How Eurovision Song Contest 2019 is caught in warzone as rockets target competition in Israel
As Israel hosts Eurovision, air raid sirens wail and thousands run for shelter
FROM their verandah beneath the vast concrete wall dividing Israel from the Gaza Strip, a traumatised family tells how the missiles came in swarms.
Showing me a video on her phone, Israeli mum Nava Afenjar, 49, said: “People were screaming. Hundreds of rockets were flying towards us from Gaza.”
With air raid sirens wailing and thousands running for bomb shelters, Nava believes terrorist group Hamas unleashed the missile firestorm because “the world is watching Israel host Eurovision.”
Until now the most famous battle associated with the Eurovision Song Contest was Abba’s classic Waterloo.
As the Afenjar family watched the missiles rain down on southern Israel the weekend before last, Eurovision contestants — including Icelandic techno punks Hatari — were rehearsing just 42 miles away in Tel Aviv.
Hatari’s bondage gear-clad frontman Matthias Haraldsson said: “The way the conflict is covered, it makes it sound further away than it is — but it’s really just down the road.”
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fired 690 rockets at Israel, who responded with airstrikes in Gaza during the two-day conflict.
Four people were killed in Israel and 25 in Gaza. One news outlet called it the “Eurovision War”.
University of Vienna historian Dean Vuletic, author of Postwar Europe And The Eurovision Song Contest, says: “Eurovision has never been held so close to a warzone before and been so susceptible to attack.”
Israel and Hamas agreed a ceasefire last Monday, though many are doubtful it will hold for long.
Yet last night Tel Aviv dusted down its sequins and chiffon for a glitzy red carpet Eurovision curtain-raiser.
A week of semi-finals climaxes on Saturday, with the grand final featuring Madonna performing for a £765,000 fee.
'EVERYTHING ISLAMISTS LOATHE'
Israel wants to convey an image of Tel Aviv as a sun-kissed, easy-going Mediterranean tourist spot.
But Hamas militants — once described by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as “friends” — are threatening to ruin the party.
Eurovision is everything Islamists loathe. Raunchy pop music, scantily clad cavorting male and female stars plus openly out and proud LGBT performers and fans.
A Hamas source told Israeli paper Haaretz after the recent rocket barrage: “Eurovision can’t happen in Tel Aviv when no relief is felt in Gaza. It can’t be that they will sing and enjoy while we suffer.”
The source added that Israel “can’t ask for quiet before and during the Eurovision while we’re in the same state.”
Fellow Gaza terror outfit the PIJ recently vowed to “prevent the enemy from succeeding” — a reference to what it believes is Israel using Eurovision to promote its image on the world stage.
For the 840 Israeli villagers of Netiv HaAsara, close to the Gaza border wall, Eurovision comes as light relief.
Three residents have been killed in the village since it was founded in 1982. During the latest attack, which targeted nearby Israeli cities including Ashkelon and Ashdod, a rocket smashed into a house leaving the upper storey charred.
Every home has a bomb-proof safe room and families have just five seconds to dash to safety when missile attack sirens sound.
The Afenjars’ bungalow is one of those closest to the border — where two giant walls separate them from the Palestinian town of Beit Lahia.
Conditions in Gaza’s narrow, sandy strip of 1.8million citizens — under blockade since Hamas were elected to power in 2007 — are dire.
Described as an “open-air prison” where it is practically impossible to enter or leave, Gaza has 50 per cent unemployment with shortages of electricity, food and medical supplies.
Israeli mum-of-three Nava, who performs X-rays at a local clinic, added: “The Palestinians are good people but Hamas has messed everything up. I’ve a friend in Gaza who says life is bad there.
The leaders have big houses but the people are left scavenging in the garbage.”
She tells how a Hamas attack tunnel was discovered after being dug under the wall just 800 metres from their home in 2014.
Mum-of-four Tsameret Zamir, who runs a visitors’ centre in Netiv HaAsara, is urging people to stick a tile calling for peace on the wall which is emblazoned with a giant dove.
She wept while describing the recent bombardment, saying: “It was awful — the children were terrified. My grandparents were forced to flee Poland because of the Holocaust. I won’t run away from here.”
Tsameret, 53, believes Hamas will stop short of disrupting Eurovision, saying: “They think very carefully about their strategy.”
Targeting Madonna and cheesy pop acts from across Europe would unleash an international backlash.
Israel is reportedly easing restrictions on some imports and allowing millions of dollars in cash from Qatar into Gaza in the hope of stopping a resumption of the Eurovision War.
The Palestinians are good people but Hamas has messed everything up
Hamas certainly has an arsenal capable of reaching Tel Aviv, including rockets such as Iranian M-75 with a 10kg warhead.
PIJ leader Ziad Nakhala said his fanatics were “about to launch rockets at Tel Aviv when the ceasefire stopped it from happening”.
Yet, Israel’s cities are protected by its Iron Dome defence system, which launches rockets to intercept Palestinian missiles. It has been a game- changer in the conflict, intercepting 85 per cent of projectiles fired at Israeli cities since 2011.
Despite the recent bloodshed, UK Eurovision contestant Michael Rice was remarkably calm when I met him at his Tel Aviv hotel this weekend.
The former McDonald’s worker, 21, from Hartlepool admits he doesn’t know much about international politics. Michael said: “I’m not worried at all about security.
I don’t know much about politics, I don’t think anyone my age and from where I come from knows much about what’s going on.”
Michael, who will sing Bigger Than Us, is also unperturbed by calls by activists for performers to boycott Israel’s Eurovision show.
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement has claimed Israel is “shamelessly using Eurovision as part of its strategy, which presents ‘Israel’s prettier face’ to whitewash and distract attention from its war crimes against Palestinians”.
Posing on the beach with a Union Flag, Michael told The Sun: “Politics shouldn’t be brought into it. I’m just here for the music.”
Tel Aviv doesn’t feel like a city in the cross-hairs of terrorist missile batteries. A bar owner playing 1950s rock ’n’ roll near the beach tells me: “Foreigners think it’ll be like Vietnam but you don’t even see many police in the street.”
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As temperatures hit 28C yesterday many locals relaxed on the beach.
Sunbathing army fitness instructors Dana Neeman and Noy Pinto, both 19, are looking forward to Eurovision.
Dana says: “People shouldn’t be afraid — if they fire missiles they won’t reach Tel Aviv.”
At the border Nava says: “Hamas are using Eurovision as a bargaining chip for cash so I don’t think we’ll see more rockets this week.
“We just want peace, and hope Eurovision can bring that.”
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