All selected artists/groups for Tel Aviv Eurovision Song Contest – which is it’s original name – have been invited to produce before the contest a short video-clip (video post-cards), clips used in the live broadcats of the event. …. These clips were set and filmed in different parts of Israel… whatever territory might entail… so I saw a few (I do not watch the Eurovision thing normally, but now it has enough other meanings to do so when Isarel becomes a part of Europe)… in the clips I saw beautiful fields, beaches, townscape (no fences and walls in sight) – all without an actual mapping of the location… I became under the impression that there was no ‘video shot’ fired in the West Bank, let alone in Gaza… so public relation managers must have advised prime minister Netanyahu not to use the occasion of Eurovision to showIsraeli occupied/liberated enclaves within the West Bank as Israeli landscape background for these clips.
This screen shot is taken from: “ISRAEL21c is a non-partisan, nonprofit organization and the publisher of an English-language online news magazine recognized as the single most diverse and reliable source of news and information about 21st century Israel.” The’ABOUT’ section states also this: “ISRAEL21c was founded in 2001, in the wake of the Second Intifada, to broaden public understanding of Israel beyond typical portrayals in the mainstream media. The organization’s founders – Israeli-American technology executives – understood the great power of the Internet and developed a first-of-its kind online product with global appeal and reach.“
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The winning Israeli song of 2018 had a #MeToo theme with the song “I am not your toy boy”, which is a good thing in a gender emancipatory sense. The #MeToo theme needs to be expanded to other phenomenon of repression and rape… to ‘the rape of nation states’.
No nation state can deny that its history is based on the favouring of one group of people over another one and what is presented as its sacred history is nothing more than a constructed myth about a past that never existed the way it is represented now. Of course a myth tends to have some traits of reality that existed in the past, it is not all imagination, but as the nation state proposes it’s unique identity, this can only be done by neglect or discrimination of elements that are excluded.
What kind of Eurovision we will see in the future with the split up of national states on the one hand and a further integration of European nations on the other? Will it become a contest of regions? Will the number of participating regions and even city-states make it into an event with over one hundred contesting ‘national or cultural entities’? Welsh, Scottish, Norther Ireland, Catalan, Basque, Occitania, Flanders, Wallonia, Limburg, Friesland, Sachsen, Transylvania, Liechenstein, Rutania, name it… Will it be something smeared out over a song-contest season taking several months… and most important will we then get a more idiosyncratic regional cultural impact on melody, text,language and choreography of the contesting singers, musicians and dancers? As it stands now diversity of the stage acts is dwindling by the year and with participants from the other side of the globe we may ask if this is more due to a globalising than an europeanising cultural effect, with less and less unique cultural species around.
A Eurovision Song Contest of regions could counter the melting pot effect of styles… or am I here proposing a xenophobic renaissance of autochtone tribalism and is the fusion of all national styles into three theatrical prototypes – as we witness now – something we should welcome as a positive outcome of peaceful coexistence?
The total neglect and exclusion of the Palestinian nation in the year 2019 Eurovision Song Contest in Israel shows that such a development may take many decades before it can becomes a reality. At least I like to propose it as something to strive for, utopian as it may seem today.
(*) The New Yorker had this picture and comments on the choice of Eurovision city and the failed attempts to boycot the 2019 Israel Eurovision event:
The host city is often a country’s capital, but this year the European Broadcasting Union, which produces Eurovision, nixed Jerusalem. The city has hosted the event twice before, in 1979 and 1999, but those were times when Jerusalem’s future seemed more open-ended, and Israel’s claims on it more ambiguous. Barzilai won the event, last year, during the same week that the Trump Administration moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and more than sixty Gazans were killed at the border with Israel. If the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump were going to try to settle the fate of Jerusalem by fiat and force, the executives of the European Broadcasting Union, apparently, were not going to be party to it.
So Tel Aviv was swapped for Jerusalem, Israel’s état réel for its état légal, a decision that rightist pundits called “a win for the B.D.S. movement”—the Palestinian-inspired movement of Western activists advocating for boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions—although any hard feelings caused by the flap quickly dissipated. In the end, no country backed out of the contest. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, a B.D.S. supporter, had called on artists to shun the event, particularly Madonna, who was considering making an appearance. But Madonna, an acolyte of Kabbalah—a Jewish mystical tradition—confirmed that she will perform at the closing event, on Saturday night. Israelis will settle for that.
Caption of the New Yorker: “Left-wing Israelis protest the Eurovision Song Contest, which this year is being held in Tel Aviv.Photograph by Menahem Kahana”
(**) There is a very interesting andwell documented Wikipedia page on the Eurovison Song Contest and the participating countries, explaining how the odd definition of Eurpean works according to the EUROVISION broadcats association as well as listing those ‘countries” that tried in vain to participate (Liechtenstein, Lebanon, Catalonia, Kosovo, Qatar, Scotland, Wales, Soviet Union, Tunesia).
the limping messenger 