EUROVISION IS A WEAPON OF ISRAELI PROPAGANDA
Europe would rather destroy its own institutions than admit Palestinian lives matter.
Something historic is happening in Europe on a stage coated with glitter, corporate branding, and a collapsing myth of neutrality. Within hours of the European Broadcasting Union’s decision to allow Israel to participate in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, the contest began to disintegrate from within. Spain pulled out. Ireland pulled out. The Netherlands, Slovenia, and Belgium’s Flemish broadcaster followed, almost in unison, as though Europe finally might be starting to shift under the weight of its own conscience.
Iceland is expected to make its final decision on Wednesday after Björk — Iceland’s most beloved cultural figure — urged the nation to boycott. Even Turkey’s TRT, which left the contest years ago, reaffirmed that Israel’s inclusion only vindicates its ongoing refusal to participate.
This is not a sideshow about a kitschy singing competition; it is the largest coordinated broadcaster walkout in Eurovision history. And it is happening because millions across Europe refuse to dance, sing, or cheer for genocide.
Eurovision banned Russia within days of its invasion of Ukraine, claiming the decision was necessary to prevent the contest from being brought “into disrepute.” Yet somehow the killing of more than 70,000 Palestinians — including over 25,000 children — does not bring Eurovision into disrepute. Somehow the starvation, the mass graves, the bombed-out hospitals, the dozens of murdered journalists, the flattened neighborhoods, the live-streamed horror of a people being made to disappear does not.
The question is no longer whether Eurovision understands its own political role; it is whether Europe has ever considered Palestinians human in the first place.
At the Doha Forum this year, EU Vice-President Kaja Kallas insisted that international law “must matter” and that global institutions “must be defended.” Yet Europe has imposed no sanctions on Israel. Many EU states continue to sell weapons to Israel. And Europe still allows Israel — a country not even geographically on the continent — to use Eurovision as a soft-power billboard while committing genocide in Gaza. Spain’s public broadcaster put it bluntly: the contest has become “dominated by geopolitical interests.” In other words: stop pretending this is about music.
What makes this even more revolting is that while Western politicians like Britain’s Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey pretend a “ceasefire” exists, the Qatari Prime Minister — the man directly negotiating between Hamas and Israel — has said clearly that this is not a ceasefire, not even a meaningful pause.
UNICEF confirmed that at least 67 children have been killed during the so-called “pause.” The WHO’s Dr. Rik Peeperkorn echoed this: “Although there’s a ceasefire, people still get killed.” And as journalist Richard Sanders told LBC host Rachel Johnson:
“How can you possibly say the ceasefire is holding? The Israelis have killed over 300 Palestinians. Do they simply not count? Are they not people?”
Europe has built an entire architecture of selective outrage around this question.
When Propaganda Becomes a Performance
The propaganda is not metaphorical, it is documented. An investigation by Eurovision News Spotlight uncovered that the Israeli Government Advertising Agency — not fans, not independent groups — launched a covert cross-platform influence campaign targeting viewers across Europe during Eurovision 2025. The Israeli government placed ads across Google products, encouraging Europeans to vote up to twenty times for Israel’s contestant. A YouTube channel created on April 20, 2025 posted 89 videos in just ten days, amassing more than 8.3 million views. Google’s Transparency Center confirmed the ads were placed by a verified Israeli government account.
And here’s the most revealing part: the ads never mentioned KAN, the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, because the broadcaster wasn’t involved. The state was. That omission violated Eurovision’s own rules, which explicitly require broadcasters to prevent government interference and prohibit any political instrumentalization of the contest.
Eurovision’s reaction? Tighten the rules, and then invite Israel back anyway.
Europe’s hypocrisy is not subtle. Before Russia was banned from Eurovision and FIFA, it had killed far fewer civilians in Ukraine than Israel has in Gaza. Germany, which now supplies 29% of Israel’s weapons (the U.S. supplies 70%), positioned itself early in 2025: if Eurovision ousted Israel, Germany would withdraw. In other words: Germany threatened the contest to protect Israel. So while Israel massacres civilians with German weapons, Germany shields Israel’s cultural participation in Europe’s largest entertainment event.
As Billy Bragg framed it:
“If we have one rule for Ukrainians and another rule for Palestinians, it starts to look like we only care about white-skinned people and not brown-skinned people.”
It doesn’t just start to look like that — it is exactly that.
