The repugnant campaign against Israel’s Eurovision star

Every generation, it seems, produces its own brand of inquisitor. The dogma being enforced may change, but the impulse to denounce and silence remains the same.

Enter Nemo, the winner of last year’s Eurovision Song Contest. The Swiss singer, who identifies as nonbinary, is now leading the charge for Israel to be excluded from the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, Switzerland. Speaking to the Huffington Post last week, Nemo claimed that ‘Israel’s actions are fundamentally at odds with the values that Eurovision claims to uphold – peace, unity and respect for human rights’.

Ahead of the semi-finals this week, over 70 artists and performers associated with previous Eurovisions signed an open letter demanding that Israel’s contestant, Yuval Raphael, be kicked out of this year’s competition. There have also been anti-Israel protests in Basel, as Raphael and the Israeli delegation arrived for rehearsals last weekend. One male protester even reportedly made a throat-slitting gesture towards her during the demonstration.

It’s hard to overstate just how grotesque the hatred against Raphael really is. After all, she is a survivor of Hamas’s vile 7 October pogrom at the Nova Music Festival in 2023. She was wounded in the attack and hid for several hours in a bunker beneath the bodies of those killed by the terrorists.

Now, Raphael has said she hopes that her Eurovision entry, ‘New Day Will Come’, will have a healing and unifying message in the aftermath of 7 October. At 24 years old, she is the same age as Nemo was when he crooned his way to Eurovision victory with ‘The Code’, a song about coming out as nonbinary. ‘I went to hell and back’, he sang. Presumably, this was all metaphorical. Raphael, by contrast, went literally. Yet self-styled progressives are still determined to silence her.

Nemo’s demands to exclude Raphael are truly repugnant. Nemo preaches ‘human rights’, while attempting to strip the survivor of the worst anti-Jewish attack since the Holocaust of her voice. It is an astonishing spectacle of moral inversion, in which the victim is punished for having the temerity to survive.

Sadly, the backlash against Israel’s entry is grimly predictable. It was a similar story at last year’s Eurovision in Malmö, Sweden, when thousands protested against the fact that a young Israeli woman, Eden Golan, was allowed to sing. That this year’s Israeli entrant is a survivor of an actual pogrom makes this spectacle all the more sickening.

The irony of all this is that, if Eurovision stands for anything, it is for the survival of the human voice. It was born, after all, in the wake of the Second World War. It was meant not just to entertain, but also to remind us of a shared humanity. To sing after war is an act of defiance and of hope. To sing after a massacre is nothing short of heroic. Shame on those Israelophobes who want to silence Yuval Raphael.

Andrea Seaman is a writer based in Switzerland.