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Welcome To Eurovision Wars
Eurovision Wars is a series of podcasts exploring geopolitical themes as they emerged on the Eurovision Song Contest stage. You can listen to Seasons 1 and 2 in full on Spotify, covering such topics as the Russia-Ukraine War, and the long-running dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia. For Season 3, the podcast moves to its new home at ESC Insight, and will focus on the many controversies of Eurovision 2024. In particular, hosts Phil Doré and Ana Oppenheim will attempt to contextualise the fierce rows over the Israeli entry for Malmö 2024.
In episode five, the date is May 11th 2024, and we arrive at the Grand Final of the 68th Eurovision Song Contest. How does the pressure leading up to the live show play out, how did the likes of Israel, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom fare, and how important is the Song Contest to the wider world?
Our Principles Of Discussion
Before we go on, a quick reminder of the principles we are holding to in this series. Discussing Israel and Palestine is inevitably difficult and polarising, so in episode one, we introduced three ground rules to frame our podcasts.
Be willing to keep more than one thought in your head.
It can be true that the founding of the state of Israel was in response to centuries of antisemitism and the horrors of the Holocaust, and also that its founding was marked by massacres and forced displacement of the local Arab population. Likewise, it can be true that Israelis have a right not to be victims of Hamas terrorism, and Palestinians have a right not to be bombed by Israeli warplanes. These are not contradictory.
Explanation is not justification.
When we say that decades of oppression against the Palestinians contributed to October 7th, that is not to justify the atrocities of that day. Likewise, in describing those atrocities, this does not render the mass destruction inflicted by Israel on Gaza acceptable.
If one side in a conflict commits a war crime, that doesn’t mean the other side gets a free war crime.
Because, unbelievably, that point still has to be made.
Eurovision stage concept for Malmo 2024 (EBU / SVT)
If we are to fully understand how the Eurovision Song Contest became so controversial in 2024, then this inevitably leads to difficult conversations. But these are conversations we absolutely need to have as a community.
You can find previous Eurovision Wars episodes on ESC Insight here.
You talk extensively about the campaign done by Israel in days leading to Eurovision’s final 2024 and how it was too much. You basically say that it is due to this campaign that Israel won such a large televoters. I suspect that you are trying to delegitimize Israel televote score and in the process you throw the televoters(mostly from the U.K., but in general all of the televoters) under the bus and portray them as easy to manipulate, brainless people who didn’t know what they did when they casted their vote to Israel.
What Israel did with that campaign is exactly what Google or META do on a daily basis. Sending all of us a targeted advertisement on basis of our internet surfing and our interests. All you need is someone who knows how it works and use it to your own advantage. I suspect that the person(s) who did the online campaign did this on volunteering basis( something in Israeli society, you will never understand). I also think that if the U.K.(or any other country) would do such a campaign, which would results in a good televote results, you would have been praising the U.K. for the good job they did.
The thing is, we don’t know how effective this campaign was. In Eurorvision, people make their own mind and pay for their vote, but they don’t have to give the reason why they have voted. How many people voted for Israel as a result of the campaign and what was their percentage of the total votes? The same question applies for those who voted out of sympathy and it also applies for those who voted because they liked the song ( contrary to your beliefs, there are people who liked the song, and voted for that reason for the song). We also don’t know if there are people who voted only once or maybe gave all their 20 votes to Israel. In short,what you say about the campaign is all speculative, because you have no proof about its effectiveness.
I wouldn’t read too much in the fact that Hurricane did not reach the top 100 chart, although it got 12 points from the U.K. televoters. For every Eurovision song , which reaches the top 100, there are countless Eurovision songs, which don’t reach the charts. It is what is.
There are some very surprising televotes results, which are worth mentioning, because they were very very much unexpected ones: 12 points from Spain, Finland and Portugal and 10 points from Ireland – Do you have any explanation for those votes? Especially the Irish televoters – Were they also influenced from the campaign or maybe the campaign simply was irrelevant?
At the end Israel finished 5th, above 99% of all the countries/artists that were calling to boycott Israel, who wanted Israel to be expelled from the 2024 contest. The sweetest victory of this was when Israel finished above the Irish participants, the one I considered to be the chief bullied of them all. I hope they shed tears when they realize that they finished under Israel, with quite a large margin.
I have no problems with Nemo as the winner. It was a good song performed very well. In few years time , people will forget why it won. It is, once more, a winner in the juries vote which wasn’t the favourite or even the 2nd or 3rd favourite by the televote
P.s.
I am going to take this opportunity to talk about something that belongs to episode 4 of this series of podcasts. I didn’t react to it when the episode was aired, so by this.
Half way through episode 5, Phil raises the “from the river to the sea…”slogan and he and Anna make a short 2 part discussion about it. In the 1st part of the discussion, they talk about the best solution for the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Their conclusion is that 1 state is the best solution. They leave it quite vague if this would be an Arab/ Palestinian or a Jewish state. From something Phil says, I suspect they mean the former rather than the later. Remaining vague about this allows them, in the 2nd part of the conversation, to call the slogan a non-anti semitisch slogan and define the slogan as a general call for resistance. A typical way in some circles, to soften the blow by giving something which sounds bad a softer meaning, so it will be acceptable by the general public.
For those of you out there, a Geography lesson: The river is the Jordan river, the East border of Israel. The sea is the Mediterranean sea, the West border of Israel. And when Pro-Palestinian shout this slogan they mean they want a full Plestinian state on the full area which is now Israel. All you need to do is check the the Palestinian books , which they use in schools. This is what children are taught from a very young age. In short the slogan “from the river to the sea…”, is not just call for a resistance but it is also very anti semitisch slogan.