Israel could still get out of hosting the Eurovision Song Contest next year.
Sources close to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) responded Sunday evening to a threat from the Israel Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) that it would be forced to cancel Eurovision in Israel next year unless the government would provide the 12 million euro guarantee being demanded by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
The IBC is having difficulty securing the guarantee, which the EBU is demanding be deposited in a Swiss bank.
Gil Omer, chairman of the IBC’s board, threatened Netanyahu that the corporation would announce to the EBU this week that he would give up the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest in Israel.
“In two days’ time, the Israel Broadcasting Corporation will be required to provide a guarantee of 12 million euros to ensure the existence of the Eurovision 2019 competition in Israel, a point of no return, after which if the guarantee is not provided by the European Broadcasting Union, it will not be possible to change the situation and Eurovision 2019 cannot exist in Israel,” Omer wrote to Netanyahu.
He added that “for the past two weeks I have been making great efforts to inform the decision makers of the obstacles we face in order to make every effort to resolve them. In various letters I sent during this period, I noted that we see great importance in the competition in Israel, Both in terms of image and economic perspective.”
“Unfortunately, our repeated requests for intensive work to solve the major problems that stand in the way of competition in Israel have not been answered,” Omer added in his letter to the prime minister.
Sources close to Netanyahu responded Sunday night, saying that “The prime minister and the finance minister decided that a body that is budgeted at a huge sum of 750 million shekels at the expense of the public can find the budget source for the Eurovision Song Contest.”
Eurovision is scheduled to take place in Israel next year due to Netta Barzilai winning the contest this year with her song Toy. But does it even make sense for Israel to be competing in Eurovision, much less hosting it?
More important than the issue of the obscene costs, it’s important to understand that Israel is a deeply Semitic nation with a ruling class that desperately wants to be part of the West. Competing in European sports leagues and song competitions isn’t going to change the fact that Israel is actually very Middle Eastern and should desire active integration into our own region (even VICE sees our participation in Eurovision as ridiculous).
The Europeans will never accept Israel as part of Europe just as they couldn’t historically accept their Jewish populations. Nor should we want to be accepted as part of a civilization that represents everything that’s antithetical to authentic Hebrew identity – a value system based on the foundations of an idolatrous religion, an economic system based on oppression, individualism at the expense of the collective, a shallow “universalism” that’s actually enforced uniformity and “multiculturalism” that’s actually just Western capitalist values expressed with various accents and cuisines.
Israelis aren’t European and pretending we somehow share fundamental values only make it harder to decolonize our identities and easier for our neighbors to mistake us for foreign invaders in the region. Europeans themselves at best see us as cheap facsimiles of themselves – which anyway no one really likes or respects.
