Doing the Eurovision – and Palestinians – some service
The powerful performance of Bambie Thug in the Eurovision Song Contest last night, and all week in Malmo, has been a compelling experience. For this is a true artist unlikely to disappear quietly into the dark night now the contest is over for another year. In what has been one of the more controversial contests of recent decades, the creative and talented performer — Ireland’s first non-binary contestant — represented the country with an astute ferocity when there was significant pressure on them, and on other contestants, regarding the Israel-Hamas war.
Bambie Thug, from Macroom, resisted the clamour to withdraw, which was then and remains the correct decision. But the performer has also been clear on that war, chiming with public opinion back home on the side of the besieged Palestinian people while remaining focused on delivering a captivating performance quite unlike any Irish entrant before.
As Bambie Thug delivered a message in Sweden, the UN General Assembly in New York passed a resolution on Palestine’s membership of the UN by an overwhelming majority.
While there should be no illusion as to the challenge of converting the UN resolution into a reality, another person from Cork, Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin, declared that in passing the resolution by an 80pc majority, the voice of the world has said unambiguously it is time for Palestine to take its rightful place at the table.
The time has come for concrete, irreversible actions to underpin the equal right to security, dignity and self-determination for the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. Meanwhile, US president Joe Biden has withheld the supply of about 3,500 bombs, refusing to let US munitions play a part in Israel’s assault on the city of Rafah where more than one million Palestinians have sought refuge. But still Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to buckle, telling his people ahead of Israeli independence day that they will fight alone, without US arms and with their fingernails if they have to.
As has been stated by commentator Jonathan Freedland, Netanyahu wants to sound Churchillian, but these are words of weakness, not strength. Washington wants Netanyahu to stay out of Rafah, while his far-right coalition partners insist he go in hard to finish the job and win a “total victory” over Hamas.
At a time of such geopolitical tensions — in the Middle East and related to the unjustifiable Russian war on Ukraine — the Eurovision Song Contest may seem a trivial event by comparison. And of course it is. However, it is also an event where politics has long been close to the surface, as Ireland knows to its cost following the transformation of Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, culminating with the introduction of a public tele-voting system that has never favoured this country.
All of which adds yet more to the credit of Bambie Thug, an artist of talent and charisma who has surmounted even the voting blocs of eastern Europe and the Balkans and returned this country to its rightful place on the Eurovision final leaderboard. In more ways than one, Ireland made a notable contribution in Europe last week.