The New York Times missed the mark on Israel and Eurovision |
The Eurovision Song Contest is a loud, flashy event whose entire essence is exaggeration: The songs are exaggerated. The costumes are exaggerated. The delivery is exaggerated. The choreography is exaggerated. The stage is exaggerated. The audience is exaggerated. The coverage is exaggerated.
Eurovision is not an evening in which humankind soberly celebrates the charms of understatement and the wonders of refined taste.
At its best, Eurovision is a glittering arena where Europe gathers every year to rejoice, sing, dance, get excited, laugh, wave flags, surrender to nonsense, and, along the way, display liberal openness toward anyone who deviates from accepted norms — regardless of religion, race, sexual orientation, or lack of taste in clothing or music.
In Israel — where loudness, blurred boundaries and exaggeration are an essential foundation of the state’s infrastructure — Eurovision has become one of the most important events on the calendar.
The further Israel has drifted in recent years from the values of liberalism, tolerance, openness, and pop lightness that characterize Eurovision, the more important the event seems to have become.
For months ahead of the competition, the Israeli media is preoccupied with “the road to Eurovision.” Politicians stir the pot. The president delivers remarks. The prime minister tweets. The chosen singers take the stage to “bring a little comfort to the people of Israel,” to “make us all forget, if only for one evening, everything we have been through here,” and to “show the world Israel’s beautiful face.”
But even within this exaggerated context, the investigation published this week in The New York Times was exceptional, if not downright ridiculous.
Reporters Mara Hvistendahl and Alex Marshall interviewed more than 50 people across Europe and were given access to what they call “internal Eurovision documents” in order to deeply investigate the widespread claims on social media that Israel is working to tilt the results of the competition in its favor. They write:
“As the normally lighthearted contest became a proxy fight over Middle Eastern affairs and human rights, Eurovision struggled to defend a core tenet: Politics play no role in the event.”
No role?! Allow me to deviate from the rules of refined restraint and burst out laughing at the top of my lungs.
When exactly was Eurovision an event where politics play no role? It is, after all, a competition between nations, not between singers. On Saturday........