Boycott Eurovision, take to the streets, dance to songs of anti-colonial resistance!

14 May 2026

The Eurovision Song Contest takes place this Saturday. Please join Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain along with the Musicians boycott campaign—of which I and All Our Friends, a community party I co-host, are signatories—and boycott the blood-stained broadcast!

Israel fully understands that the contest is one of the most effective ways to improve its public image, which has suffered as a result of its ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians along with the six illegal wars/invasions its currently engaged in. Eurovision exists to help us understand that Israel is just a victim and only wants to bring peace and harmony to the world.

Last year, in the middle of an ongoing genocide, Israel’s entry, "New Day Will Rise" by Yuval Raphael, spread the message of the loss of 7 October and of responding by choosing the light. The contest attracted 166 million viewers. There’s substantial evidence that the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) altered the live audio feed during Israel’s performance to dampen the sounds of booing and protest chants.

This year’s Israeli-Jewish entrant, Noam Bettan, singing “Michelle”, is supposed to mark a shift from lyrics that directly try to portray Israel as the hard-done-by victims of Palestinian dominance. Apparently Israel’s hasbara chiefs have grasped that playing the victim on the back of a genocide is a hard sell.

Instead “Michelle” is about breaking free from a toxic relationship, and so plays into the long history of feminist and queer songs that capture the resilience of being courageous, independent and principled, even when confronted by terrible circumstances. Israel will represent the song with a mirrored diamond prop, which Israeli public broadcaster Kan describes as the largest prop of this year's event.

It’s an odd way to break with the narrative of victimhood. The West’s major source of diamonds was Kimberley in South Africa. Britain dominated the diamond mines from the 1870s onwards, pioneering a system of racial exploitation that defined South African for more than a century. It’s just so frustrating for Britain, the Germans (who genocided the Herero and Nama peoples in the early 20th century) and other western supporters of Israel that South Africa leads the case against Israel for perpetrating a genocide. 



Yet the diamond symbolism makes sense, as do the song’s thematics of surviving a toxic relationship. From the Israeli perspective, the relationship could easily refer to how it increasingly views its diehard supporters—the US, Germany, the UK, France, etc. All have come under fire from Netanyahu and the government for not being sufficiently supportive of a genocide that Israel couldn’t have perpetrated without them.



Netanyahu has been particularly upset that any ally should recognise Palestinian statehood while funding Israel to make sure that that statehood has minimal chance of becoming a reality—wipe out the children, demolish every building and road, block the sources of water, poison the land. But this is the nature of delusion: nothing is ever enough.



Another aspect of Israel’s delusion rests on an idea that complements the victim-survival narrative of “Michelle”: that it can resist being a victim by establishing itself as a genuine global power. Back in September Netanyahu made a typically sickening speech that positioned Israel as a modern-day Sparta. In other words, Israel is not only resilient and self-reliant but also militarily formidable. Everything is directed towards the aggressive power of the state. Though this it can not only withstand growing international isolation but force people to love it.



The Sparta model appears to rest on the idea that it can become an economic powerhouse through its booming military-AI industry, selling weapons it has “successfully” trialed in Gaza—success here meaning they can operate according to genocide-level standards. Certainly the Israeli stock market is flying, up 100% since 7 October. At the same time, Israelis have long been massively buying up property in Cyprus and Greece in particular. Greater Israel doesn’t constrain its ambition to West Asia—the Mediterranean is included as well.



Argentina is also emerging as a notable non-European destination for Israeli property investors. The development coincides with Argentina executing a dramatic geopolitical realignment from South America to the historic Euro-US alliance. Argentina has a long history of harbouring war criminals (5,000 Nazis migrated there after World War Two) and fostering fascism. So the relationship with Israeli citizens carries promise.



The breaking free from a toxic relationship also plays into western media. Independent journalists along with Al-Jazeera have long reported on the widespread use of rape as a tactic of domination and power by the IDF against Palestinians. This also involves using dogs to commit the rape. Almost entirely complicit with Israel’s victim narrative and particularly treacherous when it came to reproducing hasbara lies about rape, beheading babies etc on 7 October, the New York Times caught up with the story and even did some original research in a story it published on Monday. Now Netanyahu and foreign minister Gideon Saar have initiated a defamation lawsuit against the NYT.



All of this is underpinned by the great irony of Israel entering Eurovision in the first place. The contest began in 1956. Israel joined in 1973. The EBU determines who can compete. It has nothing to do with geography. Yet Israel has also felt comfortable with the Euro branding.

The first major wave of Jewish settlers in Palestine came from Europe, in particular Germany, with the Jewish Agency negotiating with Hitler for more than 50,000 German Jews to migrated to British-controlled Palestine. Ever since the Second World War Germany has made the Palestinians pay for the Genocide the Germans perpetrated against the Jews. Israel welcomes its Euro bear hug as it repeatedly attempts to position itself as being on the side of “European civilisation” vs the barbarity of “the rest”. This amounts to just one aspect of Israel’s deeply racist psychology.

