Stolen from Mastodon.
Don’t stop boycotting, but it may be a factor in what we saw today, at the very least it’s helping the Israeli government’s advertising to be more effective. ESC really needs to do something (ideally ban Israel) because Israel has made Eurovision even more explicitly political than it was before.
There aren’t really two sides in this example, though. The people who televoted for Israel were the only ones clearly voting based on that political situation, everyone else was voting for a multitude of other reasons. If it was actually a two-sided contest over Israel/Gaza, Israel would have been absolutely smashed. I’m also not sure I agree with you that Eurovision isn’t meant to be political when that is literally how it has always been. Voting has always been influenced by politics, whether that’s current events or just long-term relationships between countries. It can be frustrating but it’s also part of the drama and fun of the competition. The UK receiving 0 points will never stop being funny to me, for example.
I’m not saying that every vote which didn’t go to israel was actively a vote in protest to israel. My assumption is that mostly every vote to israel was to support their political actions while mostly every vote to other countries is because people like the music. With those two catagories, the votes to israel probably don’t need more than 10% of the votes to beat an even field of 90% of the votes, since those votes are diversified.
Political reasons for voting have always been a part of eurovision, but it has never been this prominent and this dividing. If we were to embrace eurovision as a political contest, those public votes would have to be gathered and coordinated to support a single country to assure that israel wouldn’t win. That’s a level of political degeneracy which I hope that eurovision never reaches.
I broadly agree with you, it’s only this hypothetical situation where a second voting bloc is formed that I can’t see happening. That would require a level of active coordination and strategic voting that I’m not sure is possible in this competition. Even if it were possible, do people actually care that much about preventing Israel from winning that they’d rather spend money ruining the entire competition instead?
You are probably right in that people wouldn’t collaberate to prevent an israeli win like that. But israel is gathering people for their collaberation, so I think the voting system is broken either way. If nothing is done, israel is basically guaranteed a top position. If a counter collaberation is formed, the competition is broken into a miserable predetermined show.
I just don’t think eurovision can work with israel (or any other country in a controversial war) participating.
I agree, something needs to be done. And by “something”, I mean an indefinite ban on Israel’s participation.