The public broadcasters of both Ireland and the Netherlands announced this week that they will not participate in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest if Israel is allowed to participate, according to JTA.
They join several other countries in pressing the competition’s organizer, the European Broadcasting Union, into excluding Israel as an act of protest against Israel’s participation because of the war in Gaza.
The EBU has until now resisted entreaties to bar Israel but now faces a crisis as Europe — both through its unified institutions and as individual countries — has sought to ramp up pressure on Israel to end the war, which began when Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, 2023.
“RTÉ feels that Ireland’s participation would be unconscionable given the ongoing and appalling loss of lives in Gaza,” the Irish public broadcaster said in a statement on Sept. 11, adding that it was “deeply concerned by the targeted killing of journalists in Gaza.” (The Committee to Protect Journalists says 197 journalists have been killed during the war; Israel has said some of them were Hamas operatives.)
On Sept. 12, the Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS announced that the Netherlands would not participate in the competition if the European Broadcasting Union admitted Israel into the competition, where it has participated since 1973, winning four times.
“AVROTROS can no longer justify Israel’s participation in the current situation, given the ongoing and severe human suffering in Gaza,” the broadcaster wrote in a statement.
The broadcasters in Slovenia, Spain and Iceland have also all signaled that they could pull out of Eurovision if the EBU does not exclude Israel.
“I don’t think we can normalize Israel’s participation in international events as if nothing is happening,” Ernest Urtasun, the Spanish culture minister, told La Hora de La 1.
The simple answer to this problem is to move the population far away from the Israeli Fascists, a second State in the middle of Spain or the Netherlands would be perfect.