Don’t overstate Israel’s Eurovision result – but don’t understate it either

The nail-biting end to 2025’s Eurovision Song Contest has sparked furious debate about the extent of Israel’s public televote performance, which saw Yuval Raphael, the miraculous survivor of a horrific eight-hour ordeal on October 7th 2023, finish in second place.

This superb result has been hailed in some quarters as the work of a “silent majority” in support of Israel. Clearly, without more, this is a facile overstatement of reality, given that the viewing population of Eurovision is but a very limited number of the hundreds of millions in Europe, and also all those outside it who constitute the “Rest of the World” audience category.

However – and perhaps in a salutary lesson for the leaders of some participating Eurovision nations – it cannot be understated either. Israel’s televote-winning performance, with 297 audience points, clearly represents a triumph for the Jewish State among those who do watch Eurovision – estimated to be around 150 million in recent years – and those who pick up the phone to vote in the contest.

From those questioning how this has happened – from the malign conspiracy theorists quickly clutching at extreme theories of vote “rigging”, vote “engineering”, vote “manipulation” and vote “(insert next conspiratorial verb here)“, without evidence, to even the most innocent observers suggesting significant Jewish viewership of Eurovision across Europe – there are simply too many other factors that need to be explained away.

The most simple, and perhaps most overlooked factor, is that the Israeli public cannot vote for themselves. Given that Israel is the world’s largest Israeli and Jewish population, that is a lot of Israelis, Jews and supporters of Israel who were unable to vote for their nation. And therefore, given a total of 12 countries plus the entire “Rest of the World” category gave Israel the maximum 12 points, that is a lot of people sat outside of Israel, who had the option to vote for Israel, and duly did.

Equally, Israel’s performance cannot simply be put down to a loud Jewish/Zionist block of voters in the diaspora. Even if one subscribed to the unconvincing idea that the world’s second largest Jewish/Zionist population, the United States (not a Eurovision participating country) had played some influential part in the voting, there are simply too many other voters in the actual Eurovision member nations for US voters to be a major influence.

And among those countries’ Jewish populations, one need only look at those 12 nations who awarded Israel maximum points to underscore the point. Of those countries, it is France, the UK, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands with the most established Jewish communities (totalling around 1 million Jews), none of which are outsized relative to their wider populations. Even if one assumed every single one of these viewers had watched Eurovision, voted at Eurovision and voted for Israel specifically, it is simply nowhere near enough to even remotely influence the overall televote.

Fundamentally, the theory of outsized Jewish voting influence also fails to explain clear outliers in this year’s results, from countries not only with much fewer Jews than the above nations, but those whose leaders and institutions have also been immensely hostile to Israel for far longer since the onset of the war with Hamas.

How can it be down to the simple influence of Jews that Spain, a country with no more than 50,000 Jewish citizens, can award Israel douze points while its own Prime Minister last week labelled it a “genocidal state”, and its broadcaster defied European Broadcasting Union (EBU) warnings to publicly criticise Israel for its actions in Gaza during the Eurovision broadcast?

And how can it be that Ireland, who have no more than 5,000 Jews, whose government have sought to broaden the definition of genocide at the ICJ, whose President has repeatedly pushed out bizarre, unprompted claims without evidence against certain elements of the State of Israel, and whose broadcaster initiated calls for a discussion on Israel’s very presence at Eurovision this year, could see its audience give Israel 10 points out of the 12 (and its jury give out a very respectable seven points)?

These burning questions bring us naturally to the theory, subscribed to by an appallingly high number of people, that Israel has malignly engineered a mass vote in its own favour. Unfortunately for those people, they would then need to explain how it is that audiences in Armenia, Croatia and Poland gave Israel no points whatsoever, while Israel’s only other fellow embattled nation in the contest, Ukraine, gave it a meagre 1 point. I would politely suggest that a mass-engineered voting shop cannot achieve unparalleled success in some European countries while absolutely backfiring in others.

The explanation must, surely, be that these audiences found great musical merit (as did some juries) in Yuval Raphael’s delivery of her powerful ballad, and/or sympathised with her story, and/or sympathised with Israel more broadly. There can be few other reasons for significant numbers of non-Israeli, non-Jewish viewers to pick up the phone, reach into their pocket and pay to lend up to 20 votes per person to one single country.

This is not an experience unique to 2025 either. Israel received even more televote points last year (323, second only to Croatia) and came fifth, the televotes being more thinly spread over a greater number of countries in 2024. And the previous year, with no October 7th and no war in Gaza, Israel scored 185 televote points, and came third. Most countries don’t even achieve triple digits.

For all the noise, all the protest, all the calls for Israel’s exclusion, and now all of the bizarre calls from other Eurovision participants for a review of the televote system (prompting a robust defence of the system from organisers), it is clear that there are simply too many variables that could easily have swung against Israel in the current climate, but have instead stacked up significantly in its favour.

Silent majority this may not be, but a product of Yuval Raphael’s unique appeal, Israel’s consistent musical prowess at Eurovision, and – yes – a high degree of sympathy from geopolitical circumstance, it surely is. And foul play, it certainly isn’t.