AGI – A salvo of boos accompanied the rehearsals of Eden Golan, the Israeli competitor, in view of the final of the Eurovision Song Contest this evening in Malmo, Sweden. Police reinforcements have arrived from across the country, but also from Denmark and Norway to ensure security at the event, for which almost 100,000 fans from 90 countries are expected.
Police estimate that up to 20,000 people could demonstrate during the day against Israeli participation in a city that is home to Sweden’s largest community of Palestinian origin. Israeli singer Eden Golan, just 20 years old, won her ticket to the final on Thursday evening with the song “Hurricane”, the initial version of which had to be changed because it was deemed to allude to the Hamas attack on 7 October.
During the evenings, followed by tens of millions of viewers in twenty-six countries, nine participants, seven of them in the final, called for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza. Israel is participating in Eurovision, which it won for the fourth time in 2018, since 1973. “It is truly an honor to be here to present ourselves with pride,” Eden Golan, favorite to win behind Croatia, rejoiced on Thursday. Eden assured that her song “Hurricane” is “about a girl going through her own problems, her own emotions.” Before the semi-final, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Eden had “already won”, hailing her in a video message for having “successfully confronted a horrible wave of anti-Semitism”.
On Friday, the Spanish far-left Sumar party – whose leader Yolanda Diaz is number three in the government – launched a petition calling for Israel’s exclusion from the final “at a time when its troops are exterminating the Palestinian people and destroying all the countries in the region.” Berlin responded by considering “calls for a boycott against the participation of Israeli artists totally unacceptable”, while Paris underlined for its part that “politics has no place at Eurovision”. But the neutrality claimed by the demonstration is continually questioned. On Tuesday, Swedish singer Eric Saade appeared with his arm wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh. And yesterday the representative of the Netherlands Joost Klein, who on Thursday evening had expressed his disappointment at having been paired with Eden Golan, was not admitted to the dress rehearsal. Unions at Flemish public television VRT briefly interrupted the broadcast Thursday evening to broadcast a message condemning “human rights violations by the State of Israel.” An action condemned by the festival organisation, which last year banned Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky from speaking during the competition, in the name of political neutrality. Any flag other than that of the participants is prohibited in the arena, as is any banner with a political message.