Zionists like to say that Israel is no longer a European country, especially since non-European Jews became a major presence in the country. None of this changes the fact that Europeans, particularly the British, created Israel in the first place for geopolitical reasons. In contrast to the wider European colonial project, the plan from 1917 onwards was to not administer Palestine from afar but instead to have European Jews run the country as an ally by establishing a majority presence—an inherently violent yet faltering project that the genocide has sought to get back on track.

Of course the EBU, like almost every other western organisation, insists that it can’t do anything to exclude Israel. Yet within hours of Russia invading Ukraine it excluded Russia from the next Eurovision. The lies of the Eurocrats just don’t wash anymore.

The wider background to this is that Israel understands that it’s losing control over the media narrative. Enter Larry Ellison, a hardcore Zionist and the co-founder of Oracle who in recent times has also bought Paramount/CBS, TikTok (US), the Free Press, DC Comics, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, etc, and is looking to buy CNN, Warner Bros., and HBO. This is all part of an Israel-led call for Zionists to take over social media as well as traditional media platforms. Zuckerberg is of course already there with FB and instagram. Two months ago Israel announced that it was increasing its PR/hasbara budget from $150 million last year to $730 million this year.

These budgets go towards mass campaigns that stretch across society—including Eurovision. For each contest Israel invests huge sums of money to persuade supporters to vote up to 20 times each to inflate Israel’s popularity. The budget for the campaign to reach out to diaspora groups to get them to vote Israel in a completely manipulative way reaches hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This kind of dishonest vote-rigging is the only way to explain Israel’s relative popularity last year while it was doubling as easily the most hated country on the planet. A vote for Israel is a vote for genocide and psychopathic warmongering—but for Zionists Palestine, a land they didn’t reside in for 2,000 years, is inherently theirs.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, named in the SA genocide submission as someone who has delivered genocidal statements, and also a warmly-welcomed guest of Keir Starmer last year, has been campaigning European broadcasters for months to support Israel’s ongoing inclusion. Both Iceland and Spain have commented on how Israel has effectively coopted—they’re too polite to use the word “colonised”—Eurovision. The Zionist response has been to label their boycott along with the boycotts of Iceland, Ireland and the Netherlands as antisemitic. What else?

If it had any commitment to its founding principles the EBU would kick out Israeli public service broadcaster KAN for becoming a pawn of the state. As Palestinian-Irish activist Samir Eskanda told Owen Jones yesterday, KAN isn’t just whitewashing the genocide, it’s justifying it and advocating it. Link:

The good news is the boycott looks like it’ll be massive. In addition to the five nation states that have take the ethical decision to do something better with their Saturday evening, the No Music for Genocide campaign has more than a thousand signatories. They include Brian Eno, Massive Attack, Paloma Faith, Nadine Shah, Kneecap, Macklemore and many others.

There’s a growing chorus of diehard Eurovision fans who are dismayed at the cooption of a once-loved pop contest by the Zionist lobby. Several ex-Eurovision winners are boycotting the event and have announced they will return their trophies. Eurovision devotees are complaining that the competition has become soulless and boring. Covering up genocide just isn’t a very soulful thing to do. Pretending that everything is shiny and rosy is boring.

I joined the No Music for Genocide campaign a while ago and now a party I co-host, All Our Friends, is a signatory. For the last few years All Our Friends has somewhat accidentally found itself running up against Eurovision. This time we approached the clash more boldly and called on our community to boycott Eurovision—whether or not they were planning on coming to our party. We’ll be donating any profit to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

We operate an invite list system and I wondered if the Eurovision email might lead to an unusually high number of guests decided to unsubscribe from the list. Yesterday I got to check. No, it didn’t have that effect at all. In fact it had had almost no impact on numbers at all. Unsubscribes were if anything down. The requests to join continued their ongoing rise. We’ve also had dancers write in to say how happy they are to take a stand against the genocide.

Before all that happens, if you happen to be around during the day, the next national solidarity demo is taking place earlier that day, assembling at 12:00 noon on Exhibition Road, SW7. This also looks like it’ll be massive. Starmer, urged on by everyone from the Chief rabbi to Nigel Farage and the far right, is committed to clamping down on the right to protest. He’s also dismantling the judicial system so that juries are persuaded to convict protestors. This rally therefore carries added urgency.

I wish I could attend but will be immersed in nonstop preparation for the party. If all goes well I’ll get to select some songs from the new Kneecap album—songs of anti-colonial resistance and joy to counter the diamond-encrusted toxicity of Israel’s genocide-soaked entry.