Hundreds march in Valletta to demand Eurovision boycott over Israeli participation

Hundreds of protesters marched through Valletta earlier on Saturday to reiterate growing calls for Malta to boycott the popular Eurovision song contest following the European Broadcasting Union’s decision to allow Israel to participate while its genocide in Palestine remains ongoing.

The protest, which is the culmination of a months-long pressure campaign to push the Maltese government to formally withdraw from the singing competition, was organised by multiple NGOs and was endorsed by a total of over 150 artists.

After marching around Valletta, activists converged around a stage that had been set up a few metres down the road from the office of Culture Minister Owen Bonnici.

Moviment Graffitti activist Andre Callus, who has been advocating for Palestine’s liberation from Israeli oppression for over a decade, began by emphasising that Malta faces a stark choice.

“The choice we have is this: to choose the kind of politics that is in favour of humanity, to be on the right side of history, or to choose the kind of politics that normalises genocide…we have an obligation, we finally have an opportunity to do something about the horrors we are witnessing in Gaza,” Callus said.

While echoing Callus’ call for Malta to stand in solidarity with Palestine, fellow Graffitti member Amy Marie Abela quoted Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer’s poem, “If I Must Die”.

“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself–
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.”

“Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike two years ago at the beginning of this genocide. An investigation by Euromed Monitor concluded that he was assassinated by Israel because of his artistic activism. His poetry, and that of many other Palestinian artists, has deeply moved people around the world. Their sumud (their steadfast determination) fuels my own continued activism, and that is why I am here, to keep fighting for them,” Abela said.

The President of the Malta Entertainment Industry Association (MEIA), Maria Galea, also spoke up at the protest.

Thanking all the artists who supported MEIA’s call to join the demonstration, Galea argued that art cannot be separated from politics – especially not in the context of a genocide.

“This is a clear refusal towards allowing culture to be used to whitewash a context in which human rights are being breached. We’ve been trying to deliver this message since this campaign began months ago. To this day, we’ve seen no real response,” Galea said.

“Our participation in this contest carries symbolic and political weight. When a platform like this is used to project normality when suffering on this scale is allowed to continue, this is unacceptable,” she added.

Galea further spoke about MEIA’s proposal to redirect public funding that was meant to be used for the contest and reinvest it into nurturing local talent – a longstanding bone of contention between Malta’s local artists and a government that spends millions on subsidies for foreign productions.

Ġustizzja Għal Palestina activist David Zammit and artist and broadcaster Angele Galea also spoke at the event, joining their fellow speakers’ calls for Malta’s withdrawal from the competition.

The Culture Minister, who continues to conceal the state’s extravagant spending on Eurovision, insists that Malta will press ahead with its participation in the name of “fostering dialogue”, refusing to acknowledge the fact that the contest aids in the normalisation of the Israeli government’s decades-long genocide of the Palestinian people.