My Word: The Eurovision and the drums of war

Spoiler alert: Israel is not going to win this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. It doesn’t matter how Eden Golan performs, what song she sings, and what message she delivers to the multi-million-viewer audience around the world. She is simply out of tune with international sentiment by the very fact that she is Israeli – and proud of it.

The musical event sings its own praises as being apolitical, but experience has shown otherwise. It was clear, after all, that Ukraine was going to win the 2022 Eurovision, following Russia’s brutal invasion. The six-member Kalush Orchestra, with its folk-hip hop fusion, could have sung anything, worn anything, and said anything and still won. Eden Golan is in the opposite situation.

But winning the Eurovision is not the same as winning the war, which is what really counts. There has been a drop in international aid to Ukraine and the gains that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces once so remarkably made have been held in check. Russian missile and drone attacks on places like Kharkiv take a toll but hardly make global headlines. The woes and narrative of the Palestinians have usurped other stories.

But this is the global village and there are connections – global jihad connections. For instance, according to the Institute for the Study of War, Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) this month reported that Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are training Russian drone operators at a Syrian air base.

Different responses to the refugee issue

It is also interesting to compare the different responses to the “refugee” issue. While displaced Ukrainians found shelter in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, the Gazan Palestinians are being told to stay put. Not even the Arab world is willing to house them. Especially not the Arab world. Palestinians, apparently, are meant to be the responsibility of Israel, the Jewish state.

Neither Egypt nor Jordan wanted control of Palestinian territories as part of their peace treaties with Israel. On the contrary. Both countries insisted on remaining separate from their Palestinian brethren. Nor did either country establish an independent Palestinian state during the 19 years they controlled Gaza and the West Bank.

Some Egyptian officials have been quoted as declaring that an Israeli ground operation in Rafah, Hamas’s last stronghold in the Gaza Strip, and an influx of Palestinian refugees crossing the border there, would be a reason to revoke the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty. 

Jordan’s Hashemite monarch, King Abdullah II, is similarly set on keeping the Palestinians where they are. Given that his kingdom already has a Palestinian majority, and in view of the belligerent acts by Palestinian terrorists against the Hashemite rulers, it’s easy to see where he’s coming from.

All this points to the absurdities that the pro-Palestinians do not want to make a song and dance about. Amid the never-ending talk of a “two-state solution,” the Palestinian majority population in Jordan is conveniently overlooked. And Egypt’s insistence that the “refugees” not be allowed to cross its border should underscore the fact that Gaza does, indeed, share a border with the Sunni Muslim, Arabic-speaking country.

Depictions of Gaza as “the world’s largest open-air prison” deliberately avoid stating the obvious point that Egypt could, if it wanted, open its border, and unlock the door.

It has become increasingly obvious since Israel’s military response to the Hamas October 7 mega-atrocity that Gaza is not an “open-air prison.” It is a warren of some hundreds of kilometers of underground terror tunnels. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar himself in 2021 boasted of 500 km. of tunnels. Israel and the world should have been paying more attention. The monstrous regime openly uses its own civilian population as human shields.

Something else has become unavoidably evident: Hamas has been working side by side with UNRWA. Or, in some cases, one on top of the other, with the UN body responsible for perpetuating the status of Palestinian refugees located above the underground facilities of the Islamist terrorist organization.

This week, the depths of the collusion were more evident than ever. Israeli forces uncovered a Hamas command center under the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza’s upscale Rimal neighborhood. Electric and communication cables literally linked UNRWA’s server room to Hamas’s intelligence data center. Every such discovery shows yet again where international aid and funds have been spent over the years.

True to form, UNRWA Commissioner-General Phillipe Lazzarini denied any knowledge of it, because, you know, it’s difficult to detect the sound of something the size of an underground station being dug directly under your building. Maybe the noise of the kids in the UNRWA school in the same compound drowned out the massive digging. Perhaps the UNRWA staff thought the quantities of quarried earth were part of a gigantic kindergarten sand pit.

European Union High Representative Josep Borrell told a press conference in Brussels this week: “It is not a secret that the Israeli government wants to get rid of UNRWA.” With way more respect than Borrell is due, I’d like to point out that he has got it the wrong way around. It seems that UNRWA wants nothing more than to get rid of Israel, and replace it “from the river to the sea” with Palestinian “refugees.”

At the press conference, standing alongside UNRWA’s Lazzarini, Borrell called for limiting arms supplies to Israel, following the decision by a Dutch court to stop the sales of F35 parts. He criticized the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza (based on Hamas’s Health Ministry figures) but, of course, also ruled out Gazans finding shelter over the Rafah border in Egypt.

Fernando Simon Marman, 61, and Luis Har, 70, had been abducted from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak on October 7 along with Clara Marman, 62, who is Marman’s sister and Har’s partner; their other sister Gabriela Leimberg, 59; Gabriela’s daughter, Mia Leimberg, 17, and, unforgettably, Mia’s dog Bella, who due to the dedication of the women also survived captivity. The women (and Bella) were returned as part of a ceasefire and exchange deal in November.

Hamas still holds more than 130 captives, of whom roughly 100 are believed to still be alive. Nothing will bring back to life the more than 1,200 people slaughtered in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad massacre of October 7, or the soldiers who have fallen since, but Israel cannot give up on the hostages.

In an act that requires a new definition of the word “chutzpah,” Hamas decried the rescue of Marman and Har as a “Nazi crime” and a continuation of the “genocidal war.” Later, playing down the success of the Israeli operation, Hamas claimed that the two men, who were imprisoned in a room on the second floor of an apartment building, had been held by civilians, not Hamas operatives.

I wanted to shout “Gotcha!” After four months in which Hamas and its supporters have tried to pretend that all Gazan civilians are innocent, Hamas was eager to change its narrative when it better suited its means.

Al Jazeera reporter Mohammed Washah embodies the toxic overlap. His job could be described as “journalist and terrorist.” Sadly, he is far from being the only reporter actively fighting for the Palestinian cause. The IDF found Washah’s laptop in Gaza, which revealed that the Al Jazeera contributor had a moonlighting gig – operating anti-tank missile systems and working in R&D of aerial weapons.

Security will inevitably be high. Ever since Palestinian terrorists murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972, no international event has been able to ignore security needs. And that was before the days of Hamas, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Iranian-sponsored global jihad.

It is not Israel that is threatening world peace and security but Israel’s enemies – the ones Israel is fighting to help make the rest of the world safer. Unlike Ukraine, Israel cannot hope for the sympathy vote to win the Eurovision, but that doesn’t mean we should let the terrorists call the tune.