Eurovision Boycott – Disconnect Between European Leadership and Public
Some European countries have been featured in the press recently after they decided to boycott Eurovision because of Israel’s participation.
Slovenia even announced that instead of broadcasting Eurovision, they “will be airing the film series ‘Voices of Palestine,’ featuring Palestinian documentaries and feature films”.
As a note for North Americans, who may not be familiar with Eurovision, it is a widely popular annual contest pitting representatives of European countries (and countries including Israel from a few other regions) in a flamboyant song and dance extravaganza. I had never heard of Eurovision before I moved to Israel from America and married a French woman some years ago. Before our marriage, my wife-to-be appeared to be having second thoughts because I didn’t display the requisite knowledge or enthusiasm about Eurovision, which I now understand is one of the biggest European-wide yearly events (even as I surreptitiously avoid watching it at all costs).
What is interesting is that if you take a look at the recent Eurovision results, there is a huge disparity between the leadership of European countries that are choosing to show their disapproval of Israel by boycotting, and the voting patterns of the broader European public in response to Israel’s recent Eurovision performances.
Here are the two most recent Eurovision voting results:
Israel came in first in the voting results of the European public in 2025 (second overall) , and second in public voting (and fifth overall) in 2024! Overall results are based upon a combination of a panel of judges and the voting general public.
These are the opposite of the results you would expect from European residents if they favored a boycott of Israel.
Now, it is true that in the countries that have announced boycotts (Spain, Ireland, Slovenia Holland & Iceland), Israel didn’t receive support from their public in recent year’s Eurovision votes. But that didn’t stop Israel from finishing first and second respectively in the most recent two years of public voting at Eurovision, which leads one to believe that the boycotting countries are outliers in terms of the European population’s attitudes towards Israel.
In fact, having these countries with such anti-Israel sentiments decide not to participate in Eurovision probably increases Israel’s chances for success, as Israel probably wasn’t going to garner much support from the public of those countries anyway.
It is thus completely inaccurate to jump to a conclusion that the European public does not support Israel because of the disproportionate attention given to the announcements of those few countries that are boycotting. Rather, if the general public’s support, at least as measured in Eurovision voting (estimated at more than 17 million people), is an accurate indication, Israel is well thought of by the majority in Europe, even when inundated with overwhelmingly negative coverage of Israel by the local media.
And that is truly welcome news.
By the way, I did a bit of research to try to identify what Slovenia’s relationship is like with Israel. According to the former Yugoslavian republic’s governmental website: “Relations between the two countries [Slovenia & Israel] are good and traditionally friendly, and have developed in a spirit of constructive cooperation. The two countries have developed a wide range of cooperation, particularly in the fields of economiy [sic], science and culture. These relations provide the basis for developing a long-term partnership.”
I get the feeling that they need to update their website, and maybe do a spell check at the same time.
Noam Bettan will be representing Israel with the song Michelle next month – you can watch his beautiful trilingual performance here.
