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Long live Eurovision!

  • Pablo Sapag Pablo Sapag
  • Source: Al Mayadeen English
  • 15 May 2024 15:57
5 Min Read

As Spain’s song for the 2002 Eurovision edition proclaims, for the last one hundred plus years “Europe's living a celebration!”

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  • The participation of “Israel” is a blatant confusion between geography and ethnic, cultural realities, and political and military impositions. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab el-Hajj)
    The participation of “Israel” is a blatant confusion between geography and ethnic, cultural realities, and political and military impositions. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab el-Hajj)

Leaving aside the dubious taste of many of the songs and choreographies performed, the recently held Eurovision Song Contest is very useful to understand what has been happening for more than a hundred years in Natural Syria, of which Palestine is an essential part.

To begin with, the participation of “Israel” is a blatant confusion between geography and ethnic, cultural realities, and political and military impositions. There is no entity more European and therefore Western than “Israel”. For this reason, its membership in Eurovision is granted and more than justified. Expelling “Israel”, furthermore, would mean concealing its spurious origin, its condition as a strange European colonial exclave in Bilad al-Sham and the rest of historical and Natural Syria, which is a comprehensive thousands years social and cultural reality.

In every single edition, even more so when the European-Zionist entity perpetrates actions like the ones of this year in Gaza, the Eurovision Song Contest provides a unique opportunity for the general public to ponder the fundamental questions that help us grasp the underlying structure of such an anomaly.

The Zionists and their creation, the Israeli entity, did not arise in Natural Syria by spontaneous generation. Zionists came from the heart of Europe, which was influenced by German Romanticism, and which in the last third of the 19th century gave birth to Zionism and other supremacist, exclusionary, and expansionist ideologies as well. Later they were projected onto historical Syria thanks to the imperialism of France and the United Kingdom, which with their secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 to divide and conquer Bilad al-Sham, laid the foundations for the “Balfour Declaration” of 1917, in which the United Kingdom promised Zionists the creation of a state in Palestine. 

German Nazism accelerated the transfer of the European population to natural Syria and the partition of Palestine, imposed in 1947, attracted other Zionists from around the world, from the United States to Argentina, from Russia to Ethiopia, and so on to this very day. 

Eurovision, which is organized by public European TV corporations, is as significant as European football or basketball championships. This year, the Israeli contestant said her name was Eden “Golan”. Naturally, it is a false surname. The performer is of Ukrainian and Latvian origin, her true paternal surname being Glagolev, with clear Baltic and Slavic origin. In fact, the singer was doing what many other Israelis, especially those  attempting to project their propaganda have done, such as film producer and screenwriter Menachem “Golan”, who is in reality Menachem Globus, known alternatively as Joseph Goldman. Or musician Eyal “Golan”, known for his surname of Bitton. 

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As evidenced by the most reputable genealogical dictionaries of family names, “Golan” is “an artificial name adopted by many Israelis”, from the geographical feature whose name is “the Golan Plateau or Heights.”

According to the United Nations, the Golan is a territory of the Syrian Arab Republic occupied by “Israel” in 1967 and annexed illegally by the Zionist entity in 1982. Illegal actions that violate International Law and resolutions 242 and 497 involve “Israel’s” refusal to withdraw from the occupied Syrian Golan. The UN Security Council declares the illegal annexation resulting in the displacement of tens of thousands of people from the Golan Height as null and void. Additionally, “Israel” conducts frequent attacks on the rest of Syria, exacerbating the situation.

The occupied territory served as a rear base for jihadist groups operating in the south of the Syrian Arab Republic between 2011 and 2018. There is an infamous image of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose original Polish surname is Mileikowsky, visiting members of these armed groups in an Israeli field hospital in the occupied Syrian Golan in 2014.

The participation of the Israeli interpreter in Eurovision allows us to realize and remember that the European-Zionist project, supported by the entire collective West, which is nowadays led by the United States, is based precisely on the occupation of others' territories by non-natives of Bilad al-Sham; occupiers whose surnames expose them, such as that of Miss Glagolev. Her presence on stage became a consented exaltation of the occupation of other people's territories by fire and sword.

As the contest didn’t veto “Israel's” participation, unlike what happened for two years with Russia because on account of the war in Ukraine, the hypocritical European double standard has been revealed. 

Also, what German Chancellor Olof Scholz and his predecessors call “reason of state” to justify their unrestricted defense of “Israel”, no matter the crimes it commits, was made much clearer by the repeated image of embraced young European hedonists waving the German and Israeli flags together in Malmo, the Swedish city hosting the contest. 

Any symbol that remotely signified Palestine was prohibited, and the booing towards Glagolev was drowned out in the television audio track with canned applauses. That was an unnecessary action because during the online general public voting, “Israel” secured fifth place among the 26 participants. Not bad at all. As Spain’s song for the 2002 Eurovision edition proclaims, for the last one hundred plus years “Europe's living a celebration!”

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Mayadeen’s editorial stance.
  • Eurovision
  • Gaza
  • Israel
  • Zionism
  • war on Gaza
Pablo Sapag

Pablo Sapag

Professor at Complutense University of Madrid and author of "Syria in Perspective".

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