Genocide and glitz, torch songs and torched bodies, savagery and silliness, bombshell blondes and 2000-pound bombs, terror and trivia, nul points and annihilation, camp and catastrophe. To fit Gaza and the Eurovision Song Contest into the same sentences, we must leave irony far behind and venture deep into the realms of the grotesque. The absurd conjunction forced into the headlines by RTÉ’s decision to withdraw from the competition in protest at Israel’s continued participation verges on blasphemy.
And yet it also gets us close to a profoundly potent contradiction: the idea of Israel as a European country. Involvement in Eurovision is not, strictly speaking, confined to European counties – Australia and Morocco have strutted their stuff in previous years. But Israel’s long and very prominent history in Eurovision is an important part of its sense of location.
It sings European songs and its football clubs play in European competitions. In other sports such as basketball, handball, athletics and swimming, Israel is a member of the relevant European associations. It is also an equal participant in the European Union’s Horizon scientific research programme.
These things matter. Whether it’s Dana International winning the Eurovision or Maccabi Tel Aviv playing Aston Villa in the Europa League or Ireland’s women basketball players having to compete against Israel in the EuroBasket qualifying competition, or scholars at the University of Galway working on marine, agricultural and linguistic research with 11 partners in Israel, a message is being sent – Israel is part of Europe.
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It isn’t of course. Israel is in Asia. No one imagines its immediate neighbours in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon as European countries. More to the point, no one defines Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank as Europeans. There is a literal displacement going on here and it is neither innocent nor inconsequential.
The idea that Israel is European is not rooted in geography. Nor is it even rooted in ethnic history – about half of the Jewish population of Israel is descended from immigrants (and refugees) from Arab countries, Turkey, Iran and central Asia. Israel’s Europeanness is, rather, a political construct. It is a statement that there is a dividing line between Us and Them and that Israel, unlike all its neighbours, is on the right side of that line.
There is a tragic irony in this pretence. Jewish people, when they were allowed to emerge from the ghettoes into which they were confined, did indeed want above all to be European. It is history’s most brutally unrequited love.
As Ari Shavit writes in My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, “For these newly emancipated European Jews, Europe is like a surrogate mother. They look up to her, they worship her, they give her all they have. Then, suddenly, these devoted sons of Europe notice that Europe won’t have them. Europe thinks they smell. Overnight there is a new, strange look in Mother Europe’s eyes. She is about to go insane. They see the insanity dancing in her eyes, and they understand that they must run for their lives.”
Mother Europe devoured her most devotedly European children. The original conception of Israel was above all as a place in which the oppressed Jews of the Tsarist empire could find shelter from pogroms and impoverishment. But Israel came too late to save them. The Shoah wiped out most of the Europeans for whom this new state was intended to provide a safe home.
It’s easy to understand why postwar Germany and France and Italy would want to assuage the guilt of genocide by imagining that European Jewry had been reborn in the Middle East, that somehow the Enlightenment dream of a Europe that embraced its Jewish populations as equal citizens was still alive on the far side of the Mediterranean.
And easy to understand too why – in spite of this continent’s transformation into a hellhole for Jews – Israel would want to maintain that illusion. Being European still had (and has) very real material advantages, not least in highly favourable trade deals with the European Union.
But this misplacement has nonetheless become increasingly toxic. The idea that Israel is European sustains the most deadly of mental partitions: the divide between civilisation and barbarism. This has long been Binyamin Netanyahu’s mantra: that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is no local dispute but a clash between “the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism”.
And in this epic equation, Europe equals Israel equals civilisation. “We’re part of European civilisation,” Netahyahu announced in 2017, “You look at the Middle East – Europe stops in Israel. That’s it.”
That is indeed it. Being European does not just stake a claim to exceptionalism in the Middle East. It asserts an innate and absolute superiority. For this conception of Europeanness has its evil conjoined twin: it depends on the barbarism of the Arabs, the Palestinians, all of the people among whom Israelis do and must live.
In the deep history of colonialism, Europe, as Caroline Elkins puts it in her essential Legacy of Violence, “constructed an alternative moral universe for populations it perceived to be off civilisation’s scale of humanity, in an otherworldly order distinctly their own”. Those otherworldly barbarians are not civilised enough to understand anything except raw violence.
Netanyahu’s pulverisation of Gaza showed exactly what this means in practice. And because it was carried out in the name of European civilisation, it forces us Europeans to decide what our civilisation really consists of.
Is it the civilisation that shaped itself through thousands of years of annihilation of the uncivilised? Or is it the one that was founded on the ruins of its own self-destruction, built on international law and the universality of human rights? If it’s the first, then Netanhayu is indeed an exemplary European and Israel belongs, not just in the Eurovision, but at the heart of Europe. If it’s the second, then Israel has definitely placed itself outside of Europe by flaunting its refusal to give a continental damn about either law or humanity.
