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.
This is exactly the same issue as with first-past-the-post elections. Diversifying votes on one side of an issue weakens that side. Eurovision isn't meant to be a political game, so when political forces become involved like this, the votings become extremely broken, and if this continues, the only natural endgame is a two-party system.
I don't think the votes in eurovision has ever been this politically driven. I have been receiving adds from several sources. It's disgusting.
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.
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.