On Saturday night, the Israeli Eurovision entry won the public vote across Europe, and not by a small margin: Yuval Raphael, the Israeli entry, secured well over 100 points more from the public than her nearest rival. In the end, only the votes of the elite juries saved the European Broadcasting Union from what would have been the deliciously uncomfortable prospect of organising next year’s event in Tel Aviv, or, worse, Jerusalem.
Nobody who watched the competition honestly (as yours truly did for, ahem, purely journalistic reasons) could honestly have come to the view that Raphael’s soaring ballad was a bad song. But equally, you’d have to be smoking something a little wacky to imagine that it was some-kind of stand-out clear winner, deserving of the kind of mandate it got. No, what happened here was political voting on an enormous scale.
What’s more, it is very clear that the scale of the public vote for the Israelis was not simply contingent on that country’s national or religious diaspora: In Ireland, Raphael came second in the public vote, in a country where native Jews number only about 2,700 out of a population of over 5 million and Israeli expats significantly fewer than that. In the UK, she was the clear winner in a country where Israeli expats and UK Jews make up only about 0.5% of the population. It was a similar pattern across Europe, where she came first or second in well over a dozen countries.
No, the only explanation that makes sense here is that the very large vote for the Israelis in the Eurovision is – to refer back to my headline – a form of trolling: A very conscious decision by hundreds of thousands of Europeans to stick it to the predominantly left-leaning and pro-Palestinian mainstream media outlets that organise the event.
We should not pretend – as some pro-Israeli people have been doing over the past 24 hours – that such a vote represents a “silent majority”. In Ireland, those of us with more sympathy for Israel than Hamas-run Gaza are clearly in a minority. But in a first-past-the-post ballot where there are 25 separate options, it is possible to come first in a country’s ballot with as few as 6% of the votes, assuming the remainder are evenly distributed amongst the other options.
Nevertheless, when a pattern repeats itself time and time again across multiple countries with multiple populations, it is clear that there is a not insignificant segment of the European public entirely sickened by the constant moralising about Israel, and who felt that Eurovision was a cheap and effective way to give an enormous two fingers to the moralisers.
I do not write much, on these pages, about the ongoing conflict because to do so is pointless. I have written instead about Ireland’s particular democratic reaction to that conflict, and how, in my view, it has been ineffective on all fronts: Ireland has neither persuaded Israel nor its backers that it should alter its course, and has in the meantime alienated several of its own important allies, not limited to countries like Germany, the United States, and the UK.
But on this subject, while there are diverse views amongst my colleagues, I confess that my own personal irritation has been mounting for some time.
Yes, what is happening in the Gaza strip is indisputably awful: Civilians, many of them young children, are caught in a war not of their own making. Too many people have died and continue to die. But the root cause of that war – the fact that the Government of Gaza continues to hold living Israeli civilians as hostages (a clear and unambiguous and actual war crime, not that most media outlets ever admit it or expressly acknowledge it) – is the central reason why that war continues. Nobody sensible wants that war to continue. Everybody with a modicum of sanity wishes it to end. But wars cannot spontaneously end by themselves. The Israelis have a very clear end-goal to the war – the release of their hostages. It really is that simple. And, even if you don’t believe me, then you should want the hostages released immediately to prove me wrong.
Further, the Israelis really do not have any options here: To give up the fight without securing the release of their hostages would – and this is a point that almost every observer wilfully ignores – make every Israeli citizen, in every country on the planet, a target for kidnapping. It would send a message to the world that if you take an Israeli hostage, Israel will do less than everything in its power to recover them.
It would also likely condemn those hostages to years in Hamas captivity, being used as bargaining chips. And with Hamas still in place, it would mean that the organisation just re-armed with the willing assistance of its Iranian backers and the unwitting but no less important assistance of “humanitarian groups”, and attempted to do more of the same in a decade. This has long been the pattern: Hamas regroups, re-arms, and attacks again. There is absolutely no reason to think this time would be any different. An end to the war now would not be an end to the war in any real sense. It would simply mean more war, later.
The Israeli Government’s first responsibility is to its own people, and its own civilians – that is a position I hold in relation to the Irish Government when it comes to migration and foreign policy, and I think it is hypocritical therefore to expect other Governments to act differently.
Further, this is not the only war on the planet. In the same time period as 50,000 (a figure which includes Hamas combatants) have lost their lives in Gaza, fully three times that number have been killed in the Sudanese war, with fully 8.5million people internally displaced. Only the most dishonest person could pretend for a moment that European Palestinian-flag-wavers care about all civilian lives equally. It is readily apparent that they do not.
To me, this is morally corrosive: You do not need to endorse the Israeli war in Gaza to recognise why it started or why the Israelis continue to fight it, and consider it existential. They want their hostages back. They put their sovereign duty to put their own citizens first at the centre of what they do.
Perhaps this is why the Israeli spirit is so anathema to so many western European liberals, for whom the very notion of putting your own people first has been dead and buried in the ground for a generation. It is within the power of Hamas to end this war tomorrow morning by dis-arming, surrendering, and returning the captives which they criminally hold hostage. Were they to do so, Israel would be left without any casus belli whatsoever.
I am not alone in this view. There are hundreds of thousands of us across Europe who hold it. If Eurovision votes are the only way, once a year, that we can make that voice heard, then don’t be surprised as Israeli artists continue to challenge for Eurovision victory year after year, on the strength of organised campaigns of public voting.