The presence of Israel in the 2024 Eurovision song contest has generated a lot of protest, but Israel’s participation is an important part of its ‘Hasbara’ strategy to keep being seen as a rational democratic actor.

This piece was previously published in Dutch as a column for SamPol.

Military and political strategists have long known that a war is not just about tactical military victories. To ultimately emerge as the winner, it is also important to have international support for your struggle.

Israel is certainly well aware of that. Since the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, the country has continued to count on sympathy for its military actions in Gaza, which are considered by an increasing number of experts to be disproportionate and genocidal . Israel’s atrocities are meeting with widespread resistance worldwide, with students occupying university campuses in protest in the United States—and also in my own country Belgium. Yet military contributions continue to flow from countries like the United States, and the European Union remains painfully lenient toward Israel.

To generate international support, Israel possesses notorious and well- documented information warfare capabilities, sometimes referred to as ‘Hasbara’. Literally translated as ‘explaining’, Hasbara serves to influence international public opinion in Israel’s favor and maintain global support for its policies. In 2024, a Hasbara budget of approximately 17 million euros was allocated as part of its ‘public and cultural diplomacy’.

In this context, the Eurovision Song Contest comes into the picture. Although often regarded as a frivolous song contest, the Eurovision Song Contest has a significant cultural and political impact. Every year, some 160 million people worldwide watch the competition, which was launched in 1956 to unite the region following the trauma of World War II. Israel has long used the LGBTQI+-friendly contest to position itself as a Western democracy that embraces liberal values. Consider, for example, how the Israeli Dana International was the contest’s first transgender winner in 1998. Participation in the Eurovision Song Contest can therefore be seen as a Hasbara practice aimed at overshadowing Israel’s image as an occupier. This practice is also sometimes referred to as ‘ artwashing ‘ and ‘ pinkwashing ‘.

This year, protestors put immense pressure on the song contest to prevent the country from participating and thereby normalize itself, while they violate human rights in the Gaza Strip. The organizer refused an exclusion by clinging desperately to the ‘apolitical’ nature of the contest, even though this did not really align with the earlier decision to exclude Russia within a week of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

To further reinforce this normalization, Israel campaigned fervently this year for Eden Golan, the Israeli candidate in the competition. They relied on billboards, social media advertisements, messages via embassies , and pro-Israeli influencers. This was accompanied by thinly veiled messages that a vote for Eden is a vote against antisemitism. An article by the Israeli news site Y-net revealed that the Israeli government also engaged in targeted advertising to expose certain Israel-sympathizing countries and internet users, as well as journalists and opinion leaders, to videos in which Eden Golan addressed them in their own languages ​​to vote for her. Unprecedented for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Israel ultimately finished second in the public vote with a total of around 323 televotes. It is difficult to predict to what extent those votes reflect genuine appreciation for the song or indicate sympathy for the country. We know from previous research into Eurovision voting behavior that about 36% of the average voter cites reasons for voting other than the quality of a song. That ‘political voting’ may also have led to the Ukrainian victory in 2022. However, the number of votes for Israel could also have been heavily inflated by votes deliberately attempting to make support for Israel appear larger than it is in real life. Far-right allies across Europe have already made it clear on X (formerly Twitter) that they normally never watch Eurovision, but voted for Israel at least 20 times this year (the maximum number of votes per bank card). Meanwhile, the Slovenian public broadcaster has also requested an investigation by the EBU, as there were reportedly a suspiciously high number of new online voters.

Despite the fact that Israel did not win, the high score was used by Israeli spokespersons as a misplaced ‘poll’ to demonstrate just how popular the country still is. In my native Belgium, too, politicians like Theo Francken used the vote as an example of how a ‘silent majority’ of Belgians still supports Israel. In this way, a song contest is instrumentalized into an information war to create the impression that a country accused of genocide does indeed enjoy popular support.

Of course, we do not know to what extent the Hasbara campaign contributed to the Eurovision victory, or whether it influences political opinion tout court. Opinions on the conflict within Europe remain deeply divided, with a silent majority appearing primarily to want to see an end to the suffering of people in the region. Research also shows that Israel’s information warfare tactics may even be counterproductive by polarizing societies into groups that are either *with* or *against* Israel. Paradoxically, this would have led to greater solidarity with the Palestinians in the past. Similarly, Israel’s stubborn participation in Eurovision made a large group of viewers more aware of the opposition to Israel, which they might otherwise have heard of only on the periphery.

Although the end to the atrocities in Gaza currently seems far off, Israel may currently be digging its own grave with aggressive Hasbara campaigns, forcing itself into a song competition that was supposed to be about peace and unity.