Standing on the stage of the Malta EuroPride opening concert, Israeli artist and former Eurovision winner Netta Barzilai kicked off the event with yet unexpected chants from the audience who greeted her with loud slogans about Palestine.
The audience as well as a group of pro-Palestine activists attended the concert with Palestinian flags held high in their hands and plenty of placards condemning the pinkwashing of Israeli apartheid and its occupation of Palestine.
The activists also commenced other symbolic actions of solidarity with Palestine during the event, stressing that they are serving as a reminder that Israel’s efforts to hide and falsify facts about its oppression of the Palestinian people will never work out.
Netta Barzilai has a long record of boosting Israel’s narrative as she has regularly taken part in activities organized by ‘Israel’ aiming to celebrate the establishment of the Israeli regime on the rubble of Palestinian villages and on the blood of indigenous people who were forcefully expelled from their homeland.
This fact coincides with the news that five Maltese organizations called, in August 2023, for Netta Barzilai’s invitation to be revoked, stating that the “principles of equality and freedom are not a menu from which one chooses at will.”
The organizers, however, turned deaf ears to the requests proposed to remove Barzilai from the event. Though the concert called for the dissemination of love and equality, it still embraces personalities who are accomplices in racism, atrocities, and ethnic cleansing.
In a related context, pro-Palestine fans, in August 2023, called on the American pop-rock band Imagine Dragons to cancel its concert, in Israeli apartheid as it was supposed to be held on the ruins of Jarisha, an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village.
Thousands of artists have refused to be used by ‘Israel’ to artwash its human rights violations against Palestinians.
In this regard, more than 1500 artists joined the #MusiciansforPalestine campaign, through which they proclaimed their refusal to perform in Israeli Apartheid believing that “silence is not an option” for them.
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