The Eurovision Song Contest is now facing the biggest boycott and most serious crisis in its history after five European broadcasters withdrew rather than share a stage with genocidal Israel. PACBI, which called for boycotting Eurovision in 2018-19 when hosted in apartheid Tel Aviv, has repeated that call since 2024. We welcome the Spanish, Dutch, Irish, Icelandic and Slovenian broadcasters’ withdrawals and reiterate our call on all participants to boycott the complicit song contest and all its events.
For broadcasters, contestants, presenters and others to still participate in Eurovision alongside a state perpetrating an ongoing, livestreamed genocide amounts to complicity in artwashing genocide. Furthermore, the refusal of most participating broadcasters to withdraw has helped to shield Israel from accountability, accelerating the world’s descent into a might-makes-right order.
Millions of fans, thousands of artists, many former participants including recent winners and national selection finalists across Europe have supported our call for Israel to be excluded from the contest due to its ongoing, livestreamed genocide against 2.3M Palestinians in Gaza and underlying regime of settler-colonial apartheid.
In a statement published by No Music for Genocide, more than 2,000 musicians say they “refuse to be silent when Israel’s genocidal violence soundtracks and silences Palestinian lives. When children in Israeli prisons endure beatings for humming a tune. When all that’s left of nearly every stage, studio, bookshop and university in Gaza is piles of rubble, under which slaughtered bodies still await recovery and proper burial.”
A recent investigation by even the New York Times–an outlet whose shamelessly biased reporting has helped enable Israel’s genocide and decades of oppression against Palestinians–has found that “Israel’s efforts to influence Eurovision’s vote were broader and started years earlier than previously known.” Its report also said that “in some countries, it would have only taken a few hundred people to tip the popular vote,” including in countries where Israel is “deeply unpopular,” and that overall this “campaign could have easily changed the contest outcome.” As the chairman of the board of Iceland’s public broadcaster said, “the Israeli government has co-opted Eurovision.”
At the Eurovision organisers’ last General Assembly in Geneva, members voted in favour of slap-on-the-wrist reforms but did not suspend the deeply complicit Israeli broadcaster KAN. Immediately after, five European broadcasters withdrew. It was then revealed by Israeli media that Israeli president Isaac Herzog had launched “an intensive, months-long diplomatic campaign that unfolded largely behind the scenes,” lobbying European broadcasters to support Israel’s inclusion. Herzog had been named in South Africa’s submission to the International Court of Justice for inciting to genocide. Responding to the news, the president of Spanish broadcaster RTVE said: “Israel manoeuvred in the shadows for months. What seemed like a democratic debate in Geneva was just a farce cooked up in backroom offices… The government of Israel will continue using the festival as it sees fit.”
Meanwhile, Israeli broadcaster KAN has broken every rule in the European Broadcasting Union (EBU)’s rigged, colonial book. It has consistently justified and incited to genocide live on air. A UN-published report, Gaza Genocide: a collective crime, cites Israel’s participation in Eurovision and the Venice Biennale as prominent examples of how “Israel has been sheltered from accountability” in global fora. Failing to ban Israel has helped to normalise its genocide and contributed to its destruction of the rule of international law.
Excluding Russia from Eurovision over its illegal invasion of Ukraine while keeping Israel shows an astounding level of colonial hypocrisy. Amnesty International says the failure to suspend Israel from Eurovision is “an act of cowardice and an illustration of blatant double standards,” adding that “Israel’s impunity can no longer be tolerated.”
Eurovision is also an opportunity for Israel to pinkwash its genocide against Palestinians and its underlying apartheid regime, as many queer and trans artists, activists and organisations have recognised in supporting the boycott. More than 140 LGBTQ+ organisations from over 30 countries have supported the Palestinian call for the boycott of Eurovision 2026. Alternative, genocide-free Eurovision events are taking place all across Europe, including in Brussels, Oslo, and host city Vienna, where there is also a demonstration planned.
Contest organisers the EBU have utterly tarnished the contest, which is partnered with complicit Israeli company Moroccanoil, simply in order to serve Israel while it commits genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Eurovision audiences and fans have responded decisively, with many hotels in host city Vienna lowering prices after the expected wave of tourists failed to materialise. Viewing figures for the semi-finals reportedly showed sharp declines in key markets compared to previous years. Israel’s semi-final performance was peacefully disrupted by a protester chanting “stop the genocide” – later edited out by the EBU.
Artists and cultural workers have increasingly taken meaningful stands to challenge Israel’s impunity and insist on accountability from complicit institutions. At the Venice Biennale, more than 200 participants, including many national pavilion artists, demanded Israel’s exclusion. When organisers failed to, the jury declared it would not consider the representatives of any state whose leaders have been issued arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court, meaning Israel would not be considered. Reportedly following legal intimidation by representatives of Israel, the jury later resigned, with the Biennale announcing a new “visitors” award, which would be open to genocidal Israel. In response, more than 20 national pavilions have withdrawn from consideration from the awards, and many partly or fully closed their exhibitions in solidarity with an historic strike called by Palestine solidarity campaigners and trade unionists.
PACBI applauds the tireless and strategic work of BDS campaigners and cultural workers and our intersectional allies across Europe to effectively pressure broadcasters to withdraw. Since Israel has expanded its aggression to the wider region, escalating its ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, and perpetrating massacres against the peoples of Lebanon and Iran, it now, more than ever, poses a threat to humanity at large. Ending complicity with Israel is the most effective and principled way to hold it to account.
As José Pablo López, the President of Spanish state broadcaster RTVE recently said, "there is no music that can cover up this horror nor business that can justify it. The theatre is over.”
For any enquiries please contact [email protected]