“THERE IS NOTHING LIKE AN ISRAELI PARTY” a line noted by journalists swarming around the Israeli singer Netta Barzilai who just had won the Eurovision Song Contest 2018 in Lissabon. She won the competition with an act & song that referrred to the #MeToo movement as could be heard in the lyrics that repeated several times the line “I am not your toy, you stupid boy”…
click image for larger version
Israel is now the country that will host next year’s Eurovision spectacle (as Israel is a member of the European Broadcasting Union)… and the town hosting that event will be what the state of Israel wants to see as “it’s capital”: Jerusalem.
Only one day after it was shown what sentiments lay behind that future host city of this innocent mass entertainment show. The day that the Americans opened their new embassy in Jerusalem and Palestinians were demonstrating against this act and claim, especially along the border with the Gaza strip.
Another kind of movement – #UsToo – manifested itself in a asymmetrical war like demonstration, whereby during the ‘wave attacks’, under cover of smoke fumes produced by burning car tires, attacks with catapults and stone slings against Israeli border troops, things did get so much out of hand that the Israeli army started to shoot with more than tear gas canisters…
The real numbers are not yet known, but it seems that there are over 40 dead on the demonstrators side and over one thousand wounded… Nobody wants to say that the demonstration was all peaceful, though most being present were not committing live endangering acts of violence … what we know for sure is that on the Israeli side there were no deadly casualties…
Will we see the day that there will be only events like ‘song contests’ that play out differences and competition between nations? Will it be the Broadcasting Union of the Levant & Mesopotamia that swarms the world with a new television show, the LEVANT/MESOPOTAMIA-VISION Contest, with female singers from a more liberal Iran, the new configured Syria displaying newly found brother- and sisterhood, Kurdish singers without war songs, an Iraqi bard duet with a Shia singer and a Sunni oud player… a sensational Israeli/Palestian post-punkband?
We will be all be watching it from our portable devices… there will be big screens in the open air to celebrate this great event… but first let’s do the ground work to make this happen in the future: take a stance beyond today’s hardliners and partisans of whatever unilateral ‘righteous causes’… we need to write the lyrics for a new top hit: #Us Too…. for all those good willing people that are fed up with harassment and assault in the name of national states, political power groups and religious organisations … a song that will “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem” [ref Wikipedia #MeToo]
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NB curiously the Israeli version of the #MeToo movement hashtag is #UsToo in Hebrew :גםאנחנו#
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Image & text sources used:
– “After Eurovision win, Jerusalem gears up to strut stuff on world stage” header of article in the Times of Israel of May 13th. 2018 on opening of American embassy in Jerusalem and winning of Israel of Eurovision Song Contest and Jerusalem as Eurovision event host in 2019.
The Times of Israel
– screenshot of Eurovision performance by Netta Barzilia of the song Toy
YouTube
– two pictures of the confrontation on March 14 at the Gaza-strip border with Israel, near Zeitoun, by the photographer Mohammed Amed of an Israeli drone that drops tear gas canisters on Palestinian protesters and Palestinians running for cover from the gas.
Washington Post
– Celebration of national ‘Jerusalem Day’ 13 May 2018 on Western Wall Plaza in Jerusalem, a photograph I altered a bit by adding the silhouette of the ‘Dome of the Rock’; Western Wall Plaza was created in 1967 after the Six-Day War by bulldozing what was then the Moroccan quarter, an extension of the Muslim quarter.
Ray Tribune
the limping messenger 