Eurovision is an annual celebration of the gaudy and the garish – but I suppose someone should come to its defence amid the backlash. This year’s contest has provoked a fit of fury not about the naff music, simpering performers, or style choices that make Lady Gaga seem demure, but about the fact that Yuval Raphael came first in the popular vote.
I probably don’t need to tell you which country she was representing. It was, inevitably, Israel, under whose flag she sang the pop number ‘New Day Will Rise’. Twenty-four-year-old Raphael is a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre on 7 October 2023. After Palestinian terrorists shot up the shelter she and her friends had fled to, Raphael spent eight hours lying alongside their bodies pretending to be dead.
Israel didn’t come back to Basel to justify itself, it came to sing its song
In Saturday night’s Eurovision final, Raphael came out top in the public vote, with viewers watching at home awarding her 297 points, but fared poorly in the jury vote, made up of music performers and industry insiders, where she picked up just 60 points. In the end, Austria’s JJ leapt from fourth place among viewers to overall first thanks to a very favourable jury vote for ‘Wasted Love’. Raphael came second overall. This made some Eurovision-fixated progressives very happy, an odd way to respond to a singing contest but hardly the first time Europeans have sided with an Austrian over the Jews.
Others were not so satisfied. How could Israel, the global pariah reviled by all right-thinking people, have won the popular vote across enlightened, progressive Europe? On X, coping and seething were to be seen in roughly equal amounts. Irish state broadcaster RTE commissioned a politics lecturer to explain why Irish viewers gave Israel ten points, the second-highest allocation possible. (Answer: opposition to Israel was too divided.) Across social media, a few minutes on any Eurovision hashtag or topic will quickly throw up a plethora of users explaining that the public vote was rigged.
It might just be that the viewers liked the song. Israel-haters struggle with this. If that were true, it would mean viewers saw Eurovision as a mere music competition rather than another platform for doing their mandatory daily devotion to the Palestinian cause. The masses might be frightfully unideological but their consciousness couldn’t possibly be in need of that much raising. Or maybe viewers felt bad for what Raphael had been through and gave her a sympathy vote. If Israel had more rational detractors, this would have been the explanation they coalesced around. European audiences didn’t embrace Israel or enjoy its music, they were emotionally blackmailed into giving pity points to a massacre survivor.
Israel has rational critics, but they are more likely to be found in mid-level roles in the Trump State Department than among very online European progressives or TikTok-radicalised zoomers who agree that Zionism, the definition of which they are currently skimming on Wikipedia, has no place at Eurovision.
It would never occur to such people to dismiss Yuval Raphael’s popular appeal as the product of excessive empathy because they could not conceive of the person who would feel any empathy for an Israeli, excessive or otherwise. To feel empathy for an Israeli is to deny empathy to a Palestinian. The possibility that someone could empathise with both the victims of 7 October and the Gazan civilians killed by Israel during its military response simply does not register.
Hating Israel was once a favoured sport among the intellectuals, and just as their race and gender hobbies have been loosed upon the rest of the world, so too has this one. There is no requirement to know anything of the conflict, its origins, its history, its nuances, or its hypocrisies. If you have reserves of resentment dammed up – and don’t we all? – you can let them flood down upon these new villains, who, I must tell you, aren’t all that new to the vilification business. Progressive politics is fashion or it is nothing, and Palestine is the latest iteration of the omnicause, the viral trend all your favourite influencers have hopped on, a cultural password by which the low-information may gain access to the world of high-status opinion.
When an Arab hates the Jews it’s damnable, but at least there’s a long-running, two-way beef there. When Callum who lives in Vauxhall, works in marketing, and until two years ago thought the Gaza Strip was a drag act at Pride, hates the Jews, there is no dispute of history or religion or philosophy from which to extract context. Callum has never knowingly met a Jew in his life, has never heard of Ben Gurion, couldn’t name a single Palestinian, and would stare blankly if you started up a conversation with him about the nakba. Hatred can be understood, but shallow hatred doesn’t deserve the attempt. Viewers who just tuned in to listen to some pop music somehow managed to be the least superficial members of Eurovision’s audience.
This year’s final was held in Basel, Switzerland, the city where in 1897 Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress and proposed that the Jews, tormented and vilified across Europe, return to their ancient homeland and establish a Jewish state in Palestine. It was a provocative idea then and remains so now, albeit the identity of those provoked and the nature of their objections have switched a few times since. Israel didn’t come back to Basel to justify itself, it came to sing its song. It will go on singing its songs for as long as there are Jewish songs to be sung.
Comments