So… What if Israel wins Eurovision

Eurovision turned 70 this year. For seven decades it managed to be simultaneously absurd and beloved, deeply political and officially apolitical, seen as a good laugh and watched by everybody. That tension is, in many ways, the whole point. The contest works because everyone agrees to maintain the fiction that it is just a song competition. It is a shared, slightly ridiculous act of good faith.

That act of good faith is now in serious trouble. And the organisation responsible for protecting it has, by any honest assessment, handled the situation so badly that a crisis communications professional could use it as a case study in what not to do.

The New York Times put a number on it

The New York Times published an investigation today into Israel's use of Eurovision as what it describes as a soft power tool. The findings are significant. Israel's government spent at least one million dollars on Eurovision-related marketing across 2024 and 2025. Some of that money came from Netanyahu's hasbara office, widely understood as Israel's overseas propaganda arm. The campaign included multilingual advertising across multiple countries, direct instructions to the public on how and when to vote, and what the Times described as a well-organised operation that the EBU was ill-equipped to respond to.

The purpose was not about the songs. While Israel faced mounting international pressure and growing calls to be excluded from the contest, a strong public vote result would serve as evidence that European audiences still supported them. Israeli media celebrated Eden Golan's 2024 result as proof that "the world, it seems, is not against us."

That is not a fan campaign. That is a government using a music competition as a reputational instrument while subject to genocide proceedings at the International Court of Justice. The EBU allowed it to happen twice.

It is worth being specific about what Israel has been accused of, because vague references to "controversy" do not capture the scale of what is at stake here. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel's acts in Gaza could amount to genocide and issued provisional measures ordering Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent genocidal acts. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and then-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, charging them with war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing attacks against civilians. In September 2025, a UN-backed independent commission of inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Amnesty International reached the same conclusion in December 2024. The International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution declaring that Israel is committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

These are not fringe accusations from partisan actors. These are findings and proceedings by some of the most credible legal and humanitarian institutions in the world. The EBU is fully aware of all of this. They chose to proceed regardless.

Russia got banned in 24 hours

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the EBU banned Russia from Eurovision within 24 hours. Their statement said that "the inclusion of a Russian entry in this year's Contest would bring the competition into disrepute." They cited "the values of the EBU" and called the invasion an "unprecedented crisis."

Russia had invaded a neighbouring country. That is a serious thing. It was right to act.

Israel is the subject of genocide proceedings at the ICJ, ICC arrest warrants for its prime minister, and conclusions of genocide from a UN commission of inquiry, Amnesty International, and a global association of genocide scholars. Five countries have left the contest over it. Seventy-two former Eurovision contestants signed an open letter accusing the EBU of applying double standards compared to its treatment of Russia and of normalising "crimes against humanity." The EBU's response has been to issue a formal warning about a promotional video and remind everyone that the new voting rules would have limited its impact anyway.

The EBU told us exactly what its values are in 2022. The question is why those values appear to apply selectively.

I am not suggesting the two situations are legally or politically identical. I am saying that an organisation which acted decisively and within hours in one case, and has spent three years issuing statements and tweaking voting rules in the other, has a credibility problem it cannot explain away with references to its apolitical mission. The apolitical mission was abandoned in 2022. The EBU made a political judgement then. It has been making political judgements ever since. The only question is which direction those judgements consistently run in.

The vote that wasn't a vote

The decision-making process itself deserves more scrutiny than it has received. In December 2025, the EBU held a general assembly vote on the Israel question. It sounds like the right thing to do. It was not. The vote was not on whether Israel should participate. It was on whether members were satisfied with a package of reforms. Two-thirds voted to adopt the reforms. By doing so, they implicitly accepted Israel's continued participation, without ever being asked to vote on that question directly.

That is an extraordinarily cynical piece of institutional manoeuvring. The EBU structured the vote so that any broadcaster who wanted to stay in Eurovision had no choice but to accept Israel being there. Staying meant consenting. The only way to actually object was to leave, which five countries then did.

The EBU did not ask its members whether they were comfortable with Israel participating. It asked them whether they liked the new rules, and then treated the answer as a mandate. That is not a vote. That is a trap.

