Why Eurovision won’t boot out Israel

The rules of the Eurovision song contest are clear: no politics. That might not seem hard for a pop-music showcase, but when contestants represent their countries, politics tends to get involved. The victory in 2014 of Conchita Wurst, a drag queen from Austria, seemed to rebuke Russia’s homophobic government, which had invaded Ukraine. Two years later Ukraine won with a song by a Crimean Tatar about Stalin’s deportation of her ancestors.

This year’s contest, on May 7th-11th in Malmo, in Sweden, is the most politicised yet. Israel is taking part even as its war in Gaza rages. In February the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), an alliance of national broadcasters that runs the contest, considered disqualifying the country because the lyrics of its entry, “October Rain”, seemed to refer to Hamas’s terrorist massacre of Israelis on October 7th. The deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza led Scandinavian musicians to petition the EBU to ban the country, as it had banned Russia in 2022 after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.