A famous Swedish television game show presented a map of Israel with “Palestine” written on it alongside a Palestinian flag in one of its trivia quizzes.
During the semi-finals of the game show “Free for All” presented on Sweden’s Channel 5 on Monday, contestants were presented with a quiz on famous Swedish singer Laila Bagge Wahlgren, whose mother is Swedish and father a Palestinian.
The map was presented following a question asking contestants to answer where Wahlgren’s father was born, and detailed only Arab and mixed cities, alongside ancient sites like Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Nazareth, Ramallah, Gaza, and more. Tel Aviv was excluded from the map.
The Israeli Embassy to Sweden posted a question in a format similar to the gameshow, on their Twitter account, asking: “what should Channel 5 and the show’s producer do when they present a map with no mention of Israel? 1. Check the graphics, 2. Do more research, 3. Apologize, 4. All of the above.”
The game show’s producer apologized following the post. “It was a mistake, we’ll fix it as soon as possible, I apologize,” he wrote on his Twitter account. Swedish media also reported the incident.
Sweden’s Jewish Youth Association also took to Twitter, writing that “the map you presented was wrong in several aspects – if it was supposed to present Mandatory Palestine, the flag is wrong. The map is wrong both from a historic and modern perspective. It was clearly a modern map from which Israel and its cities were removed.”
“According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, antisemitism is denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and wishing for Israel to stop existing,” they said.
Israeli ambassador to Sweden Ziv Nevo Kolman said the map was shocking. "We challenged the show’s producers with an interactive response that drew attention and was covered positively in Swedish media,” he said.