Who but Israel could stage Eurovision in the Middle East? Ask the voting public - The Jewish Chronicle

When Eurovision expanded to include Israel in 1973, it demonstrated something important about what is now the world’s most-watched non-sporting event. It was never a geography seminar. It is a celebration of European habits minus the map: camp, cabaret, drinking games, schlager, all the unembarrassed fun that baffled Soviet apparatchiks and still confounds Americans. It is what academics may call a voluntary cultural polity. Australia’s later inclusion made the same point: cultural Europe is a mood, not a landmass.

Israel fits naturally. Even then, it was what it remains today: the only place in the Middle East where you could plausibly stage a Eurovision final without having to negotiate blasphemy codes or morality police. Israel’s Eurovision presence emphasises this point again and again: the contest offered Israel a platform to show a version of itself that never appears in conflict reporting. A state of mixed crowds, Russian-speaking immigrants, Mizrahi families, Arab and Jewish performers sharing stages, gay clubs, and drag acts. The “pinkwashing” critics call this branding. Others call it reality.

To this day, Israel remains the only state in the region where men in glitter and leather could dance without being arrested. As Graham Norton once said from the Tel Aviv stage: “There are a lot of men in the audience who have forgotten to bring their wives.” In which other Middle Eastern country would those men have felt safe?

This is why the current campaign to expel Israel from Eurovision feels so profoundly at odds with the contest’s purpose. A vote was taken and lost. Israel stays. Yet broadcasters in Spain, the Netherlands and Ireland have flounced out anyway. The confusion, judging from their statements, is sincere. Eurovision has always been about peoples, not governments. It is a rebellion against diplomacy: a place where Serbs, Croats, Cypriots, Armenians and Azeris stand in line to sing at one another despite – sometimes because of – their governments. It exists precisely to show other sides of countries otherwise known only for their politics.

Few countries have used the platform as well as Israel. Its hosting in 2019 was an attempt to foreground the mundane, plural country that never quite penetrates the way is is seen by the rest of the world. The staging and the tourism campaign were all designed to place cosmopolitan normality ahead of geopolitics. The same happened this year. Yuval Raphael, Israel’s entrant, had been at the Nova music festival on October 7. Nova was precisely the kind of European-style cultural mingling – Jews, Arabs, foreign backpackers, trance DJs – that Hamas sought to obliterate. The point is unavoidable. Eurovision has long served as Israel’s counter-image: modernity, safety, nightlife, vulnerability, and the very camp sensibility that jihadists despise.

It is also the only country in the Middle East where you could have figures like Sapir Berman, the first transgender referee in international football. Or Dana International, who won Eurovision in 1998 and would face a 14-year prison term if she lived under Palestinian Authority law. There are openly gay soldiers in the IDF; same-sex couples receiving partner benefits; surrogacy rights; recognition of same-sex marriages performed abroad. Arab citizens sit in parliament, litigate in the courts, run cities, and occasionally hold the balance of power in coalitions. It is not an idyll. There is real structural discrimination. But it is an electoral democracy with Muslim Supreme Court justices and Druze generals – which, again, makes it an absolute outlier on any regional comparison.

Yet the politics of “progressive solidarity” has shifted. Research on queer activism and left movements describes a moral ranking of harms in which Israel’s military and territorial power is treated as analytically prior to any minority gains. Hence the paradox that Israel’s protections for women, gay people and religious minorities are not considered mitigating factors but part of the accusation. In this logic, those protections are cast as “pinkwashing” – an attempt to distract from violence against Palestinians. This helps explain why Eurovision delegations from countries with poor LGBT records themselves could call for Israel’s expulsion without embarrassment. The definition of progressive politics has subtly re-sorted itself around a simple strong-versus-weak hierarchy. Israel is classified as the strong and, ergo, a target. Nothing else matters.

Eurovision’s voting always shows divergence between juries and public tele-votes. When elites became more hostile, publics became more supportive. In both 2024 and 2025 Israel scored disproportionately high in the popular vote – in some cases topping it – even as demonstrations outside venues demanded its removal. Viewers often feel sympathy for performers who are being cast as fall guys. That tele-voting shows that European publics have not absorbed the elite narrative that Israel is unfit for a celebration of diversity. They can dislike Israeli foreign policy and still recognise Israeli’s humanity.

The row this year has felt like a stress test of Eurovision’s founding ethos. It has always been a family reunion of sorts – secular Germans cheering Greek ballads, Serbians giving 12 points to Croatians. Israel’s 12 points to Germany (for Nicole’s A Little Peace performance when Britain hosted in 1982) was a landmark in the rapprochement between the two peoples. Israel later invited Nicole to Tel Aviv to perform for soldiers. “They put down their weapons, took each other by the hand and listened to me for three minutes,” she later remembered. “It was such a great moment.”

“Nation shall speak peace unto nation,” says the BBC. Eurovision’s version is cruder: nation shall get drunk alongside nation, have a laugh at the wacky and weird and collectively choose the winner via the world’s most inebriated electorate. But all of this fosters a kind of cultural Europeanness that politics cannot. And one where, as tele-votes attest, Israel is warmly welcome.

Next year the Irish and Dutch will watch it as avidly as ever, whatever their broadcasters decide. Eurovision has survived an attempt to make it endorse a geopolitical purity code. In defending Israel’s right to appear onstage, the contest itself has defended its own essence. And the fight over Israel has reminded Europe what that essence is, how difficult it is to uphold, and how necessary it remains.

Fraser Nelson is a columnist for The Times

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Eurovision Song Contest