Former Anders chairwoman Gwendolyn Rutten appeared yesterday on VRT’s De Afspraak to comment on Israel’s participation in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest

Former Anders chairwoman Gwendolyn Rutten appeared yesterday on public broadcaster VRT’s De Afspraak to comment on Israel’s participation in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest.Her message was unequivocal: in her view, Israel should not be allowed to take part.

What raised eyebrows, however, was not only the position she took, but the way she expressed it. Speaking about Eurovision’s main sponsor, Moroccanoil, Rutten first described it as “not a Moroccan company but a Jewish company.” Only afterward did she correct herself, saying that, to keep the terminology “pure,” she meant an Israeli company.

Flemish Parliament

And that is precisely where the problem begins, on several levels.

Whether intentionally or not, Rutten was invoking in De Afspraak on Public Broadcaster VRT an old and poisonous trope: that of Jewish financial power, the Jewish lobby, Jewish capital pulling strings behind the scenes. The fact that such insinuations are resurfacing at all is disturbing. That they should come from a former liberal figurehead makes it all the more painful. It suggests that a party such as Open VLD—now rebranded as “Anders”—has drifted so far that it has lost not only its ideological compass, but its moral bearings as well. Besides why politicians get involved in a cultural event like the Eurovision Song Contest.

Because what is Moroccanoil, exactly? It is an Israeli company. Not “Jewish capital.” Not “the Jewish lobby.” An Israeli company. Rutten began with “Jewish” and later corrected herself to “Israeli,” but it is precisely that slippage between terms that reveals the deeper problem: ethnicity, religion, nationality, company ownership, and state policy are all being carelessly conflated.

That is not merely sloppy. It is dangerous.

Israel is not an ethnically homogeneous country, nor is it synonymous with “the Jews.” Jews do form the majority of the population, but Israel is also home to Christians, Muslims, Druze, and other minorities. And there are roughly as many Jews living outside Israel as there are within it. Anyone who casually shifts back and forth between “Jewish” and “Israeli” is displaying either a startling ignorance or a deliberate refusal to take that distinction seriously.

Rutten also seems confused about what a company is. In the pluralistic democracy that Israel is, an Israeli company is simply that: a company. It may employ Jewish, Arab, Christian, and other workers alike. Israeli businesses are not free to operate according to apartheid principles. So what, exactly, is Rutten suggesting? That a company’s nationality is inherently suspect? That ownership, origin, and moral guilt automatically collapse into one another? That any sponsor from Israel is tainted by definition?

Once that becomes the logic, we find ourselves on a slippery slope that Europe knows all too well from its darkest chapters. In practice, what Rutten is suggesting comes perilously close to Kauft nicht bei Juden. That kind of language, those associations, those latent images of the enemy belong to the 1930s not to a contemporary debate on a public broadcaster like the VRT.

Imagine the situation in reverse. Suppose a Belgian company, owned by Jewish Belgians, were sponsoring a cultural event in Europe. Would anyone seriously speak of “the Jewish lobby”? Would anyone insinuate that some shadowy and suspect network of influence lay behind it? Of course not. And that is exactly why Rutten’s remarks are so revealing.

She turns a commercial company into a political symbol, and then transforms that political symbol into an ethno-religious category. Everything is collapsed into a single hostile image: Israel, Jews, money, influence, sponsorship. It is intellectually crude and morally reckless.

And there is another problem. If Rutten’s outrage were truly principled, then her boycott of Israel to the European Song Contest fervor would have to extend to half the world. Why not China, for instance, a dictatorship accused of interning millions of Uyghurs and systematically erasing a people? Why is there no endless national media campaign demanding cultural exclusion there? Why is it always Israel, and always Israel again?

Rutten is not a marginal figure. She is a former party leader of Open VLD, for years one of the country’s major political forces. Today that party goes by the name “Anders,” after suffering the worst electoral results in its history. By now, few still need convincing that something has gone badly wrong.

In Flanders, voters have increasingly turned to parties such as N-VA and Vlaams Belang. That did not happen in a vacuum. When Open VLD was still recognisably liberal, rather than a party eager to sound morally fashionable while drifting into ideological incoherence, it was one of the largest parties in the region and even produced the prime minister. Today, it has been reduced to a splinter party with just 8 of the 150 seats in the federal Chamber and 8 of the 124 seats in the Flemish Parliament.

Anyone wondering how matters came to this need only listen carefully to Rutten’s remarks and especially to what echoes between the lines.

Her insinuations about Jewish influence and Jewish capital would not have sounded out of place in 1930s Germany. This is not a minor detail, a harmless slip, or some trivial semantic confusion. It is a low point. And a deeply painful one for a party that, for decades, benefited without hesitation from Jewish votes. It is hardly surprising that the Jewish Information and Documentation Center (JID) responded sharply on social media.

After two years of relentless debate in the Belgian media over Israel’s participation in Eurovision Song Contest, it would be refreshing if a measure of sobriety returned. Israel should simply be allowed to participate.

And perhaps, ironically, it is Germany that offers Europe a lesson here today. Precisely there where the historical consequences of antisemitic excess are understood more clearly than anywhere else, people still recognise that this sort of reasoning must never be casually normalised. They understand that moral clarity begins with drawing elementary distinctions: between Jew and Israeli, between company and state, between criticism and demonisation.

Belgium would do well to take note.

Image credits: Flanders Parliament