Closing My Eyes to Eurovision

We skipped Eurovision this year.

For those of you who live under rocks or in the US, Eurovision is an annual song contest. It’s open to any nation that subscribes to some nebulous European television consortium, which is how countries like Australia, Israel, and Azerbaijan get in, and it’s been running for over sixty years now. Each participating nation contributes one song to be judged by both national panels of judges and a popular vote from each country. The winning country gets to host the next year.

We’ve been watching it for a few years or so – Kim longer than any of us – and it’s always been an enjoyable bit of nonsense. Two semifinals and a final event, each three-plus hours of high camp, power ballads, spectacle, the occasional funny or quiet song, and enough gender fluidity to pucker the asshole of every Republican in Texas. It’s pointless, completely unproductive, and a welcome break from a world that insists that such things should not be allowed to exist.

And the songs are generally pretty fun.

Part of the ethos of the thing is that it’s not supposed to be political. It was founded at a time when the scars of World War II were still livid and its organizers wanted to do something that would bring people together a little. Whether it has lived up to that standard is an open question, especially recently – everything has become political these days, and song contests no less than anything else.

Russia hasn’t been able to participate since it invaded Ukraine, for example, and honestly this feels about right. Nobody wants to hear from warmongers.

This does, however, beg the question of why Israel was allowed to participate last year given its ongoing overt campaign of genocide against the Palestinians. It seemed a double-standard, particularly since one of the biggest corporate sponsors of the event was an Israeli company and since – despite the loud boos from the crowd and the deep unpopularity of their presence – they very nearly won with a song that could at best be described as “forgettable mid-list FM filler.” I suspect that the Eurovision folks were very relieved they they’d come in second, because if they’d won this year’s version likely would have taken forty minutes to air in its entirety. 

We now know that the Israeli government spent millions of dollars in advertising to buy the popular votes in the participating nations and urge its own citizens to cast multiple votes for their own act, and while this is technically not a violation of the letter of the rules it is deeply cynical and destructive to the ethos of the thing. Not that the current Israeli government cares about destruction or cynicism.

And before you get your engines revved up, please understand that anyone who accuses me of antisemitism based on the previous discussions will be held up to public ridicule and declared a worthless toady of a genocidal government. I grew up in an area that had a majority Jewish population. The local public schools got Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur off. Most of my early friends and two of my first three girlfriends were Jewish, as are members of my extended family. The sovereign state of Israel is very much not the same thing as the Jewish faith or the Jewish people or their culture. It is a nation state whose actions must be judged by the standards of all nation states, and by those standards it is one that deserves to be shunned by any who abhor war crimes, the slaughter of civilians, and the willful violation of international law and human decency.

It is in other words entirely possible to judge the sovereign state of Israel – and judge it harshly – without being antisemitic, and those who work to obscure that point need to explain why they feel genocide is acceptable if their side is doing it. “Never again” was supposed to apply to everyone, and the fact that a nation founded as a refuge for the victims of the Holocaust is currently inflicting genocide on others is grotesque.

That Israel was allowed to participate in this year’s Eurovision was inexcusable.

As an American, I realize my own government does not leave me with any moral high ground on which to stand – honestly, if the US were a participant this year that would have been yet another reason to skip it entirely. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his merry band of neo-Nazi ethnic-cleansing ghouls have turned the US into an outcast nation in less than two years, and I cannot tell you how infuriated this American is at seeing my country dragged into the abyss of disgrace like this. But since the US isn’t part of Eurovision, that’s a separate problem for another day.

There was a lot of hearted argument in the Eurovision community about the presence of Israel this year. Spain – one of the Big Five countries who fund most of the event – withdrew over it, as did seven-time winner Ireland. Iceland (a perennial favorite), the Netherlands, and Slovenia also announced that they would not participate. Yet nothing changed.

The contest was this week, and it slipped by largely unnoticed in our household, a sad change. I did see the winner pop up in my social media feed, and perhaps someday I will bother to listen to it. I also saw that nothing changed regarding the runner up from last year, also the runner up this year, so maybe I won’t.

This will not bother the Eurovision people at all, of course. I am one obscure person in a country that doesn’t even participate in the event, and my decision to skip it this year will cost them nothing.

But watching would have cost me something I couldn’t replace, and that seemed more important.