Harmony, Interrupted
As Hanukkah begins, boycotts of the Eurovision Song Contest raise questions about abandoning a cultural project built to keep people connected.
On the first day of Hanukkah, as we commemorate the endurance of light in dark times, it’s worth recalling an unlikely postwar experiment in peacekeeping.
When the Eurovision Song Contest debuted in 1956, it wasn’t conceived as kitsch or escapism. It was a postwar response to catastrophe. Europe had just lived through the consequences of hardened identities, zero-sum politics, and the moral certainty that accompanies them.
Tens of millions were dead. Borders had shifted. Distrust lingered, and the Cold War was already pressing new ideological divisions onto an already wounded continent. Against that backdrop, the European Broadcasting Union launched a live, cross-border music competition with the ambition of fostering intercultural exchange and a sense of shared humanity in a continent that had lost both.
Eurovision was less a spectacle than a statement of faith that cultural exchange might bridge political differences and help prevent the next war.
Nearly seventy years later, that faith is being tested.
In response to the European Broadcasting Union’s decision on December 4 to allow Israel’s continued participation in the contest, broadcasters from five countries, including Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Iceland, announced boycotts of Eurovision in protest of Israel’s inclusion in the contest.
Conversation and shared cultural experiences don’t guarantee agreement, but they do make violence harder to justify.
Israel is not a recent or incidental participant. It first joined Eurovision in 1973, seeking cultural integration rather than isolation, based on the premise that Eurovision was about shared broadcasting values, not simply geography. Within a few years, Israel had won the competition twice, followed by its most recent win in 2018.
These boycotts are unfolding at a moment when antisemitism has reemerged with disturbing clarity, and with increasing violence. Yesterday, 15 people were murdered and multiple others wounded in a mass shooting targeting Jewish families on the first night of Hanukkah in Sydney, Australia. This is just one incident in what has become an alarming global pattern.
Against that backdrop, the attempts to exclude Israeli singers from Eurovision take on a different resonance. Making Jewish participation in shared civic spaces conditional signals something darker than protest.
None of this is to deny the gravity of the war in Gaza or the legitimacy of political disagreement. It’s to ask whether cultural boycotts actually advance peace, or whether they simply satisfy the urge to take sides while making future coexistence harder.
For me, the answer to that question is grounded in experience. As a teenager, I spent a year as an international exchange student in the Dominican Republic through American Field Service (AFS), an organization founded after World War II on a premise similar to Eurovision’s. Its founders believed that diplomacy alone was insufficient to prevent future global conflict, and that sustained person-to-person engagement could succeed where treaties had failed.
Their logic was practical, not sentimental. Young people who live with host families, learn new languages, and experience daily life across borders are less likely to reduce others to abstractions later in life. During my year abroad, I learned to speak Spanish and dance merengue. I came to appreciate Dominican culture, without losing my own culture in the process.
I learned that exchange doesn’t eliminate disagreement or create homogeneity. Rather, it humanizes people across distant cultures. My year abroad didn’t subtract from the person I was. I kept my fundamental values and beliefs, but gained perspective, friendship, and empathy.
Eurovision was founded on the same insight.
Its creators didn’t imagine that music could resolve geopolitical disputes. They believed that continued cultural exposure could lower the temperature and complicate easy antagonisms. Eurovision was never intended to endorse governments. It was intended to showcase people.
That’s why the current wave of boycotts is so revealing.
Withdrawal may feel like moral clarity, but it represents a retreat from one of the few remaining forums where nations meet as cultural equals rather than geopolitical adversaries. It signals that even artistic institutions must now conform to political battle lines, and that participation itself is suspect.
History suggests a different approach.
Europe learned, at extraordinary cost, that cultural isolation fuels extremism and mistrust. The value of exchange, whether through AFS or Eurovision, is that it requires individuals to remain present and to recognize humanity in others, even amid disagreement.
AFS didn’t suspend exchange programs every time the United States went to war or had policy disagreements with other countries. Had it done so, the organization wouldn’t have survived the Cold War, Vietnam, or numerous other periods of sustained global tension. Its founders understood that moments of conflict are precisely when exchange matters most.
There’s a choice embedded in this moment. Nations with political differences can treat Eurovision as a proxy battlefield, narrowing the space for understanding among millions of ordinary people, or they can reclaim its original purpose: a shared stage where disagreement doesn’t preclude participation and where cultural engagement persists despite political conflict.
When I co-founded the Prohuman Foundation with Daryl Davis and Letitia Kim, we were driven by the enduring belief that every person is a unique individual, united by our shared humanity. Daryl, a musician who has spent decades engaging people across the deepest ideological divides, often reminds me that when people are talking with one another, they aren’t fighting.
The same is true when people are making music together. Conversation and shared cultural experiences don’t guarantee agreement, but they do make violence harder to justify.
On this first day of Hanukkah, we are reminded that light endures when people choose to preserve it. If we truly want more light in our future, the answer isn’t fewer shared stages.
Choosing to sing together may still be the best way to create harmony.
Bion Bartning is an entrepreneur and investor. He is co-founder of the Prohuman Foundation with Daryl Davis and Letitia Kim.
Together, we have made immense progress building a foundation for social harmony. But, we still need your help. A generous donor is matching every contribution to the Prohuman Foundation, dollar for dollar, up to $250,000. Join the movement and double your impact today.
Europe experienced the devastating consequences of identity politics through the Nazis’ identity based politics. In response, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created to restore the principle of universal human dignity — that every person is equal regardless of group identity. However, modern DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives have revived the same divisive focus on identity that the Declaration sought to overcome. Wherever DEI takes hold, it erodes institutions — even cultural ones like the Eurovision Song Contest. To preserve what unites us, Europe must reaffirm the universalist values that protect individual worth over group categorization.
Europe didn't abandoned its 'cultural project', it abandoned universalism equal human rights. Based in common humanity. Freedom of speech and freedom of thought and critical thinking suffer because of this.
If deeply liberal, deeply tolerant countries like Iceland, Ireland and the Netherlands are withdrawing from the competition, maybe it's time for Israel and its apologists to take a good, long look in the mirror.