Later today, the Eurovision Song Contest will be taking place in Israel, and the University of Nottingham will broadcast the event for students to enjoy. This is all taking place while 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, 1 million of whom are children, are caged in what the UN human rights chief has described as a "toxic slum", where electricity is limited to 4 hours per day, hospitals are shutting down due to lack of fuel, and 97% of the water is contaminated. Over the past year, Israel has killed over 300 unarmed demonstrators in Gaza and maimed thousands more, many of them permanently; the UN Human Rights Council released a report earlier this year in which it concluded that Israeli snipers have intentionally shot children, journalists, medics and disabled people. Recently, Israel bombed this tiny, besieged strip of land and killed 25 Palestinians, including a four-month-old baby, a pregnant woman and a 12-year-old boy. Meanwhile, the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem has documented continuous and ongoing human rights violations by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, including the killing of civilians, the demolition of homes, the unlawful abduction and detention of children and daily harassment of Palestinians at military checkpoints.

Cultural events like Eurovision serve to whitewash and legitimise Israel's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians through concealing it under a blanket of feigned normalcy. Israel's own leadership is perfectly frank about this; for example, last year Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated Netta Barzilai, Israel’s 2018 Eurovision winner, for having done "exceptional foreign relations work", and referred to her as "the best ambassador of Israel". At a time when poll data shows that Israel's reputation is at an all-time low in Europe, owing to its increasingly brazen defiance of basic moral norms and international law, this event offers Israel's leadership a chance to divert attention away from its ongoing atrocities in Palestine and to present Israel as a free, open and vibrant society.

For this reason, we feel that it is highly immoral for the University of Nottingham to participate in this act of cultural whitewashing by broadcasting it for the entertainment of students. How can it be right that we enjoy the spectacle of Eurovision as it takes place in Tel Aviv, while just a few hours from that city an entire population is trapped in a manmade humanitarian catastrophe? We are asking the university to take a moral stance and to NOT broadcast Eurovision later today, in solidarity with the Palestinians.