The People Voted for Israel in Eurovision

For the second year in a row, Israel’s entry received the most votes from the Swedish public and zero votes from the SVT jury in the Eurovision Song Contest. The trend was the same throughout the rest of Europe. Instead of training sights on their own jury members, the organizing public service companies claimed that the public had been persuaded to vote for Israel through advertisements.

Yuval Raphael hid on October 7, 2023, along with about 50 others in a shelter near Kibbutz Be’eri, where she sustained shrapnel injuries from grenades thrown into the shelter by the terrorist group Hamas. Raphael was one of 11 survivors, having hidden under dead bodies for eight hours. Photo: Que JayTee

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) stated that Israeli advertising was the reason Israel’s song received so many votes from the public and so few from the state-run public service broadcasters’ experts.
The underlying assumption was thus that the EBU’s own experts were correct and that the public had been duped by Israel, according to the reasoning from Eurovision News Spotlight, EBU’s investigative journalism network launched in April.
The network, which includes Swedish public service broadcasters SVT and SR, is described as a collaborative fact-checking joint-network intended to equip public service media across Europe with tools to combat “disinformation.”
– “In a digitally focused world, we are facing an increasingly severe crisis of incorrect, false, and synthetic information that challenges our grasp on truth and reality,” said Liz Corbin, EBU’s head of news, ahead of the launch.
A number of countries ran advertisements for their Eurovision songs without being scrutinized by EBU’s fact-checking network. The EBU was founded on February 12, 1950, because its predecessor, the International Broadcasting Union (IBU), was considered too involved on Nazi Germany’s side during the war.

Ahead of this year’s Eurovision, EBU was accused of trying to steer and control journalists’ reporting. EBU forced journalists to forfeit their right to free and independent reporting, with a gag order that prohibited reporting on EBU and Eurovision that could be perceived as derogatory.
After criticism from Sweden’s evening newspaper Aftonbladet among others, the EBU will now revise its handbook for journalists ahead of next year’s contest. The background is a controversial phrasing stating that media coverage “must not harm Eurovision or the reputation of the EBU.”
After his victory this year’s winner, Johannes Pietsch from Austria, expressed that he did not want Israel to participate in next year’s song contest in Vienna.
– I’m very disappointed that Russia was excluded, but Israel was allowed to participate, he told the Spanish newspaper ABC.

– If it were up to me, I would exclude Israel, he continued, and hinted at the possibility of election fraud:
– Maybe next year the televoting will be properly monitored, without advertising or anything like that.

Further commotion arose when Johannes Pietsch ‘liked’ a social media post about a report describing how two Israelis were murdered in Washington after a terrorist deliberately targeted a Jewish institution and shouted “Free Palestine” during the attack.
The Israeli singer Yuval Raphael represented Israel and finished second in the Eurovision Song Contest 2025. She had participated in the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists attacked the festival killing 360 young attendees, and kidnapping another 40.
Yuval Raphael hid together with about 50 others in a shelter near Kibbutz Be’eri, where she sustained shrapnel injuries from grenades thrown into the shelter. Raphael was one of 11 survivors after hiding under dead bodies for eight hours, reported the BBC.
Prior to this year’s Eurovision Contest, demands were made for the EBU to exclude the Israeli candidate from the contest in Basel, Switzerland. Similarly, ahead of last year’s competition in Malmö, members of parliament from far-left and nationalist parties called for a boycott of Israel.