, the first sign will be when Eurovision has a song performed by an Israeli and Palestinian duo, and camp as Christmas the pair of them. Until that day, just ask yourself: is this really helping?
