Israel has ranked among the top countries by fans in Eurovision while receiving significantly lower scores from the contest’s professional jury, prompting some observers to speculate about a gap between elite and public sentiment in light of geopolitical events.
Last month, Israel ranked second in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest while garnering high marks from European countries. Noam Bettan, a 28-year-old from Ra’anana born to a French family, earned the maximum of 12 points from Germany and France.
That was in spite of Spain’s public broadcaster joining five other European nations in calling for Israel’s removal from the contest this year and boycotting the event. Their calls added to the scrutiny Israel already faced from left-wing politicians, activists, artists, and organizations following the Middle Eastern nation’s response to the deadly terrorist attacks led by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.
Bettan’s victory also came as tensions ran high over the U.S.–Israeli attacks on Iran, and Europe’s reluctance to participate.
Public Votes for Israel
For the third consecutive year, audiences in countries such as France and Germany awarded Israel the maximum number of points in the public televote.
The United Kingdom awarded near-maximum support, having given top marks in both 2024 and 2025. When Spain still participated in 2024 and 2025, Spanish viewers also awarded Israel the full 12 points.
Socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez defended his country’s withdrawal from this year’s contest in a video message, saying Spain was staying away “on the right side of history” in response to what he alleged was a genocide in Gaza. At the same time the Eurovision 2026 competition played out, Spain’s public broadcaster aired a message calling for “Peace and Justice for Palestine.”
Israel succeeded due to its high levels of support in the public televote, which allows European fans to vote for their favorite performers. Performers are then ranked according to the number of votes they receive from each country.
The performer with the highest amount of votes in a particular country receives a televote score of 12 from that country. Other performers receive decreasing scores of 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Voters can give all 10 votes to a single country or spread them across several.
Shabbos Kestenbaum, a political commentator at PragerU, said many audience members are simply supporting good performances with their votes.
“People want to celebrate music and talent, while the mainstream media want to engage in politics and division,” he told The Epoch Times. “I’m not surprised Israel is consistently ranked highly by the public: their music has been terrific.”
Gilles-William Goldnadel, a French lawyer, president of Lawyers Without Borders, and author of the post-Oct. 7 best-seller “War Diary,” told The Epoch Times that the repeated high public votes reflected, in his view, more than a musical preference in what has become a highly politicized contest.
“When you play politics, you get politics,” he said. “So one can logically see behind the result a desire among a large part of the public, across all backgrounds and not only Jews, to push back against the pathological anti-Israel sentiment of left-wing media and politicians.”
Accusations of Vote Manipulation
Amid strong public support, Israel has faced accusations of cheating from left-wing figures, including from French MP Aymeric Caron of the far-left France Unbowed.
“While Israel’s propagandists were rigging the Eurovision vote to make their contestant win despite having no place there, their army was once again killing innocent people in Gaza,” he alleged on X in 2025.
A Eurovision News Spotlight investigation in 2025 uncovered evidence that the Israeli Government Advertising Agency had placed advertisements across Google products and used state social media accounts to promote the Israeli entry.
A New York Times investigation published days before the 2026 final described a multi-year Israeli government effort to promote its Eurovision candidates, citing internal European Broadcasting Union (EBU) documents and interviews, and reporting over a million dollars in contest-related spending in 2025 alone.
Meanwhile, The New York Times acknowledged finding no evidence of bots or covert manipulation.
Contest organizers and others also disputed the accusations of manipulation. EBU director and Eurovision Executive Supervisor Martin Green said that while Israel’s promotional activities in 2025 had been, in his view, excessive, they had not altered the outcome.
In 2025, several European public broadcasters challenged the Eurovision song contest voting system, following the overwhelming public vote in favor of Israel’s candidate.
Spain’s broadcaster also requested an audit from the organization responsible for Eurovision in order to investigate the Spanish televote.
However, no public audit findings were released showing irregularities in Spain’s 2025 televote, or confirming any manipulation.
In response to the controversies, the EBU introduced several rule changes for 2026. The number of votes allowed per payment method was halved from 20 to 10, professional juries were restored to the semi-finals for the first time since 2022, jury panels were enlarged, and artists and broadcasters were barred from joining third-party promotional campaigns, including government-led ones.
In 2026, after artist Noam Bettan released promotional videos in 13 languages explaining how to vote up to 10 times for his entry, Green stated publicly that the EBU contacted Israeli broadcaster KAN within 20 minutes of discovering the material. The EBU requested the immediate removal of the videos, and KAN promptly took action to delete them.
“The Voting Instructions of the Eurovision Song Contest that cover promotion are predominantly directed at discouraging large scale funded third-party campaigns, and we are satisfied that this video did not form part of such a campaign,” said Green in a statement.
“However, employing a direct call to action to vote 10 times for one artist or song is also not in line with our rules nor the spirit of the competition.”
Kestenbaum said that “every country engages in soft forms of diplomacy in the hopes of winning” and that Israel’s actions were “neither nefarious, controversial, nor new.”
The Eurovision News Spotlight investigation similarly found evidence of sponsored posts for Malta, Greece, Albania, Poland, Armenia, and France.
Goldnadel noted that after the change to the voting structure, Israel was still able to finish second.
The Jury–Public Divide
Israel’s success seemed to stem mostly from the televote, which makes up 50 percent of the total score it receives from each country.
The other half of the score comes from professional juries—including singers, songwriters, music executives, and others—appointed by participating broadcasters like the BBC.
In response to Israel’s comparatively lower success among juries, some analysts suspected political bias among national jury members appointed by public broadcasters, while others suggested that the gap between jury and public scores was itself evidence that the televote was not organic.
A 2026 analysis by the British NGO Action on Armed Violence stated that Eurovision’s public televoting support for Israel had risen markedly since Oct. 7, 2023, as professional jury scores had sharply declined. The organization argued that this “raises the spectre of voting manipulation intended to give a sense of widespread support for Israel.”
The 2025 results illustrated the gap: Israel’s entry received 297 points from the public and 60 from the jury, while the Austrian entry, which won overall, scored 178 from the public but 258 from the jury.
Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken interpreted the outcome on X as a grift pitting “the people against the virtue-signaling elites.” Other pro-Israel voices echoed that same view online.
Large gaps between public and jury votes are common at Eurovision and not specific to Israel.
In 2026, the Romanian candidate placed third with a notable 168-point gap between a strong televote and a low jury score.
In Australia, suspicions about the jury vote have sparked debate at the highest levels of government, although both the country’s professional jury and public televote gave zero points to Israel’s entry.
Right-wing Sen. Sarah Henderson questioned the process for selecting Australia’s Eurovision jury during a Senate Estimates hearing on May 28, which focused primarily on SBS costs.
“Is it possible to explain how the jury appointed by SBS gave zero votes to Israel when Israel was ranked so highly and came in second in the competition?” she asked.
SBS Managing Director Jane Palfreyman replied: “I think it comes back to the criteria and how the jury reached their votes. I think we’ll answer that when we take it on notice as to how they reached their outcomes.”
In 2024, Norwegian jury member Daniel Johansen Elmrhari acknowledged that his geopolitical views on Israel had an influence on his grand final voting. “I cannot in any way support Israel’s actions. In my opinion, Israel should not have been allowed to participate in Eurovision at all,” he said in an Instagram video.
Friends Read Free
Copy
Facebook
Tweet