Israel has long used Eurovision as a branding exercise to repackage its apartheid reality as progressive, LGBTQ-friendly, multicultural, and fun. When it hosted Eurovision in 2019, Israel erased Palestinians entirely, fined a contestant for holding up a Palestinian flag, showcased illegally occupied territories as Israeli land, and made it nearly impossible for Palestinians to attend. The tourism messaging was explicit: I know what you’ve heard — that it’s a land of war and occupation. But we have so much more than that.
Israel’s national selection competitions have included military propaganda and even songs about “annihilating Gaza.” Yet Eurovision insists it is “non-political.” The BBC, RAI, and most European broadcasters looked away, or worse, played along.
Audiences are no longer buying it. Spain’s broadcaster RTVE recently aired a split-screen broadcast juxtaposing Israel’s Eurovision performance with footage of bombs falling on Gaza, starving children, mass graves, and entire families lost beneath the rubble. Broadcasters, artists, and viewers across Europe are confronting the obvious: Eurovision has become a platform for laundering state crimes.
A caller to LBC named David — who grew up under apartheid in South Africa — said what Palestinians and anti-apartheid activists have been saying for generations: “Boycotts work.”
The Green Party in the UK has now called on Britain to withdraw. Activists in Australia, including the @MFWitches account, are threatening to boycott Eurovision’s major sponsors — and Australia’s broadcaster SBS — if they do not pull out of Eurovision 2026. “We aren’t playing around with this shit any longer,” they wrote, reflecting a mood spreading across the Global North: complicity will cost you.
Moroccanoil & the Architecture of ‘Foundation-Washing’
There is a reason the EBU is willing to risk a mutiny of broadcasters rather than confront Israel’s crimes. One of Eurovision’s biggest sponsors is Moroccanoil, an Israeli company whose brand is a masterclass in hasbara disguised as haircare.
Moroccanoil built its global identity by appropriating Moroccan argan oil, a heritage cultivated by Amazigh and Arab women for centuries, and rebranding it as a luxury Israeli product. Its manufacturing plant is based in Israel, producing roughly 150,000 bottles per day, shipped to more than forty countries. It sources Moroccan seeds, yet the brand’s founder has publicly described the products as inspired merely by “the Mediterranean,” erasing Morocco entirely, also known as aesthetic colonization.
Israel has even planted more than 20,000 argan trees in the Negev desert using seeds taken from Morocco decades ago — another layer of appropriation disguised as innovation. Moroccanoil rewards its top sellers with “luxury trips” to Israel, many filmed on illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights, showcasing “the beauty of Israel” while Palestinians living under apartheid are nowhere to be seen.
Moroccanoil doesn’t just sell hair products; it sells an image of Israel as glamorous, modern, carefree, sunlit, all while applying a thick cosmetic layer over ethnic cleansing.
In lifestyle magazines, fashion blogs, beauty features, and industry profiles, Moroccanoil’s presence polishes Israel into a brand associated with elegance rather than occupation, with desert chic rather than military checkpoints. It is soft-power propaganda through styling mousse and hair serum, and Eurovision is financially dependent on it.
When your sponsor’s corporate identity is inseparable from a settler-colonial state’s propaganda machine, neutrality isn’t merely impossible. It is dishonest.
The Death of Eurovision’s Moral Myth
Eurovision is collapsing because its moral scaffolding has rotted. The world now sees two parallel realities: one carefully lit onstage and one illuminated only by the flames of genocide in Gaza.
Broadcasters are withdrawing as a human response, dare I say an act of resistance. Their decision says: we will not be complicit in cultural theater that exists to distract from a genocide Europe continues to arm, fund, excuse, and sanitize.
If Europe banned Russia for invading Ukraine, then Europe must ban Israel for committing genocide. Anything less is an admission that Palestinian lives do not count, that international law is a racialized instrument, that cultural institutions will always choose power over principle.
Eurovision cannot survive as a stage where genocide is paused for a costume change. It cannot claim apolitical innocence while granting Israel a global platform to sing over children’s graves.
The only moral path forward is the one Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, Belgium, and the Netherlands have chosen: withdraw, boycott, refuse to participate in apartheid’s talent show. And if Eurovision insists on giving Israel a microphone, then the rest of Europe must respond by walking offstage.
A world that demands applause for genocide is a world in desperate need of a different soundtrack … one written by us, the people who refuse to harmonize with the machinery of erasure.
Good article, however at least two hundred Palestinian journalists have been reported murdered, not dozens.
Growing up in the 70s I remember thinking “why is Israel even in Eurovision”. That was probably when my brain began to recognise the anomaly and to deconstruct the propaganda.
Israel in Eurovision, Israeli Pride…lipstick on a 🐷. Literally.