If one were seeking a contender for the world’s silliest annual event, the 68th Eurovision Song Contest, which starts next week, would be a hard act to beat.
As if judging a pop song to be “the best” of 37 countries’ efforts weren’t inane enough, most of the songs—whether from Albania, Finland, or Latvia—are sung in a global pop style, which is to say vaguely American-accented English. The few countries which dare enter anything from their own culture or language are destined to fail—even to suffer the embarrassment of scoring “Nul Points” in the judging, which is traditionally done in French and English.
Then there is the fact that a country doesn’t even have to be located in Europe to participate. National entrants come from as far away as Azerbaijan, Armenia, even Australia. Neither does a country’s singer need to be a national of the country they represent; Switzerland got Celine Dion, who is Canadian, to sing for them in 1988.
Oh, and there’s also the byzantine voting system, which in spite of all manner of checks and balances, turns out year after year to be nakedly political. Greece, for example, always gives maximum points to its buddy Cyprus and vice versa, and the Scandinavian and Balkan countries invariably vote most heavily for their immediate neighbors, as do the former Soviet-bloc nations.
Nevertheless, in spite of—or possibly because of—all this, Eurovision somehow still manages to be a huge, splashy, kitschy, good-humored entertainment, beloved by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Eurovision parties are popular everywhere the contest is big, along with viewing events in theaters and public squares. In the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, the contest is affectionately called the “gay World Cup.” It’s all such harmless fun that everyone puts aside how fundamentally asinine it is.
Until this year.
The problem is not just that Israel—a competitor since 1973 and a four-time winner—will be taking part in Eurovision 2024, the country’s first significant appearance in an international event, such as it is, since October 7 and the ensuing Gaza war. The prospect of protests, boycotts, and possibly violent action directed at Israel’s 20-year-old entrant, Eden Golan, her team, and anyone merely cheering for her, would be a headache enough for the organizers of a televised spectacle. But by an awkward alignment of the stars, the contest happens to be taking place in Malmö, Sweden, a port city and longtime gateway to immigrants, which hosts a large Muslim—and, specifically, Palestinian—population and has for many years been regarded as a somewhat unfriendly environment for Jews and Israelis.
Members of Malmö’s small—and shrinking—Jewish community, many of whom are the descendants of refugees from previous conflicts, have reported celebrations in the streets after the October 7 massacre, the burning of an Israeli flag outside the synagogue, and other hostile behavior directed at them since then. Members of Malmö’s Muslim community have warned against conflating anti-Israeli protest with anti-Semitism. But, as in other parts of the world, the line between the two can be blurry.
Among non-Muslim Swedes, both left-wing and neo-Nazi groups are reportedly planning to join the anti-Israel protests when the semi-finals start early this week. There is talk, too, of pro-Israel demonstrations. The volatile situation has not been helped by some inflammatory, borderline-racist, public statements against Israel’s participation from non-Muslim commentators.
No wonder local police are understood to be bringing in reinforcements from nearby Denmark and even from Norway—and that Golan is said to be arriving with a detail of bodyguards from Israel’s Shin Bet security service. Israeli authorities have warned Eurovision fans of Israel not to display publicly any signs of Israeli or Jewish affiliation in Malmö—something the city’s few hundred Jews have been avoiding for many years already.
Members of Malmö’s small—and shrinking—Jewish community have reported celebrations in the streets after the October 7 massacre.
“It’s a perfect storm,” says Fredrik Sieradzki, a spokesperson for the city’s lone synagogue. “Even my non-Jewish friends are saying we have to get away from the city, there’s going to be riots. And riots would be a comparatively good outcome. Worse things could happen. It’s a potentially dangerous situation.
“I don’t think all Muslims here hate Jews,” Sieradzki hastens to add. “I meet so many Muslims who don’t agree, who don’t hold those extreme opinions on Jews or on Israel, to be honest. We were building good relationships between the Jewish and Muslim communities. But now,” he says, “with October 7 and Eurovision, it feels like after going three steps forward, we’ve gone five back.”
Traditionally, the Eurovision winner hosts the following year’s competition. Sweden—a pop-music powerhouse since the mighty ABBA stole the show, in 1974—has won the contest many times, and Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, hosted the finals in 2013.
That year, Israeli journalists interviewed on a Swedish radio station said they were tailed by young men who threatened to bomb the Israeli delegation’s hotels. The reporters said they avoided trouble by claiming they were from Cyprus. Separately, a taxi driver who picked up Israeli passengers reportedly called them “damn Jews” and “Jewish whores” in Arabic.
If there is a law of prediction, it is that almost everything turns out to be better than the worst forecast and worse than the best. So even if—here’s hoping—Eurovision 2024 doesn’t result in any broken heads, the likelihood is high that a rather bad time will be had by all. It’s hard to imagine Golan being able to get out of her Malmö hotel room without security, and all too easy to envision her song “Hurricane” being greeted by an embarrassing silence in the auditorium when she sings it live on TV Thursday, in the second of two evenings of semi-finals.
Whatever the “quality” of her song, she is surely unlikely to get through to Saturday’s final—which could prove a relief to both the local police and her own security. Having made their daring stand by coming to Sweden at all, the Israeli delegation may well be glad just to get home safely.
But even if Eurovision turns out to be, as it should, just the routine festival of amusing nonsense and cheesy, hummable tunes, this summer Israel is taking part in another, rather larger, and vastly more fraught international event: the Paris Olympics. For those who care to remember, at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September murdered 11 Israeli athletes and coaches as well as a German policeman.
Despite the shouted slogans and threats in Sweden, not so much as a window has been broken in Malmö as a result of the current unrest. Paris, on the other hand, has seen 179 people killed and hundreds injured in 10 fatal Islamic terrorist attacks since 2013. And that was before October 7.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology