Israeli fans were warned against attending Eurovision. They came anyway — to heal from Oct. 7
Eurovision ‘is my spirit, and you won’t take my spirit,’ one fan said
For Israeli fans attending the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest, the joy and community to be found at the competition outweighed potential risks. Photo by Jessica Gow/TT News Agency/AFP/Sweden OUT/Getty Images
By Talya Zax May 9, 2024
MALMÖ, Sweden — “It’s only a kaffiyeh,” said Nir Cohen Lahav, 43, one of the fewer than 100 Israeli fans attending Eurovision this year.
The Swedish singer Eric Saade, whose father is Palestinian, made headlines Tuesday night when he wore a kaffiyeh, a traditional Arab scarf that has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance, around his wrist during a performance opening this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
Eurovision’s organizers criticized Saade for acting against the “non-political nature of the event.” But to Cohen Lahav, 43, who is attending his 14th Eurovision this year, the gesture wasn’t a big deal.
“The kaffiyeh cannot touch me, cannot kill me, cannot hurt me,” he said.
And the idea of Eurovision as a realm untouched by real-world conflicts is just that — an idea, he said: “Who says it’s non-political?”
“Cyprus and Greece vote for each other every year,” he said. “The Scandinavian countries do the same.” Ukraine’s Jamala won the contest in 2016 with a song, “1944,” that was widely understood to be a criticism of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“We live in a political era,” he said. “We cannot run from it.”
Cohen Lahav, who works in import and export logistics, and his husband, Oz, who does knowledge management, chose to attend Eurovision this year, despite their government’s warnings that the contest might be unsafe amid widespread protests against Israel’s participation. To the fans who did come, the outside hubbub over the contest has little to do with the kaleidoscopic music extravaganza they know and love — and the warnings seem, while serious, a little overblown.
To Cohen Lahav, it’s unlikely that a visit to Malmö might involve a greater terrorism risk than daily life in Israel. After all, “on Oct. 7, they came to our house.”
And if the warnings aren’t an overreaction?
Cohen Lahav, keeping an eye on the fans greeting Lithuanian competitor Silvester Belt behind me as he sat down to dinner in a mall food court adjacent to Malmö Arena, shrugged. “If something needs to happen, it will happen,” he said.
‘I trust the Eurovision fans’
People who are grieving turn to what they love for comfort.
That is what brought Israeli fans to Malmö this year. For many of them, deciding to attend this year’s competition was not a choice between caution and risk, but between staying mired in the trauma of Oct. 7, and finding a way back into life. Everyone is telling Cohen Lahav “be safe, be safe, be safe,” he said. “You need to tell me: Have fun.”
For Eurovision’s truest fans, the culture that has sprung up around the competition is a kind of lifeblood. Cohen Lahav and Oz got married while attending Eurovision in Lisbon in 2018, with a crowd at City Hall made up of their Eurovision friends of all nationalities; the party they threw in Israel, later that summer, was Eurovision themed. The contest’s music is “the soundtrack to my life,” said Miki Israeli, 46, who even planned to have a Eurovision song play as she gave birth to her daughter, who is now 13. (She ended up having a Cesarean section, but the Eurovision DVDs she watched while she labored still calmed her.)
I met with Israeli before Tuesday’s semifinal, in a space near Malmö Arena where chicly arrayed priests from the Church of Sweden were setting up for a karaoke party. (The priests, who wore the subtlest clerical collars I’ve ever seen — the next day, I caught one of them in a silver suit — gave us Diet Pepsi and pushed us to sing.) Israeli was covered in sparkles: Sequined jacket, spangled rainbow knee-high socks, pink glitter eyeshadow, and fingernails painted an iridescent beetle green.
This is her seventh time attending Eurovision. She bought tickets for this year’s contest long before Oct. 7. Sweden, which is hosting the contest for the seventh time, is something of a Eurovision mothership — it was here, exactly 50 years ago, that ABBA strutted gloriously onto the world stage — but she had missed competitions in Malmö in 2013 and Stockholm in 2016. (Some fans held a pro-Israel demonstration in Malmö in 2013, after three fans from Israel were threatened by a group of young men who allegedly said, “Where are the Israelis staying, we want to bomb the place.”)
Israeli, who works for Israel’s Ministry of Education and regularly performs with the Israeli lip sync Eurovision tribute band EuroFalsh in Tel Aviv, was determined to finally experience a Swedish Eurovision: “It’s like the queen of Eurovision,” she said. “I have to come.” But deciding to follow through on the plan came with costs. “My mother’s not talking to me right now,” she said.
