Eighty years after Europe almost completely wiped out its Jewish population through the Holocaust, while at the same time confiscating Jewish assets worth thousands of billions of Swedish kronor in today<\/b>\u2019s value, Europe is now seeing demands for a diplomatic, cultural, and economic boycott of the Jewish state.<\/b><\/p>\n
The tensions surrounding Israel\u2019s participation in Eurovision, which have increased sharply over the past two years, reached their peak this year when five countries withdrew from the competition in protest \u2014 the largest political boycott in the contest\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
After leading the unsuccessful campaign to have Israel excluded from the competition, Spain, Slovenia, Ireland, Iceland, and the Netherlands left the contest. The five nations announced their decisions after a large majority of members of the European Broadcasting Union voted in favor of Israel\u2019s participation.<\/p>\n
The EBU was founded on February 12, 1950, because its predecessor, the International Broadcasting Union (IBU), was considered too involved in the war on the side of Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Irish writer Graham<\/strong> Linehan accused Ireland\u2019s public broadcaster RT\u00c9 of antisemitism when it aired his comedy Father Ted<\/i> instead of the Eurovision Song Contest in protest against Israel.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>\u201dI did not give my permission for Father Ted<\/i> to be used as a prop in an antisemitic political act, \u201d Linehan said in a social media post.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>\u201dTo exclude the world\u2019s only Jewish state, while no such standard is applied to any other nation, fulfills the internationally recognized IHRA definition of antisemitism, \u201d he said, arguing that the public broadcaster\u2019s antisemitism\u00a0<\/span> \u201dpoisons Irish public life [and] normalizes hatred of Jews. \u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Noam Bettan from Israel<\/strong> came in second place with the song\u00a0<\/span> \u201dMichelle \u201d<\/i> in the final of the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria. He narrowly lost to Bulgaria, which took first prize. Israel came third in the televote, which accounts for 50 percent of each country\u2019s total score, while\u00a0<\/span> \u201dMichelle \u201d placed only eighth in the jury rankings.<\/p>\n For the third year in a row, Israel\u2019s entry received many votes from the Swedish public and zero from the SVT jury in the Eurovision Song Contest. The trend was the same across the rest of Europe.<\/p>\n Less than a week before the Eurovision final, the EU\u2019s foreign ministers approved new sanctions against Israelis living in Judea and Samaria, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas announced on X.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In May last year,<\/strong> the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) voted to push Norway to introduce an international economic boycott of Israel. Two hundred and forty delegates voted in favor and 60 against, and the decision was met with loud applause.<\/p>\n At the end of last year, Spain introduced new trade restrictions against Israel and banned products and services from the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem, which may be the largest embargo at the national level since the Arab League boycott when the State of Israel was established, writes The Times of Israel<\/i>.<\/p>\n Spain, Ireland, and Belgium have actively pushed for the EU to suspend the association agreement between the EU and Israel, which gives Israeli goods access to European markets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eighty years after Europe almost completely wiped out its Jewish population through the Holocaust, while at the same time confiscating Jewish assets worth thousands of billions of Swedish kronor in today\u2019s value, Europe is now seeing demands for a diplomatic, cultural, and economic boycott of the Jewish state. The tensions surrounding Israel\u2019s participation in Eurovision, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5847,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-modern-israel"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5874"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5878,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874\/revisions\/5878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}