Slovenia's broadcaster put it plainly at the assembly, saying Eurovision had become "hostage to the political interests of the Israeli government." Spain said Israel had been using the event "for political objectives" and that the reforms were "insufficient." Ireland said participation would be "unconscionable." These are not small broadcasters making noise. These are member organisations telling the EBU directly, at its official meeting, that its credibility is gone. The EBU proceeded anyway.

More than 1,100 artists subsequently signed an open letter asking how any performer could "in good conscience" participate while the situation in Gaza continues. The letter described Eurovision as being used to "whitewash and normalise" genocide. That is the reputation the contest now carries. The EBU built that.

Congratulations, you're representing your country... Also, here's a moral crisis for you to handle

The element that gets the least attention, and the one I find genuinely troubling, is what the EBU has done to the artists and delegations who had absolutely no say in any of this.

Eurovision has historically been one of the most valuable platforms available to a relatively unknown artist. A single performance in front of 160 million viewers can change a career. For many of the acts heading to Vienna this week, this is the biggest stage they will ever stand on. They spent months working toward it. This is supposed to be the moment.

The EBU took that moment and surrounded it with an impossible moral question that nobody asked these artists to answer and nobody gave them the tools to navigate. Because of decisions made entirely above their heads, every delegation in Vienna this week has had to privately wrestle with the same uncomfortable reality: does showing up here mean I am endorsing Israel's continued participation in a contest where its prime minister holds an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes? And if I have ever publicly expressed any solidarity with Palestinian people, does performing at Eurovision make me a hypocrite?

That is a disgusting position to put people in. These delegations did not design the EBU's voting structure. They did not decide Israel's entry criteria. They did not hold the assembly vote or structure it to avoid a real answer. They turned up to represent their country and sing a song, and the EBU handed them a moral burden that belongs entirely to the institution itself and then walked away.

What makes this worse, and what I do not think gets said enough, is that most delegations arriving in Vienna do not have the resources to navigate it properly. Eurovision is not the Oscars. A significant number of competing countries are working with very modest budgets, minimal PR support, and artists who may have a social media manager and a label contact and not much else in their corner. They are not walking into press week with a crisis communications team, pre-prepared holding lines, and a media strategy that accounts for geopolitical controversy. They are walking in hoping to talk about their song.

Instead, they are sitting across from journalists who know exactly which questions will generate the most usable copy. It is genuinely easy to make any artist at Eurovision 2026 look like a hypocrite. Have you ever posted in support of Palestine? Then why are you here? Do you think Israel should have been allowed to compete? Whatever they say, it can be twisted. Silence reads as complicity. A careful answer reads as evasion. A direct answer hands someone a headline. These are not traps that require sophisticated journalism to set. They are the most obvious questions in the room, and most of the artists walking into them have had no professional guidance on how to handle them.

The EBU created exactly the conditions in which untrained, under-resourced artists become easy targets for press looking for a quick angle, and then provided nothing to protect them from it. That is not just poor crisis management at the institutional level. It is a failure of basic duty of care to the people whose participation the contest depends on.

Some artists have spoken out. Some have stayed silent and been criticised for it. Some have tried to express solidarity with Palestinian civilians while still performing, and been attacked from both sides regardless. The people who chose not to attend at all made a calculation that the reputational risk simply was not worth it. All of these people are managing consequences the EBU created and refused to own.

The idea that Eurovision is a platform for artists to perform a song and build a career, which it absolutely should be, has been hollowed out by an institution that refused to make a hard call and distributed the moral weight of that refusal to everyone else instead.

The cultural boycott nobody officially declared

There is no organised campaign telling British people not to watch Eurovision this weekend. Nobody sent a memo. There is just a quiet, widespread sense that it has become something to be embarrassed about rather than enjoy.

I cannot think of a single person in my circle who is watching this year. Not because they made a principled decision and announced it, but because it simply did not come up. The conversations I have had about Eurovision in the past few weeks have all been the same: mild contempt, a reference to Israel, a shrug. In the UK at least, the dominant cultural response to Eurovision 2026 appears to be collective indifference with an undertone of vague disgust. That is a long way from where this contest was even three years ago.

