Israel's strong performance in this year's Eurovision, which primarily came down to the huge number of points the country received in the popular vote as opposed to the vote of national juries, prompted me to write on X that a "considerable amount of the passionate pro-Palestine sentiment on social media and in demonstrations is an echo chamber." Since these remarks went viral and X is not the best platform for elaborating one's thoughts, I decided it would be better to go into more depth here.
Predictably, I received a number of responses to what I wrote claiming that Israel's performance was primarily due to a mass mobilisation of Jewish and/or supporters of Israel taking advantage of the voting system (which allows for each user to cast up to 20 votes). While there was encouragement by some Israelis and supporters of Israel for people to vote for Israel, and while I am sure some did vote for Israel for political reasons, there is no real statistical evidence to demonstrate the impact of that encouragement. Thus, explaining Israel's success at Eurovision primarily in these terms strikes me as a conspiracy theory.
Instead, there is a far simpler explanation for Israel's success that gets to the heart of what I meant: that is, large masses of people in Western countries simply do not have such strong feelings and opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that they view Israel at Eurovision through the lens of that conflict. Rather, they judge Israel at Eurovision primarily on the basis of the quality of the song and the on-stage performance, and this year, very many viewers and voters happened to like Israel's entry, which had already enjoyed a favourable reception prior to the night of the final.
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