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On Thursday evening during the second semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest, Eden Golan, the singer representing Israel at this year’s edition, qualified for the final, which will be held on Saturday. Israel’s participation in the event has been much discussed for months due to the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip that began last October, in which around 35,000 Palestinians were killed.
On Thursday in Malmö, the Swedish city where the competition is held, there was a well-attended demonstration in support of Palestine. According to the police, between 5 thousand and 6 thousand people protested both against the military actions of the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip and against Israel’s participation in Eurovision. Protest organizers said further demonstrations and an alternative concert would be organized for Saturday’s final in the city. On Thursday, around 120 people demonstrated in support of Israel.
The demonstration in support of Palestine in Malmö (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)
Protesters compared Israel’s situation to that of Russia, which was disqualified from Eurovision in 2022 after invading Ukraine. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the body that organizes Eurovision, has defended its decision to admit the Israeli contestant to this year’s edition by claiming that the event is apolitical in nature. Inside the arena where the artists perform, Palestinian flags have been banned (flags in general are very common among the public), and the artist representing Ireland, Bambie Thug, had to change part of his make-up, consisting of written “ceasefire” and “freedom for Palestine” in an ancient Celtic alphabet.
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On Wednesday during the rehearsals for the semi-final Golan had already been challenged by the public present and had then received https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/1788623007990050922 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. During Thursday’s semifinal you received both applause and some protests from the audience.
Israel had to change the title and lyrics of the Eden Golan song, which had initially been rejected for violating the rules on the political neutrality of the event. The song was initially titled “October Rain”, that is, “October Rain”, and alluded to the October 7 attacks against Israeli civilians both in the title and in some of its verses, such as those in which the word “flowers” appears, which in Israeli army jargon it is used to describe soldiers killed since the start of the war. Eventually Israel’s public television network, Kan, agreed to change the lyrics and title of the song, which is now titled “Hurricane” and has been stripped of direct references to the massacre.
In the months before the event, hundreds of musicians from several countries, including Sweden, Denmark and Iceland, had signed petitions asking the EBU not to admit Israel to Eurovision, and boycott campaigns had spread online. The Nordic countries are historically favorable to the Palestinian cause, and moreover in Malmö there is a rather large community of people originally from Arab countries, who due to ethnic and religious affinities support the population of the Gaza Strip.
Eurovision has been organized by the EBU since 1956, which brings together the main public TV channels from dozens of countries, mainly European. In addition to these, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Israel are also participating, as well as Australia, which was invited for the first time in 2015, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the event.
The Eurovision finalists were chosen via televoting on two evenings, Tuesday and Thursday: Israel qualified in this way along with 19 other countries. Added to these are the 5 founding countries of the event – Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom – which are automatically qualified for the final, together with that of the winner of the last edition, in this case Sweden. For the final, as usual, in addition to the public vote there will also be that of the juries of experts from each of the qualified countries.
During the Rai broadcast on Thursday evening https://twitter.com/ESCdiscord/status/1788681278142718097 the percentages of votes assigned to the various competitors by the Italian public: Israel received almost 40 percent of the votes, while none of the other competitors received more than 10 percent. A surprising and difficult percentage to explain, even assuming a high appreciation of the song among the Italian public or a hypothetical demonstration of closeness to Israel. The other countries did not publish the results, and it was a rather unusual decision even for Rai, which usually does not do this during the semi-finals.
The site on Friday Eurovisionworldwhich aggregates the winning probabilities of the various countries estimated by various betting agencies, indicated Israel as the second favourite, after Croatia (Italy, with Angelina Mango, is seventh).
