Over 400 prominent figures from the entertainment industry including Helen Mirren, Liev Schreiber and Mayim Bialik have signed an open letter in support of Israel’s continued inclusion in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest.
Released by non-profit industry body Creative Community for Peace, the letter comes as a response to widespread calls for Israel to be barred from the contest, and states that those who call for Israel’s exclusion are “subverting the spirit of the Contest and turning it from a celebration of unity into a tool of politics.”
“We have been shocked and disappointed to see some members of the entertainment community calling for Israel to be banished from the Contest for responding to the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” the letter reads. “Under the cover of thousands of rockets fired indiscriminately into civilian populations, Hamas murdered and kidnapped innocent men, women, and children.”
Signed by prominent entertainment figures such as Scooter Braun, Debra Messing, Emmy Rossum, Boy George, Ginnifer Goodwin, Selma Blair, and Sharon Osbourne, the letter contends that “Israel is fighting a war against a European Union-designated terrorist group that once again broke a ceasefire that day, and then went on to slaughter over 1,200 people. This current round of fighting is not a war that Israel wanted or started. To punish Israel would be an inversion of justice.”
Israel has been participating in the Eurovision Song Contest since 1973 and has won the contest four times: in 1978, 1979, 1998, and 2018. The open letter acknowledges that Israel has always platformed “a diverse group of contestants representing the country, including Palestinians, Ethiopians, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.”
