Non-binary Eurovision winner Nemo calls for Israel to be excluded from contest

Non-binary reigning Eurovision champion Nemo has called for Israel to be excluded from this year’s contest.

Nemo, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2024 for this year’s host country, Switzerland, with their song “The Code”, becoming the first ever non-binary entrant to do so, has spoken out against Israel’s inclusion in this year’s contest.

“I personally feel like it doesn’t make sense that Israel is a part of this Eurovision. And of Eurovision in general right now,” Nemo told HuffPost UK.

“I don’t know how much I want to get into detail, but I would say, I don’t support the fact that Israel is part of Eurovision at the moment.”

Nemo later supplied HuffPost UK with an additional statement, which read: “I support the call for Israel’s exclusion from the Eurovision Song Contest. Israel’s actions are fundamentally at odds with the values that Eurovision claims to uphold — peace, unity, and respect for human rights.”

The statement comes amid ongoing conflict between the Israeli government and Palestinian nationalist group Hamas.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas undertook an attack on the Nova music festival which left 1,195 people dead and at least 250 Israeli citizens and soldiers taken hostage. Israel’s ensuing bombardment of Gaza has killed in excess of 50,000 people. A peer-reviewed study published in the medical journal The Lancet put the Palestinian death toll considerably higher.

Israel has faced international criticism for its continued military action on Gaza, which include the blockade of humanitarian aid causing food and medical shortages.

Israel’s act, Yuval Raphael, who is a survivor of the Nova music festival attack, was met by protestors and death threats as she walked the ‘turquoise carpet’ at Eurovision 2025’s opening ceremony in Basel, Switzerland, over the weekend.

In a statement, the EBU said: “We understand the concerns and deeply held views around the current conflict in the Middle East. The EBU is not immune to global events but, together with our members, it is our role to ensure the contest remains, at its heart, a universal event that promotes connections, diversity and inclusion through music.

“We all aspire to keep the Eurovision song contest positive and inclusive and aspire to show the world as it could be, rather than how it necessarily is.”

More than 70 former Eurovision contestants, including past winners, have signed an open letter calling for Israel to be removed from this year’s contest.

The letter urged the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) to ban Israel’s national broadcaster KAN, as well as Yuval Raphael, who is set to perform “New Day Will Rise”. Signatories include the UK’s 2023 entry Mae Muller and former winners Charlie McGettigan and Salvador Sobral.

Shared by campaign group Artists for Palestine, the letter says that the country’s inclusion made last year’s event “one of the most politicised” in history.

Responding on its website to a planned boycott by some fans, the EBU said that Eurovision was a “non-political event… open to all”.

Eurovision effectively banned artists from bringing Pride flags to stage this year, ruling in late April that each act will only be allowed to fly their country’s flag at anything Eurovision-related.

The Eurovision 2025 semi-finals will take place in Basel, Switzerland, on 13 and 15 May, with the final taking place on 17 May.

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