She’s concerned for her safety, as is every fan from Israel I’ve spoken to this week. But she’s not worried that violence will come from within the Eurovision community. “I trust the Eurovision fans to, you know, connect with me because of the music,” she said. The only reason she really considered not attending, she said, was that “Israel is still grieving.”
In the end, that made her case for coming even stronger. Oct. 7 was an attack on the Israeli spirit, she said. Well, Eurovision “is my spirit, and you won’t take my spirit. This is my victory.”
‘In the bubble, it doesn’t matter’
On Oct. 7, Nir Harel, who leads OGAE Israel, the Israeli outpost of the official Eurovision fan club, had a one-of-a-kind problem: How was he going to ensure the safety of Andrew Lambrou of Cyprus and Samira Efendi of Azerbaijan, two Eurovision stars who had performed a concert for fans in Tel Aviv on Oct. 5 and were still in Israel?
It wasn’t until both were safely out of the country, said Harel, 46, that he really began to process the personal traumas of the day. (Lambrou was able to leave quickly; Efendi stayed in Israel for two more days after the attack, with Harel visiting frequently to make sure she was safe and well.)
Harel, now a banker, spent a decade in the Israeli air force. His military career ended after he was injured by a suicide bomber in 2001, during the Second Intifada. He’s made many friends at Eurovision over the years, he said, but he rarely tells those not from Israel of this history. (His first Eurovision was in Malmö in 2013; he told his own wife it was a one-time thing.) “In the bubble, it doesn’t matter,” he said.
The idea of a Eurovision bubble means something different to everyone. To Israeli, it’s a reassurance, a way of staying centered. “I’m never alone,” she said, “because of Eurovision.” To Cohen Lahav, it’s an international network that’s supportive regardless of politics: “After Oct. 7, most of our friends from the Eurovision bubble call us and ask if we’re OK.”
To Harel, it’s a place where “you’re supposed to forget everything. Just relax, just party with your friends.”
For some fans from Israel, the lure of that idyll wasn’t enough to overcome safety concerns. Harel said 20 Israeli fans canceled their planned trips to Malmö in the weeks before Eurovision, with the last deciding not to come only days before the competition began.
“We’re not supposed to speak Hebrew outside,” Harel said. He would normally drape himself in an Israeli flag while heading to the performances; not this year. He’s avoiding Ubers, and when he has to take them, he won’t talk to the drivers, because he doesn’t want them to ask where he’s from. Harel runs the WhatsApp group for Israeli fans, who are here for a good time — Harel told me his plan for the week was to go to bed at 5 a.m., and wake up at noon — but in the group, “I wrote to the friends that they must be adults.”
For Harel, it’s particularly important that Eden Golan, Israel’s 20-year-old Eurovision contestant, knows fans from her home country are with her when she performs. Thursday night, as she competes for a spot in Saturday night’s final, he will be in the audience, waving an Israeli flag.
“I know I can trust her” to represent Israel well, he said. And in return, it’s crucial, too, that “she knows that we are here.”
‘This is the hurricane’
Cohen Lahav and Oz were dressed nearly identically, in ripped jeans, silver chain necklaces, and T-shirts, which Oz designed, emblazoned with the couple’s favorite lyric from Golan’s song, “Hurricane”: “Baby, promise me you’ll hold me again / I’m still broken from this hurricane.”
I asked if they thought of a particular person when they heard that line — who is the “baby” they hope to reencounter?
Cohen Lahav began to cry. Oz put his head on his husband’s shoulder. “The dead ones,” Cohen Lahav said. “The people that went, and will never come back.”
Cohen Lahav lost friends and family to the Oct. 7 attack. Oz was called up as a reservist, and served three months as a tank medic at the start of the war, leaving Cohen Lahav home alone with their two dogs. Oz plunged right back into his routine as soon as he was discharged; it’s easier to not get stuck in trauma, he said, if you go back to work immediately.
For both of them — grieving their lost loved ones, and recovering from the brutality of live combat — the embattled state of being of which Golan sings is still very present. “This is the hurricane,” Cohen Lahav said.
The couple watched Golan perform on Wednesday night, at a dress rehearsal that marked her first live performance in Malmö. She was met with cheers, but also with boos, and cries of “Free Palestine.” But when I texted Cohen Lahav the next morning, it was as if those reactions barely registered.
“It was perfect,” he said.
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