Miriam Deprez
Pro-Palestinian protesters included young and old, cis and trans, Jewish and Muslim, queer and straight—marching during the Eurovision Song Contest, Tel Aviv, Israel, May 15.
Sea breeze, laughter, and pop anthems fill the air at the Eurovision Village, a sprawling fairground only feet from the Mediterranean shores of Tel Aviv. The city welcomed thousands of people from around the globe to its sun-kissed streets and beaches as Israel hosted the week-long Eurovision Song Contest, which has been described as the “Gay Olympics,” for the third time.
But this year, diverse groups of local and international nonviolent activists are disrupting the festivities to protest against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
One group—with members from the United States, Israel, Palestine, and eight European countries—projects a video onto a screen near the main stage after nightfall on May 13. The short film, produced by the social change group Activestills and entitled “Dare to Dream” after the Eurovision 2019 slogan, shows young Palestinians speaking about their hopes and aspirations. Activists hold a banner under the screen that says “Free Gaza” in Hebrew and English.
According to Shahaf Weisbein, a Jewish Israeli activist associated with the group, the demonstration prompted outrage from the audience, who “beat the activists and [took] a phone from them.”
Forty-eight hours later, on the anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic for “Catastrophe”), the same protestors stage an afternoon “die-in” just inside the main entrance to the village. They lie prostrate on the ground to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 establishment of Israel, which made them refugees in their own land. The action lasts only a few minutes, but Weisbein stays behind to take questions from press. Facing several video cameras with a microphone in hand, she is flanked by Eurovision fans who call her slurs and boo her into silence.
Danny Brodsky, a Jewish-Israeli student-activist who helped organize a “Free Gaza” march through the streets of Tel Aviv on May 14, says it is a “cruel irony” that Palestinians are “being slaughtered” in Gaza as the Western world revels in a bacchanalian celebration only miles away.
In the Gaza Strip—one of the most densely populated regions on earth—conditions are so dire that the United Nations predicts it will be “unlivable” by 2020. For the past twelve years, the coastal enclave of some two million residents has been subject to an air, land, and sea blockade by Israel. More than half of Gazans are “moderately-to-severely food insecure,” the U.N. reports, and unemployment stands above 50 percent as of 2018, says the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Within a year, reports the U.N., Gaza’s aquifers will not have any safe potable water.
An Israeli woman who watches the die-in action and requests to speak anonymously says she does not approve of what the activists are doing. “I’m here to enjoy myself and not to talk politics,” she tells The Progressive. “Let us celebrate a little bit.”
Back at the “Free Gaza” march, hundreds of local and international dissenters walk through the streets chanting in Hebrew: “Government of war,” “Money to the neighborhood, not to the settlements,” and “The lies of the government will not bring us security.”
Miriam Deprez
Local and international activists used the Eurovision spotlight to denounce Israel’s long-standing violations of Palestinian human rights.
The march focuses on the phenomenon of “pinkwashing”—Israel’s erasure of its human rights violations by promoting itself as a queer-friendly state, explains Tair Kaminer, a queer Jewish Israeli activist from Jerusalem who speaks to The Progressive over voice messages.
“People from all over the world come here and can visit Israel and feel like it is a very multicultural and young and fun country,” she says. But occupation and promotion of LGBTQ rights “just can’t go together.”
The U.N. stated in early 2019 that Israel may be guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for its recent violence against Great March of Return protestors, who have marched along the Gaza-Israel perimeter each Friday since March 30, 2018. In the first year of protests, Israeli forces killed some 277 demonstrators, 18 percent of them children. Journalists, paramedics, and people with disabilities were also shot dead. An additional 31,000 protestors were injured by Israeli gunfire during that period.
According to Weisbein, the crowd’s aggression and violence against the activists demonstrates “that Israeli society is very much entrenched in violence and resisting anything that resembles any kind of solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
Not incidentally, Gazan and West Bank Palestinians cannot be found in the crowds of Eurovision fans or protestors, as their freedom of movement is restricted by Israel—in violation of international law. Indeed, a local organizer tells me she is aware of only four Palestinians, all of them Israeli citizens, protesting in Tel Aviv during the week of Eurovision. Amnesty International says there are currently more than five million Palestinian refugees, most of whom live in the occupied Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
After multiple requests for comment, a spokesman for Miri Regev, head of the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport, tells The Progressive that Regev “doesn’t give any interviews on that subject,” although she was an outspoken advocate for hosting Eurovision 2019 in Jerusalem. Israel wrested East Jerusalem from Jordanian control in 1967 and claims all of Jerusalem as its rightful capital, but the eastern half of the city is still largely recognized as occupied territory.
After the die-in action, shortly before sundown, the activists meet with journalists on a sandy beach near the Eurovision Village to talk about their political objectives. Under a variegated sky of violet, yellow, and bright red, The Progressive speaks with Rotem Levin, a Jewish Israeli anti-Zionist activist, about his country’s true colors. It is hard to hear him above the roar of an unmarked black helicopter that shines a spotlight down on the group.
“The occupation has been going on for so long,” Levin says. “I feel like those kinds of [demonstrations] might help the international community to understand that there is a big problem here and they have to start helping us change it.”
Members of De-Colonizer, a collective of educators, researchers, and activists who advocate for an egalitarian Israeli state, walk the grounds of Eurovision Village throughout the week, speaking to attendees about Al-Nakba. They focus specifically on the fact that both Eurovision Village and the song contest, which is five miles away at Expo Tel Aviv, take place on Palestinian land, says Eitan Bronstein, co-founder of the group.
Al-Manshiyya, a once-bustling Palestinian neighborhood of 13,000 on the shores of what is now Tel Aviv, “was destroyed” he says, “and dumped into the sea.”
The Israeli occupation, on top of its human rights violations, is also stifling dissent and advocacy for Palestinian rights, they say.
Although many see the anti-occupation activists as insular rabble-rousers, the activists see themselves as trying to engage with the Israeli public. Educating the Israeli populous, Bronstein says, is a critical component of a future peace between Israel and Palestine.
“The apartheid starts in your mind, in your experience,” agrees Brodsky, adding that he and other Jewish Israeli and other activists will not stop their efforts to end the occupation until their “last breaths.”
“If there’s no peace,” he says, “no songs can be sung.”