A group of human rights NGOs and former president Marie Louise Coleiro Preca have joined calls for EuroPride organisers to withdraw an invitation to an Israeli Eurovision winner.

Netta Barzilai is an Israeli singer-songwriter who won the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest. She is scheduled to perform at Europride 2023, which will be held in Malta next month.

ADPD has already called for her invitation to be revoked, insisting instead that organisers should support Palestinian human rights defenders to attend the EuroPride Human Rights Conference and the EuroPride March instead.

On Friday, Moviment Graffitti, aditus, MGRM, former president Coleiro Preca and Żminijietna - Voice of the Left said she should not be at Pride celebrations because of her support to the Israeli oppressive state.

They said they have written to parliamentary secretary Rebecca Buttigieg and EuroPride organisers Allied Rainbow Communities to express their disappointment and anger.

The invitation to Barzilai went against all the values that Pride stood for, they said. They did not want Barzilai to come to Malta because she was a supporter of the Israeli apartheid state.

"Barzilai has regularly participated in the efforts of the Israeli state to cover the oppression, the killings, and the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from their own land, and to project itself as a 'free' and 'democratic' state – all pinkwashing initiatives," they said in a statement on Friday.

They clarified they were not calling for the revocation of the invite just because she was an Israeli citizen.

"Nobody should be penalised because one is a citizen of one country or another.

"However, Barzilai has regularly participated in initiatives organised by the Israeli state outside Israel, in initiatives that celebrate the banishment of Palestinians from their homeland, and in concerts of the far right. According to her, the bad reputation of the Israeli state on the international scene is simply a question of 'bad PR' and not because of its politics of terror.

The activists added that since its inception in 1948, the Israeli state "has done everything in its power to push Palestinians away from their land".

Palestinians, they said, have been massacred in their thousands, while thousands of others have been evicted from their homes.

"They saw their fields and their water being stolen, their olive trees burned, the torture in Israeli prisons and the continuous cruelty of occupation that seeks to humiliate them with every step they take.  

"Today, Palestinians are confined to live in less than 20% of the land where they used to live – partly on the Gaza strip, which is bombarded regularly by the Israeli army, and partly in the West Bank, where Israeli illegal settlements continue to spread at a fast pace through the terrorisation of Palestinian villages and the violent seizure of Palestinian land."

The activists claimed the Israeli state has also blackmailed Palestinian LGBTIQ+ people into forced collaboration to provide information about other Palestinians, under threat that their status will be revealed.

"Israel uses all the means at its disposal to choke Palestinians, including cultural tools such as Netta Barzilai to wash away its bloodied image on the international stage, according to the organisations.

"Consequently, Barzilai is one of those people who is targeted by the campaign, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions called by the Palestinian civil society.

"In the same way that in the nineties, the apartheid regime in South Africa came to an end following international boycotts and sanctions, Palestinian civil society wants the world to put pressure on the apartheid state of Israel by means of boycotts and sanctions against all those that in one way or another are accomplices in its actions."

They urged for the revocation of Barzilai’s invitation because, they said, the principles of equality and freedom are not a menu from which one chooses at will.

"It is a huge contradiction that a manifestation such as Pride, which is supposed to celebrate love and equality, embraces personalities who are accomplices in the racism, killings and ethnic cleansing of the apartheid state of Israel, they concluded."