I’m waiting on the news story uncovering the voting farms all over Europe funded by the Israeli government, wanting to parallel the Ukraine 2022 result to claim vindication and that they have the public’s backing for their ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. Disgusting.
Not voting for Israel wasn’t going to have an impact if you weren’t voting for them anyway, however people who support Israel in the conflict voting for them will have an effect that there’s very little you can do to stop. You don’t think Russia would have had voting farms to stop Ukraine if it was possible? That’s why they got so many votes - if they have 15% support, then they’ll get that 15% of votes which is a significant number.
I suppose that is a fair comment and a possible reason, along with those who boycotted the event will have diminished all votes going to other acts.
I still think there is a likelihood that Israel tried to play the game on public votes, because it would be a minimal spend for a big PR boost for them. Having a big Israeli company sponsor bought them a lot of the judge votes, then this move would have topped it up. It was just my initial thought when the 300+ points came up. The majority of the crowd did not take that well, along with all of the other stories about booing at the semis, the canned applause on the TV coverage to cover it up, the vote swing just seemed like too big a massive juxtaposition to global sentiment for it to carry weight.