There is no pride in genocide:
LGBTQIA+ organisations worldwide call for Eurovision 2024 boycott

Following the refusal of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to ban the genocidal settler colony of Israel, we echo the Palestinian call for broadcasters, competitors, workers, and viewers to boycott Eurovision 2024. We urge all contestants, including those who recently said they would not withdraw, to consider their place in history and use their voices for meaningful solidarity by boycotting the contest.

By allowing Israel to compete in Eurovision, the EBU is not only complicit in whitewashing genocide, it is aiding apartheid Israel’s pinkwashing — the cynical exploitation of LGBT rights to project a progressive image — while it  commits genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. Eurovision has attracted the interest, passion and support of the LGBTQIA+ community for decades and Israel understands the contest’s propaganda value. In the words of Israeli president Isaac Herzog, “It’s important for Israel to appear in Eurovision.”

Despite clear requests from the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate and the BDS movement, along with artists from Sweden, Finland, and Iceland, Eurovision organisers have decided to keep Israel in this year’s competition, declaring it “a non-political event.” This is a change of tune from 2022, when the EBU banned Russia from competition after its invasion of Ukraine. The EBU is also ignoring the International Court of Justice ruling that Israel is plausibly committing genocide.

Israel’s cynical pinkwashing has been central to its participation in Eurovision for many years. Since adopting the “Brand Israel” strategy in 2005, Israel’s instrumentalisation of LGBT+ rights and liberal gay lifestyles has been key to its nation-branding propaganda campaign to conceal its apartheid regime. Eurovision — the ultimate celebration of camp and flamboyance — presents a perfect opportunity for Israel to pinkwash its systematic denial of Palestinian rights.

Since October 2023, Israel has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza and injured more than 75,000. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced. Major international human rights organizations and UN experts report that Israel is using starvation as a weapon against Palestinians in Gaza, with its siege causing deadly shortages of food, water and essential medicines. Shamefully, European governments and institutions continue to supply Israel with weapons, funding, and political support.

There can be no queer and trans liberation without freedom, justice and equality for Palestinians. For over 75 years, Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime has robbed, oppressed, ethnically cleansed, impoverished, imprisoned and killed Indigenous Palestinians, queer and non-queer alike. Now we see Israeli soldiers waving rainbow flags while standing on the ruins of the Palestinian homes that they just bombed.

Israel weaponizes homophobia and violence against Palestinian queers to push its colonial agenda. It spreads racist propaganda that Palestine is unsafe for queers. It claims to bring LGBT rights and liberties to Gaza, while killing queer Palestinians along with their friends and families. Israel attempts to erase Palestinian queerness, but queer Palestinians continue to exist and resist as they have done for decades. Now more than ever, it is time for queers around the world to take serious and strategic action in solidarity with our Palestinian siblings.

We are heartened by the Rio Cinema’s decision to cancel London’s biggest Eurovision screening party, and by the thousands of artists, politicians and individuals across Europe who have called for the exclusion of Israel from Eurovision 2024. Let us take inspiration from the growing global movement for Palestinian liberation as we intensify and escalate our actions. The business of Eurovision must not be allowed to continue as usual while Israel attempts to annihilate or ethnically cleanse Gaza’s entire population.

As queer collectives from Palestine and around the world, we refuse to have our identities instrumentalized by the settler-colonial apartheid regime of Israel. Our pride resides in our collective struggles for an end to colonisation, occupation and genocide everywhere. Our pride is in the movement for liberation for all of us. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

WE CALL ON THE GLOBAL QUEER COMMUNITY TO JOIN US AS WE:

• Call on Eurovision participants to refuse to perform in the genocide-washing song contest
• Organise creative actions to pressure national broadcasters to withdraw from Eurovision
• Demand that local venues cancel their Eurovision screening parties, and instead host educational events about Israel’s pinkwashing
• Join the BDS movement
• Answer the call from Queers In Palestine
• Share this campaign with friends, comrades, lovers, metamours and chosen family

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