The formal boycott movement is significant on its own terms. Over 1,100 artists signed an open letter. Five countries withdrew. Protests have taken place at venues across two consecutive contests. But the quieter, more diffuse version of that boycott, the one where people just stop watching without making a statement about it, is arguably more damaging to the contest long-term. Formal boycotts can be reversed. Audiences who have simply drifted away and found something else to do on a Saturday night are much harder to win back.

Eurovision used to be one of those rare events with genuine cross-demographic reach. Camp enough for one crowd, ironic enough for another, accessible enough for everyone else. The fact that it has lost that audience, not through lack of good songs but through institutional decisions made in Geneva, is the part of this story the EBU does not seem to fully reckon with. You cannot issue a press release that brings the vibe back.

If Israel wins on Saturday, it is over

In crisis management there is a concept called the point of no recovery. It is not the moment the crisis begins. It is not even the moment it goes public. It is the moment when the range of available responses narrows to the point where every option carries serious damage and the institution has lost the credibility to execute any of them cleanly. The EBU passed that point some time ago. Saturday night is where it finds out exactly how far past it they are.

Every decision the EBU has made across the past three years follows the same pattern: prioritise short-term continuity over long-term institutional credibility. Keep the contest running. Avoid the precedent of exclusion. Issue statements. Tweak the rules. Frame inaction as neutrality. Move on.

That strategy has a name in crisis communications. It is called containment, and it works under one specific condition: the underlying problem has to be containable. This one was not and is not. It has escalated at every stage, from coordinated government-funded vote campaigns in 2024 to five countries walking out in 2025 to a full New York Times investigation published on the morning of the first semi-final in 2026. Each time the EBU chose the minimum viable response, it bought itself a few months and made the eventual reckoning worse. That is not crisis management. That is debt financing your way through a reputational collapse.

Which brings me to the question the EBU has no prepared answer for, and no good one available to them regardless.

If Israel wins on Saturday, what actually happens?

Eurovision 2027 would be held in Israel. That is not a talking point. That is the rule. The host country is the winner's country. And the consequences of that outcome would be severe and almost certainly irreversible. The five countries that have already left would not return. Others, who stayed in 2026 under pressure and with reservations, would face a far harder conversation with their own audiences about why they are sending a delegation to a country currently subject to ICJ genocide proceedings and whose prime minister holds an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The 1,100 artists who signed the boycott letter this year would be joined by significantly more. The casual audience that has already largely switched off would have no reason to come back for a contest in Tel Aviv.

From a pure reputational architecture standpoint, an Israeli win would trigger what is known as a cascade failure. That is when a single event causes a series of previously manageable problems to become simultaneously unmanageable. The EBU cannot negotiate its way through that scenario. There is no statement it could issue, no reform package it could announce, no emergency assembly vote it could call that would contain what follows. The institution would be looking at the potential permanent loss of founding member broadcasters, a collapse in audience figures across key markets, and a media narrative that writes itself for months. And it would be facing all of that having spent three years demonstrating that it lacks both the decisiveness and the credibility to lead through a crisis.

What is particularly striking from a professional standpoint is that the EBU appears to be aware of this and has outsourced the solution to the jury system. In 2025, the professional juries voted so heavily for Austria that it won despite Israel topping the public televote. The institution was saved not by its own decision-making but by fifty panels of music professionals in fifty countries independently arriving at a result that the contest could survive. The EBU did not engineer that outcome. It got lucky.

Relying on luck is not a communications strategy. It is not a crisis strategy. It is the thing organisations do when they have run out of legitimate options and are hoping the situation resolves itself before anyone notices. The situation has not resolved itself. It has a New York Times investigation, an ICC arrest warrant, and a final on Saturday night.

The EBU had one job, which was to protect the thing that made Eurovision worth watching. It did not protect it. And if Israel wins on Saturday, the question in the title stops being hypothetical. It becomes the only question that matters, and the EBU will have no answer for it that anyone is going to accept.