Eurovision Dilemma

Eurovision insists it is non-political, which is one of those statements that only works if you never examine it. Countries compete under flags, voting blocs form along diplomatic fault lines, and Russia was rightly excluded after invading Ukraine. At that moment, Eurovision stopped being a neutral song contest and became something else. A cultural event with values. Or at least with lines it was prepared to draw.

That decision matters, because it created a problem Eurovision would rather not face.

Israel’s participation now sits squarely in that space. Gaza is not a footnote. It involves mass civilian casualties, displacement, and allegations of war crimes now before international courts. Letting Israel perform as if this is just another year of smoke machines and costume changes looks uncomfortably like normalisation. Not endorsement, but sanitisation. A projection of business-as-usual when business very clearly is not.

From that perspective, withdrawal by other countries makes moral sense. It is not censorship. Nobody is stopping Israel singing. It is a refusal to provide a glittering backdrop of normality. A quiet way of saying “this has crossed a line we are not prepared to paper over”. And once Russia was excluded, the question stopped being whether culture should be political and became whose violence counts.

But here is where the argument starts to fray.

Russia and Gaza are not the same conflict. One was a war of conquest aimed at erasing a neighbouring state. The other is a brutal, asymmetric war following a mass-casualty terror attack by a non-state actor embedded in a civilian population. That distinction does not excuse Israeli actions, but it does matter. If you flatten everything into a single category of “bad enough”, you replace moral reasoning with slogan logic.

Then there is the effectiveness problem. Withdrawal feels righteous, but it is also largely performative. Israel does not change military strategy because Ireland or Slovenia sit out a song contest. The people actually affected are artists, broadcasters and audiences, many of whom oppose the war. The government being protested remains unmoved, while the protestors enjoy the glow of having “taken a stand”.

Worse, withdrawal will be read, whatever the intentions, as collective ostracism. You can insist it is about policy, not people. It will still feed a siege narrative and reinforce the idea that Israel is uniquely beyond the pale, while conflicts in Yemen, Sudan or Ethiopia barely trouble the cultural calendar. Selective outrage is not a strong foundation for moral authority.

The soft-power argument cuts both ways. If Eurovision really is a platform with influence, then keeping cultural channels open matters too. It gives space to dissenting Israeli voices rather than handing the stage entirely to hardliners who thrive on isolation and grievance. Cultural quarantine rarely moderates anyone.

And there is the legal reality. International courts investigate, they do not yet rule. If participation becomes contingent on unresolved allegations, Eurovision will need a permanent tribunal just to decide the running order. That way lies paralysis.

So the dilemma is real.

Staying feels like complicity dressed up as neutrality. Withdrawing feels like moral clarity that risks collapsing into gesture politics. One says “this is regrettable but tolerable”. The other says “this is intolerable, even if our response is blunt”.

Perhaps the most honest position is to admit that neither option is clean. Eurovision crossed its own Rubicon when it excluded Russia. Having done so, it cannot now pretend that consistency does not matter. But nor should it kid itself that boycotts of song contests are a substitute for serious political pressure, legal accountability, or diplomatic effort.

The discomfort here is not hypocrisy or cowardice. It is that culture is a poor tool for resolving atrocities, yet too visible to ignore them. Eurovision wants to sing about unity while standing on a fault line it helped expose.

And that unresolved tension is the truest note in the whole contest.