The New York Times’ faux Eurovision scandal about Israel

In Ireland, whose national broadcaster was among the most vocally hostile to Israel's presence and which is boycotting the 2026 contest entirely on political grounds, the public also gave Israel twelve points in 2025. If Israel's vote was a manufactured fiction conjured by government advertising, somebody forgot to tell the voters of Madrid and Dublin. The Jewish population of Ireland is approximately 2,500 people. Spain's is around 40,000 in a country of 47 million. These are not numbers that shift a national televote.

Eurovision has attracted serious academic attention for decades, precisely because its voting patterns are so revealing. Researchers at the University of Central Florida analysed 60 years of voting data and confirmed what we have all long known about: geographic blocs, cultural proximity, and diaspora communities produce consistent, statistically significant voting clusters entirely unrelated to musical merit.

Germany over-voted for Turkey for years, explained straightforwardly by the 750,000 Turkish workers who arrived under 1960s labour agreements and stayed. France consistently favours Portugal and Israel, explained by its large Portuguese and Jewish communities respectively. Lithuania punches above its weight in Ireland and the UK, home to one of Europe's largest Lithuanian diasporas. A 2026 ETH Zurich study analysing nearly 1,800 Eurovision songs found that countries have been systematically learning and adapting winning strategies over decades – Sweden most successfully, having industrialised the process through Melodifestivalen into something approaching a songwriting factory, and exporting its producers and composers to half the continent for their own entries.

None of this has ever been considered scandalous. It is simply how Eurovision works. The contest has never been, and was never designed to be, a clinical assessment of musical merit conducted behind a veil of ignorance.

So what is the actual scandal here? Not Israel's advertising. The real politicisation of Eurovision ran in the other direction entirely, was broader in scope, and in several documented instances broke the rules that Israel's campaign is accused of merely exploiting more successfully than others.

A Norwegian juror, Daniel Owen, publicly admitted on Instagram after the 2024 contest that he had deliberately withheld points from Israel's Eden Golan because of his political views on Gaza. He knew this was against the rules. Jurors are shown an explicit instruction video telling them they must not discriminate against any participant based on political views. He did it anyway, and then apologised – not for the breach, but for the fact that his fellow jurors had awarded Israel any points at all. The EBU expressed disappointment. No disciplinary action has been publicly recorded.

Statistical analysis of jury versus public voting for Israel tells a damning story. Before October 7 2023, the gap between jury scores and public scores for Israel fluctuated normally, as it does for every country. After October 7, jury support collapsed across Europe while public support surged, the two lines diverging sharply and remaining diverged. The pattern across dozens of independent juries, simultaneously, is not easily explained by a sudden collective reassessment of Israeli musical quality.

Meanwhile, five national broadcasters are boycotting the 2026 contest for explicitly political reasons. The BDS movement ran organised campaigns calling on performers, crew, and viewers to refuse participation. Over a thousand artists signed letters demanding Israel's exclusion. Spain's broadcaster put a political slogan on screen during a live broadcast, in direct violation of EBU guidelines, and appears to have faced no consequences whatsoever.

All of this – documented, named, rule-breaking, institutionally coordinated – received a fraction of the scrutiny directed at Israel for buying Google ads, yet is presumably the main driver in Israel's decision to do so: to counter various international and openly rule-breaking efforts to politicise the contest against it. The reaction itself is condemned by the New York Times, despite apparently not breaking any rules.

And then there is the question of what Israel's advertising campaign actually encouraged people to do. It encouraged supporters to use all 20 votes the system explicitly permitted each viewer to cast – a rule that existed precisely to allow committed or enthusiastic voters to express stronger preference. If the intention were one person, one vote, the limit would have been set at one. Beyond that, those voters, whatever their motivation – love of the song, cultural solidarity, political sympathy, or simple tribal feeling – were doing exactly what the system invites them to do.

You may vote because the staging was breathtaking, because a leather-clad Icelandic techno-Viking caught your eye, because the singer arrived on a flying hamster wheel in a leotard and you respect that commitment, because your grandfather came from that country, because the wind machine at the key change genuinely moved you, or because you want to make a political point. All of it is legitimate. The only people in this entire saga who were explicitly required to set aside their political views and judge purely on musical merit were the professional jurors – and one of them went on Instagram afterwards to boast that he hadn't.

Eurovision is not, and has never been, a politically neutral event. It is a celebration of national identity, cultural difference, and tribal belonging. The flags, the postcards, the national costumes, the spokesperson announcing votes with barely concealed patriotic glee – all of it is steeped in exactly the kind of national feeling that is inseparable from politics. Culture is not downstream of politics; politics is downstream of culture, of identity, of who we feel we are and who we feel is like us.

If the EBU genuinely wanted a pure musical competition untainted by any of this, it would release all the songs on the night of the final, stripped of national attribution, heard for the first time by judges who knew nothing of their origin. No staging. No flags. No postcards of beautiful cities. No Graham Norton. A blind taste test of tunes.

It would be unwatchable. Nobody would care. The drama, the build-up, the camp excess, the tears, the tribalism, the sparkles, the geopolitical undercurrents, are the entire point of this festival of freakery. The joyful absurdity of the whole enterprise depends on knowing where everyone is from and caring about it. You cannot strip Eurovision of its politics without stripping it of everything that makes it Eurovision. But the rules exist to stop it being highjacked in an aggressive, bullying or nasty way.

Israel played the game. It played it openly, within the rules as they existed. The scandal the Times should be investigating is not that Israel encouraged its supporters to vote. It is that professional jurors across Europe admitted or appeared to allow a geopolitical moment to override their explicit obligations, that a national broadcaster put politics on screen during a live final, and that the EBU's institutional response was to tighten rules against advertising while leaving the rule-breaking on the other side largely unexamined.

That is the story. But douze points to the New York Times for trying.