A Message for Peace or a Tool for Oppression? Israeli Jewish-Arab duo Achinoam Nini and Mira Awad’s Representation of Israel at Eurovision 2009

Abstract

Israel's contenders for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest (known as the ESC or, as here, Eurovision) were the Israeli Jewish-Arab duo Achinoam Nini and Mira Awad. The chosen song was "There Must Be Another Way," a tri-lingual appeal for peace and reconciliation sung in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The decision to nominate Nini and Awad as Israel's representatives to Eurovision was announced in early January, in the midst of a full-scale war Israel launched on Gaza and its inhabitants, which came in response to several years of rockets ired into Israel from the Hamas-led territory. Given the timing and the high proile of the ESC, an annual competition held among active member countries of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the duo's collaboration generated much public debate in Israel and beyond. The debate highlighted the symbolic charge of the song and its performers, and it continued throughout the year, animated by the political situation, the duo's activities, and the media that closely followed the process leading to the May 2009 contest and its aftermath. This article will analyze the meanings given to the artistic collaboration of the two performers that were circulating in the public sphere to show how, in this war-torn region, cultural and political domains are intertwined such that wars are fought not only with guns and rockets but also within cultural spheres, and that both domains are constitutive of highly contested social constructions of ethnic and national afiliations. Eurovision is a site in which the intersection of popular culture with national and international politics is especially visible, due to its country-centered format, the voting processes, and the extent of mass mediation--over 100 million viewers each year (Haan, Dijkstra, and Dijkstra 2005). The voting process takes place at the national level irst when the representative song is chosen, and later during the Eurovision Song Contest, when each country votes for other countries' representative songs. Since the late 1990s, the voting process at both stages typically combines popular votes counted in local telethons with votes cast by a panel of experts commonly associated with each country's broadcasting apparatus (Cleridos and Stengos 2006). (1) Songs must be newly written for the occasion, and the participatory nature of the selection process serves to mobilize citizens to share in the creation of what Benedict Anderson calls the "physical realization of the imagined community" (1983:145). According to Anderson, the moments in which songs are publicly shared to signify an event--for example, anthems sung on national holidays--create an experience of simultaneity in which people who are unknown to each other come together in a special kind of imagined community: the nation. What Anderson is pointing to is that music provides one of the ways in which nationhood is culturally constructed. The participatory nature of Eurovision provides for similar moments of simultaneity, both when the public votes for the song and image that would represent the nation, and when it votes for other nation's songs. At the same time that Eurovision is a participatory event, the Eurovision voting process also leaves much of the control in the hands of government-affiliated institutions. In other words, what represents "the nation," and also determines the relative value of cultural production of other nations, combines both popular vote and government control. This process highlights the important role cultural policy has in the creation of the imagined community, and in the delimitation of the cultural boundaries of this community with respect to other communities. Miller and Yudice (2002) analyze cultural policy as a conflation of two registers: the aesthetic register and the anthropological register, which, when combined, provide for the training of citizens to share common values. The songs represented at Eurovision provide the musical and lyrical content that is interpreted at the aesthetic register, while the context of national representation directed by government institutions inculculates nationalist sentiments among citizens in a manner deemed appropriate by such institutions. …