How the Eurovision Censors Helped Make Eden Golan a Star

[Richard D]

Banish the rain and you’ll get the hurricane: such is the moral of the 2024 Eurovision song competition whose Grand Final was held in the Swedish city of Malmö last Saturday night. The winning entry was Switzerland’s. Upstaging it, however, was an Israeli song called “Hurricane,” which stole the show. Although many thought it deserved to finish first, its fifth-place showing among 37 competitors was itself no small achievement given the months in which it was threatened with being banned, and the days of massive protest demonstrations, crowd abuse, and anti-Israel prejudice that led up to its final performance.



And so more changes were made. “Writers of history” became “Writers of my symphony.” “Take me home” was altered to “Take it all.” The “we” of “nothing to hide” was replaced by “I,” “And I promise you that never again” by “Baby, promise me you’ll hold me again.” Still other lines that the EBU objected to were changed, too. If the new ones didn’t make much sense, well, who said that song lyrics have to? To tell the truth, not all of the original version of “October Rain” made perfect sense, either.

And so “Hurricane” was re-resubmitted, this time to EBU approval, and breezed through the Malmö semi-finals on the basis of a magnificent performance by Eden Golan, whose voice grew stronger and more powerful with every boo and catcall from the audience, and who was backed by an imaginatively choreographed group of dancers. Receiving strong TV viewer support, “Hurricane” might actually have triumphed in the Grand Final had not some of the judges had clear instructions from their delegation heads to award it no points at all on a 0-12 scale. (Other judges gave it all 12 points—an all-but-unimaginable discrepancy in a competition of any kind.) Yet under the circumstances, fifth place, too, was a triumph and an Independence Day gift to a grateful Israel that badly needed to believe that not all the world was against it.

The irony in all this is that the EBU’s attempts at censorship only worked to Israel’s advantage. In the first place, they made “October Rain/Hurricane” a cause célèbre that it would otherwise never have become. And secondly, they actually strengthened its title and most memorable line. October rains, occurring at the start of the rainy season and almost never developing into major storms, are common in Israel; hurricanes are not. As a weather phenomenon, in fact, they are unknown—and yet a hurricane is what October 7 was. When Eden Golan sang, “I’m still broken from this hurricane,” she was accurately describing Israel’s mood in the wake of October 7 as “I’m still wet from this October rain” failed to do. Getting wet, after all, is not a catastrophe. One can thank the censors of the EBU for making the correction.


https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2024/05/how-the-eurovision-censors-helped-make-eden-golan-a-star