Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The anti-Israel Eurovision mob are Hamas’s little helpers

Protestors wave the Palestinian flag as Yuval Raphael sings on stage (Getty images)

Imagine booing a survivor of a fascist attack. People actually did that this week. Pro-Palestine activists heckled and insulted a young woman who survived Hamas’s anti-Semitic butchery of 7 October 2023 by playing dead under a pile of bodies. Take a minute to consider the depravity of this, the sheer inhumanity of tormenting a woman who experienced such terror.

It was a spectacle of cruelty masquerading as protest

The woman is Yuval Raphael. She’s the 24-year-old singer who’s representing Israel at Eurovision. The last big music event she attended was the Nova festival in the desert of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. What she witnessed there almost defies belief. Mass murder. Heaps of corpses. The infliction of the most unforgiving violence on young people whose only ‘crime’ was that they were Jews in Israel. It is a miracle she survived.

In a normal world, in a world that was not so riddled with the sickness of Israelophobia as ours is, Ms Raphael would have been given a hero’s welcome in Europe.

Britain’s best politics newsletters

You get two free articles each week when you sign up to The Spectator’s emails.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Comments

Join the debate, free for a month

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first month free.

Already a subscriber? Log in