Eurovision under the shadow of war
Europe’s biggest singing contest says it’s apolitical. An Israeli artist is putting that claim to the test
The first Eurovision Song Contest was held in 1956, just over a decade after the world had emerged from the horrors of war.
When this year’s version begins next week, conflict — the sevenmonth war between Israel and Hamas — will once again be lurking below the stage-managed surface of the singing competition, which has counted ABBA and Céline Dion among its winners.
A hint of that tension was encoded this past week on the face of Bambie Thug, Ireland’s tattooed, nonbinary and musical-genre-bending pick for the competition.
In a rehearsal appearance for the show, the word “ceasefire” was written on the right side of their face in Ogham, a medieval Irish alphabet that uses combinations of horizontal and diagonal lines.
Israeli authorities have, meanwhile, warned citizens about travel to Malmö, Sweden, where the contest is being held.
There are “credible concerns that terrorist factions will take advantage of the demonstrations and the anti-Israel atmosphere to execute attacks on Israelis coming to Sweden for the Eurovision,” the country’s National Security Council said in a statement. “Unlike the Israeli delegation to the contest, individual Israelis are not protected.”
The head and heart of that Israeli delegation is Eden Golan, a 20year-old performer with the voice and stage presence of Ariana Grande who qualified for Eurovision after winning Israel’s national competition.
Golan knows a thing or two about singing. She also knows something about war.
Born in Israel to a Latvian father and a mother of Ukrainian descent, the family moved to Moscow for work when Golan was six. Her family had always intended to return to Israel. But that move was precipitated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when they joined hundreds of thousands of others fleeing the country.
The family sought refuge in Israel, but found themselves back in a state of war after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas militants, which killed nearly 1,200 people and saw about 250 others taken hostage. Israel’s military offensive in Gaza has subsequently killed more than 34,000 people, according to health officials there, and precipitated a humanitarian disaster.
“The feeling of being (in Russia) during the war and being here is completely different,” Golan told Mako, a Hebrew-language news outlet, in February. “If in Russia everyone was trying to flee the country, here, on the contrary, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else at the time.”
Before being selected for Eurovision, Golan said she struggled to find acceptance as an Israeli artist, stung by criticism that she was more a product of Russia than Israel. In victory, she has been embraced by Israelis but become a target of global outrage.
Israel is a four-time winner of the contest, but has faced a long and difficult road to Malmö, hampered by protests calling for it to be dropped over its prosecution of the war in the Gaza Strip, with some drawing comparisons to how Russia was kicked out of Eurovision after invading Ukraine in 2022.
Other competing Eurovision artists, including Britain’s Olly Alexander have faced pressure to boycott the competition from those who say it “provides cultural cover for an ongoing genocide.”
The European Broadcasting Union, an alliance of national broadcasters that runs the contest, resisted calls to ban Israel.
They were right to do so, in the view of Dean Vuletic, an adjunct professor at the University of Luxembourg who has researched and written extensively about Eurovision, in addition to attending every competition since 2012.
He said that, to him, it’s an open-and-shut legal question: There are no international sanctions against the Israeli government; none of the countries represented at the contest have severed diplomatic ties with Israel; and the national broadcasters are constrained by their governments’ foreign policies.
“When people call for the organizers of Eurovision to act, I think the people behind those calls don’t really understand what the European Broadcasting Union is and how limited its capacity to act is,” he told the Star.
Contest organizers did reject an early version of “October Rain,” Israel’s official song entry. It contained lyrics such as, “Writers of history/Stand by my side,” and “I promise you, never again/I’m still drenched from the October rain.”
The lyrics were interpreted as not-so-veiled references to the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 — too charged for a singing contest that is, according to its rules, “a non-political event.”
In accordance with those rules, organizers also say that only flags of the competing countries will be allowed into the studio, and any Palestinian symbols or paraphernalia will be turned away or confiscated.
It has been challenging over the years to separate pop music from politics.
In 2014, after Russia’s illegal annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and the imposition of laws criminalizing gay “propaganda,” the Tolmachevy Sisters of Russia were booed by the live Eurovision audience. That prompted organizers to employ “anti-booing technology” in subsequent years.
In 2016, Ukraine sent Crimean Tatar singer Jamala to Eurovision to perform “1944,” a song inspired by the forced deportation of her people under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The song began with the lyrics that could equally have applied to modern-day Russian aggression: “When strangers are coming/They come to your house/They kill you all/And say/We’re not guilty.”
Moscow protested the song’s admission into the contest. When Jamala won, Russians called for a boycott of the 2017 Eurovision competition, which was to be held in Kyiv. (They need not have bothered: Ukrainian officials refused to issue a visa to Russia’s Eurovision pick for having travelled to Crimea from Russia in violation of Ukrainian law.)
Many following Golan’s Eurovision journey have been scrutinizing her video, outfits and statements for hidden political messages.
A white tank top with a bulletsized hole in the chest was interpreted by some as a nod to Israel’s Oct. 7 victims. Others saw in the strips of white cloth used to make Golan’s flowing white dress in a Malmö rehearsal performance the bandages used for the country’s wounded.
But when she takes to the stage on Thursday, during the second semifinal broadcast, to sing “Hurricane,” Israel’s approved entry, it will be a song stripped of any lyrical winks or nods.
The final result of the world’s longest-running singing contest won’t change the grim situation on the ground in Gaza. But, it will put the conflict and all of its tensions on a Swedish centre stage, no matter how much this event has tried to portray itself as apolitical.
“The real battlefields really do have an impact on Eurovision,” Vuletic said. “Eurovision does not manage to overcome the conflicts, but rather reflects them.”