The Propagandists Who Lost Eurovision’s Popular Vote
The New York Times accuses Israel of using Eurovision as soft power. Eurovision was invented to be soft power.
Atossa is an Iranian woman writing in Persian. A few hours before Israel took the Eurovision stage in Vienna last night, she told her followers they had to vote tonight at the Eurovision live broadcast site. Don’t forget, she wrote. Her post ended with three Israeli flag emojis.
She was not the only one. Iranians across the platform were posting the same thing to each other, in Persian, all night.
I have looked at a lot of strange and beautiful things online since October 7. This one stopped me cold. Atossa is in the diaspora, or she is hiding her location, or she is brave enough not to. The country whose flag she put in her tweet is the country her government has called the Little Satan for forty-six years. The artist she is asking other Iranians to vote for is a French-Israeli pop singer from Ra’anana, performing in Hebrew, English, and French, about a woman who has broken his heart.
She wasn’t really telling them to vote for Noam Bettan.
She was telling them to use the only ballot they have.
On Monday, the day before the first semifinal, The New York Times published a front-page investigation under a headline that has since been quietly softened. The original online headline said Israel had “co-opted” Eurovision and nearly broke the world’s biggest song contest. By Tuesday morning the headline read: “How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool.” The Times changed it because, as the paper’s own reporting acknowledged, Israel broke no rules, deployed no bots, and won the popular vote on the strength of, well, popular votes.
The number the Times leads with is $1 million. That is the total Israel spent over multiple years promoting its contestants to Eurovision audiences. Doron Medalie, the former Israeli Eurovision songwriter the Times itself interviewed, defended the spending bluntly. “Everybody is jealous and triggered because Israel is achieving great results,” he said. He has a point. Israel is the only Eurovision country whose security detail this year includes the FBI. That is because Israel is the only Eurovision country whose contestants get throat-slit gestures on the turquoise carpet. A promotion budget on top of that is not scandal. It is housekeeping.
The Times traces the strategy back to 2018, when the government spent about $100,000 on social media around Netta Barzilai. Netta won. The implication is that the $100,000 explains the victory. The actual explanation is that “Toy” was “Toy,” a song that went viral on every continent and won the public televote in a landslide. The Times does not entertain that possibility.
Buried halfway down the piece is a more important concession: other countries also run ad campaigns. The Times simply does not treat their campaigns as scandal. Only Israel’s.
Set aside the framing and look at what Eurovision actually is. Eleven years after Europe finished killing itself in two world wars, the European Broadcasting Union gathered seven countries in a small Swiss casino in Lugano for the first Eurovision Song Contest. The premise was that nations sharing music on a glittery stage might be less inclined to bomb each other’s capitals. Eurovision was invented to be soft power. That is its job description. Every participating country has used it that way for seventy years. Sweden’s state-backed strategy produced ABBA and Loreen. France treats every entry as a diplomatic statement.
When the Times accuses Israel of using Eurovision as a soft-power tool, it is accusing Israel of participating in Eurovision.
If Israel had won the jury vote, none of this would be a scandal. The juries, made up of music industry professionals appointed by each national broadcaster, are the part of Eurovision where governments and broadcasters retain influence. In 2025, the juries put Yuval Raphael in joint fourteenth place. The public put her first. That is the gap that has put Eurovision into crisis, not the ad campaigns.
Most of those ordinary Europeans were doing what Eurovision viewers always do: voting for the performance they liked best. Yuval Raphael survived October 7th by hiding under bodies for eight hours in a concrete shelter at the Nova festival, while Hamas terrorists came back ten times to shoot and throw grenades at the dozens hiding inside. Eleven of the forty crammed into that shelter came out alive. A year and a half later, she stood on the Eurovision stage in Basel and sang “New Day Will Rise.” It was hauntingly beautiful. Noam Bettan’s “Michelle” is a French-Hebrew-English banger and people in countries that are supposed to hate him are already singing the chorus by heart. The songs are good. That has to be the first part of any honest answer to why Israel keeps winning the public vote.
But Eurovision did not become a political question because Israel made it one. Israel sent a singer. The campaign against Israel made it political. For two years, that campaign has told every European watching at home that a vote for the Israeli song is a vote for what they are being told Israel is doing in Gaza. Demand Israel be expelled. Refuse to broadcast the final because Israel is on it. The framing is not subtle.
Millions of Europeans heard the framing and pressed the button anyway.
Israel is not persuading anyone. The artists are just singing. And when 47,000 Spanish votes were cast for Israel during last year’s broadcast, in a country whose government had just recognized a Palestinian state and whose broadcaster had spent the year demanding Israel be expelled, the answer was unambiguous. That was not a propaganda victory for Israel. That was a refusal by enough Spaniards to bother voting to make the result undeniable.
The EBU saw what the public vote did and changed the rules. This year the maximum number of televotes per viewer was cut from twenty to ten. The professional juries, which had been removed from the semifinals in 2023, were brought back in time for 2026. Both changes were sold as anti-manipulation reforms. Both suppress the public vote and raise the influence of the people whose job it is to determine the official line. EBU director Martin Green said the changes addressed “a perception issue,” not a proven problem of fraud. The Times itself describes them as a response to Israel’s televote performance.
Which brings us to the actual story Eurovision is telling.
Eurovision is a system where a few hundred motivated voters in any given country can swing the public total. I, like the Times reporters, wonder who those people are. Are they just random pop fans? Are they diaspora Jews who feel voiceless in their own neighborhoods? Are they Christians who have been called Islamophobes for refusing to celebrate Hamas? Are they Iranians like Atossa, voting against the regime that exiled them?
