Israeli Hasbara and Popular Vote Rigging at Eurovision 2025

In the aftermath of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest – known to Europeans everywhere as the height of pointless musical kitsch and the graveyard of television careers – what really stuck out for me – and going by the amount of chatter about it online – was the way that Israel had very obviously engaged in vote rigging.

When Israel got a mere 60 points from the official juries nobody was too bothered as that was to be expected, but then all of a sudden Israel got a whopping 297 points from the so-called ‘audience score’ which is often represented as the ‘popular vote’. Far in excess of any other country and everyone immediately smelled a rat, because Israel doesn’t have anything like that amount of popular support – anecdotally or in polls – in Europe.

However, that didn’t stop the ‘Jerusalem Post’ from crowing how:

‘Much like the controversy in the US over the popular vote versus the Electoral College, Israel tends to garner big numbers in Eurovision audience voting and far fewer votes from the national juries.

This was especially true Saturday night, as Yuval Raphael, Israel’s contestant, led the audience voting at the 69th Eurovision Song Contest with her song “New Day Will Rise.”

She ended up with 297 votes from the millions watching around the world, the highest audience score of the night. When added to her 60 votes from the international juries, the audience votes gave her a final total of 357, which put her in second place overall.’ (1)

This is dishonest and a good example of what Noam Chomsky meant in his famous book ‘Manufacturing Consent’ where a ‘popular vote’ (or a poll) is created, heavily rigged and then used as evidence to by media outlets to promote the idea that ‘everyone believes X’ or ‘Y is very popular’.

In truth the ‘audience score’ is actually just your standard competition phone-in system based on trust that nobody is going to exploit its obvious vulnerability to rigging in the name of good sportsmanship.

As the official Eurovision website explains:

‘In each show, after all songs have been performed, each country will give two sets of points (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 and 12) to their favourite songs; one set is given by a jury of five music industry professionals from that country, and one set given by viewers watching the show in that country. Viewers can vote by telephone, SMS and through the official app.’ (2)

Put another way: all you have to do to rig the Eurovision voting system as it stands is to get lots of people to call in from countries outside of Israel and vote for Israel as well as for them to be willing to pay the small charges to vote.

Indeed, this isn’t remotely new since jews have been bragging on X to have been doing just this for several years now and have consistently achieved similar massively disproportionate ‘audience scores’. (3)

Below is but one example from Eurovision 2024 of jews explaining how they use their cosmopolitan international nature - since jews are often citizens of multiple countries as well as Israel itself – to achieve this:

The official Israeli Hasbara website even instructed jews and Israelis how to do this in its ‘How to Vote?’ section: (4)

However, for Eurovision 2025 in the wake of the continuing public relations disaster that is Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza and professed desire to ethnically cleanse it of its non-jewish inhabitants; the Israeli government’s Hasbara efforts have been kicked into high gear with the Israeli government’s Advertising Agency buying advertising space via Google on Eurovison’s official live stream to directly promote people to vote for its entry: (5)

This was not only clearly unsporting and completely contrary to the spirit of Eurovision – which to be frank Israel shouldn’t be participating in anyway – but also a direct attempt at vote rigging by a foreign government and a blatant attempt to produce an Israeli victory – which also succeeded I might add – which then would be used to try and ‘Manufacture Consent’ across the world by claiming that Israel is ‘actually really popular among the peoples of Europe’ and that anti-Israel politicians are ‘unrepresentative of the popular support of Israel’.

Nor should this surprise us since Israel has been looking for ways to do this for several years now (6) as a means by which to influence public opinion in the West to be more favourable to Israel, but what we saw in Eurovision 2025 was a direct attempt by the Israeli government to rig the contest in Israel’s favour.

If the Eurovision Song Contest had any balls, they’d expel Israel immediately and forever.

References

(1) https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-854437

(2) https://eurovision.tv/about/how-it-works

(3) For example, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/comments/1cpwm6k/eurovision_hasbara/?rdt=39934

(4) https://hasbara.co.il/section/resources/eurovision/

(5) https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2025/05/18/israel-eurovision/

(6) For example, see: https://www.vice.com/en/article/inside-tel-aviv-and-the-most-political-eurovision-in-history/ and https://www.newarab.com/news/understanding-hasbara-israels-propaganda-machine