International Relations on Stage

Cultural and sporting sanctions miss their target.

Spectators watch the final of the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in Turin, Italy, on May 14, 2022. Yara Nardi/Reuters

Commentary

Before this year’s Eurovision song contest in Basel, Switzerland, 72 of the competition’s former participants signed an open letter calling for Israel to be banned from the 2025 edition. The letter accused the European Broadcasting Union (EUB), which runs the contest, of double standards for excluding Russian singers from 2022’s Eurovision, in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, while not imposing a ban on Israel. The letter specifically accused Israel of “genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the decades-long regime of apartheid and military occupation against the Palestinian people.”