Whoever they are, they have been watching the same news as everyone else. The BBC. RTÉ. RTVE. Sky. They watch their politicians vote to recognize a Palestinian state and their broadcasters refuse to even air this year’s final. They scroll past protest camps and TikToks of dead children in Gaza, without context for the rockets fired at Israeli children the same week.
And then, once a year, on a Saturday night in May, they are handed a phone and given the chance to express what they actually think. Not in a poll. Not in a comment section. In a vote that is counted.
They vote for Israel.
My Tunisian grandmother Kamisa came from Djerba, an island off the coast of Tunisia that holds one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities on earth. The first female recording artist in Morocco was a Jewish woman named Zohra Alfasia, who sang at the court of King Mohammed V. For half a century, the Jewish women of North Africa shaped the popular music of the Arab world. Then most of them were driven out. Kamisa raised her daughters in Israel. Zohra Alfasia emigrated to Israel in 1962 and found a country whose cultural establishment had no interest in Moroccan music sung in Arabic. She lived in a government apartment in Ashkelon, sang at weddings, and died there alone in 1994. A generation later, younger Israeli artists rediscovered her. A poem about her fate entered the national school curriculum. The Arab world erased the women who built its music. Israel, in its first decades, kept erasing them. The children of those women insisted on remembering anyway.
Iranian women have a more recent version of this story. The regime that took their country in 1979 made Israel and the United States the official enemies of the state, then spent the next four decades imprisoning and hanging Iranian women for what they wore. In September 2022, the morality police killed Mahsa Amini for an improper hijab. She was twenty-two years old. The protest movement that followed adopted the slogan *Woman, Life, Freedom*. The regime’s response was to denounce the women in the streets as “Israel’s soldiers.”
The Iranian diaspora has spent forty-six years being told Israel is its enemy. Many of them looked at who actually targets them and decided otherwise. They watch Israeli prime ministers address the Iranian people directly in Persian. They watch Israel strike the regime that hangs their cousins. They are not confused about which country is on their side and which is hanging women in Evin Prison.
So when Atossa tells her followers to vote for Israel, she is doing something the EBU cannot regulate and the New York Times cannot understand. The Islamic Republic spent forty years calling Iranian women Israel’s soldiers. Atossa, in Persian, is calling the bluff. Her cousins in Tehran cannot vote. She can, and she is using the only ballot she will be handed this year.
This is the part the Times missed. It is not soft power. It is the closest thing to representation a lot of voiceless people have left.
Eurovision likes to call itself non-political. This was always polite fiction, but it survived because the politics it suppressed were the usual kind. Bloc voting between Greece and Cyprus. Regional alliances. The predictable Scandinavian solidarity. The contest was a place where small countries got attention and gay kids in small towns got to feel briefly visible. The politics were always there, just not the kind that questioned an entire country’s right to exist.
The campaign against Israel broke that. Five countries boycotted this year. Austria’s own national broadcasting chief floated his own country pulling out in solidarity with Israel, then resigned. Iceland, Ireland, Spain, Slovenia, and the Netherlands will not broadcast Saturday’s final. The 2026 contest has thirty-five participating countries, the fewest since 2003. Nemo, the 2024 winner for Switzerland, returned their trophy in protest of Israel’s continued participation.
And still, Noam Bettan advanced to the final last night, performing through “stop the genocide” chants in the Wiener Stadthalle and a security perimeter staffed in part by the FBI.
If Israel wins on Saturday, the EBU will lose more than the right to host Eurovision in Tel Aviv next year. It will lose the fiction that this can be managed by minimizing the popular vote. The next round of reforms will require admitting what this year’s already does: the only way to stop the public from voting for Israel is to take the public’s vote away.
I have spent the better part of my adult life arguing about Israel in rooms where it is not safe to argue. I know the cost of telling the truth in front of people who do not want to hear it.
The story the Times keeps telling is that Israel is wrong this week, again, for whatever Israel did this week. Israel is not allowed to fight when it is attacked. Israel is not allowed to do diplomacy when it is attacked. The Times has spent two years making both arguments. So when Israel sends a singer, the Times writes the article anyway.
And I will tell you something the Times will not.
The reason Israel keeps doing well at Eurovision is not that the Israeli government is good at marketing. The Israeli government is, on most days, one of the worst-marketed states on earth. The reason Israel keeps doing well at Eurovision is that millions of people across Europe are watching the same news that other Europeans watch, reading the same op-eds, watching the same celebrities pose in keffiyehs, and have decided, quietly, that they disagree.
They cannot say so at work. They cannot say so at university. They certainly cannot say so on the BBC.
But on a Saturday night in May, when the phones light up and the votes are anonymous, they can press a button.
And Atossa, in Persian, is asking them to press it ten more times.
One more point I would add is that the NYTimes (et. al) indulges in the one of the most classic of antisemitic tropes by positioning Israel as somehow controlling the world through money, votes, manipulation, exploitation, “co-opting” etc., Their contempt for the public who vote for Israel are votes made by mainstream peace-loving people (I mean, really, the public that loves Eurovision strikes me as having more in common with a puppy than any other group of people. I wish I could be more like them and I wish the musicians I’ve tended toward would be more like them in spirit).
We have been living through a protracted revolution in journalism that is speeding up and it is not going to end well for the legacy outlets if they keep up this bullshit contempt for journalistic integrity. Today, I cancelled another subscription to a national newspaper I once favoured (and even though I had to do so with a squinted eye when it came to things Jewish.). I’ve quite literally lost track of how many subscriptions I’ve cancelled to newspaper, magazine and public radio and tv outlets.
Well put as always. Also worth observing that there were no such protests made against Bosnian or Serb participation in the 1990s after thousands of Muslims actually were killed in a properly recognised genocide in those countries.