Earlier this month, Israel treated the Gaza Strip to a quick military assault that killed nearly thirty Palestinians, among them two infants and two pregnant women. Four Israelis were also killed by rocket fire from Gaza — an unusually high casualty count, proportionally speaking, for Israel, whose recent track record also includes wiping out 2,251 people in Gaza in fifty days.
As usual, Western media outlets were quick to blame the Palestinians, while valiantly upholding the Israeli monopoly over the right to retaliation and self-defense — which, it bears mentioning, is kind of like saying the car wheel was defending itself against the crushed armadillo.
According to the Daily Beast, the upshot of the bloody showdown was as follows: “Hamas Started a War Over Eurovision, the Song Contest That Gave Us ABBA.” We are left to understand that the occasional Palestinian decision to fire generally ineffective rockets has nothing to do with being under continuous Israeli attack but rather with strategic objectives like wrecking Eurovision, the annual gaudy affair that launched the Swedish pop group in 1974 and that is currently underway in this year’s host city: Tel Aviv.
Conveniently for Israel, Eurovision 2019 overlaps with Nakba Day on May 15, which commemorates the Nakba — or “catastrophe” — of 1948, when Israel set up shop on Palestinian land, destroying more than four hundred villages, murdering some ten thousand Palestinians, and expelling three-quarters of a million more. Needless to say, the ethnic cleansing, killing, and dispossession that have for the past seventy-one years characterized the Israeli enterprise show no signs of abating. On top of straightforward methods like bombing and sniping, there’s also plenty of contemporary Israeli news of a can’t-make-this-shit-up variety, such as the orders to demolish homes belonging to hundreds of Palestinians because they are located in what Israel considers its national “peace forest” — and because Jewish settlers need to build homes there. Hence, perhaps, some additional PR perks of hosting the Eurovision spectacle and thereby Euro-washing Israel’s criminal orientation.
On May 10, Israel’s official Eurovision Twitter page unleashed a promotional video that qualifies as a catastrophe in its own right: four-and-a-half excruciating minutes of cheery song and dance about how Israel is “so much more” than a “land of war and occupation” — it’s a “startup nation,” a “land of honey, honey” where Israelis are “smooth as silk,” “gays are hugging in the streets,” and there are “some” Arabs, lots of shawarma, and “lovely bitches.” (Haaretz notes: “The issue of whether the mistranslation [of ‘beaches’] was an error or a deliberate attempt to poke fun at bad pronunciation has been discussed extensively on Twitter.”) READ MORE AT JACOBIN.