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Slovenia to Pull Out of Eurovision Song Contest if Israel Participates; Spain Reaffirms Same Position
Yuval Raphael from Israel with the title “New Day Will Rise” on stage at the second semi-final of the 69th Eurovision Song Contest in the Arena St. Jakobshalle. Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa via Reuters Connect
Slovenia’s national broadcaster RTVSLO will compete in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest only if Israel is excluded from the competition, it announced on Wednesday, a day before the president of Spain’s RTVE reiterated its boycott of next year’s Eurovision if Israel is involved.
The 2026 draft programming plan for Slovenia’s RTVSLO does not include its participation in the 2026 Eurovision or even the broadcast of the competition, set to take place in Vienna, Austria, in May.
“However, if next week, on Thursday, when the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) General Assembly is scheduled to vote on whether Israel will participate in the Eurovision Song Contest or not, it turns out that Israel will not participate in the Eurovision Song Contest, then we will propose to the council a change to the program-production plan and we will of course participate in this festival,” said Natalija Gorščak, president of the RTVSLO board.
Members of the EBU, which organizes the Eurovision Song Contest, are set to convene at the 95th EBU General Assembly in Geneva on Dec. 4 and 5 to discuss next year’s competition, the implementation of new rules for the contest, and Israel’s participation.
Slovenia’s explicit actions this week to boycott the 2026 Eurovision follows its previous threats to withdraw from the competition if Israel is included. They join other countries – such as the Netherlands, Ireland and Iceland – that have expressed opposition to Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip during its war against the Hamas terrorist group, which orchestrated the deadly massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
On Thursday, José Pablo López, president of Spain’s RTVE, appeared before the Senate’s Joint Parliamentary Control Committee and defended the broadcaster’s initial decision in September not to compete in the 2026 Eurovision if Israel is allowed to participate.
“Eurovision is a contest. Human rights are not,” Lopez said, after claiming that a “genocide” has taken place in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war. He then falsely accused Israel of breaking the rules of the Eurovision competition by attempting to politically exploit the contest and influence voting in the last two years, referring to performances by Eden Golan in 2024 and Yuval Raphael earlier this year. “Any other country that had carried out this use of the contest, I assure you that it would have been sanctioned and temporarily suspended,” he said.
López also challenged Eurovision Director Martin Green, who has previously defended Israel’s participation in the Eurovision.
“Martin Green recently wrote a letter stating that television networks and artists do not represent governments and that this is a cultural competition,” Lopez told the committee, according to a translation of his remarks by Eurovision Spain. “I wonder, is Mr. Green considering the return of Russian and Belarusian broadcasters to the festival? I hope not, because we all know that if those networks return, they would use it in a similar way to Israel, because for them, the contest is much more than just a competition and has a very significant political dimension.”
Lopez also addressed recent changes by the EBU to its rules for the Eurovision, in an effort to prevent rigged voting and governmental interference. Lopez believes the new rules are insufficient. “They do not guarantee that interference from a government like Israel’s, or any other government, cannot happen again,” he said.
“The EBU knows that these measures are a step forward, but they are not enough, and above all, as I have said, they leave Israel’s actions during this period unsanctioned,” he added. “More measures are necessary, and that will be the proposal we will take to the next General Assembly, which will be held on the 4th and 5th.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, a longtime critic of Israel, has also called for Israel to be excluded from the 2026 Eurovision.
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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