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.
Making a country win is way easier than making one lose. You'd have to put in enough votes for every country as you don't know how other countries will vote.
There's definitely been an organised plan for Israel, people have spoken about it openly on twitter
And there was an "organised plan" for Ukraine in 2022 insofar as people decided to vote for them regardless of their performance, which the few people who supported Russia in the conflict were probably pretty mad at, but couldn't do anything to stop, just as people who support Palestine can't do anything to stop Israel supporters here.
The reason Israel didn't win is they have fewer supporters, but how Palestine's supporters and frankly neutrals also are feeling is how Russia's supporters and the smaller number of neutrals there felt... It's impossible to keep politics out of this and it's just a shame really
I'm saying that the government led organisation will have had a negligible impact compared to regular people, therefore the levels of organisation (ie people publicly saying "I'm going to vote for x/y to show my support" and other people seeing that and thinking it's a good idea) aren't that big of a deal.
Also I think it'd be incredibly shocking if the EBU or at least individual broadcasters don't already have requirements for tackling vote manipulation from suspicious/newly registered phones and especially voip services so a state organised campaign would have even less of an impact
I also see your source on the organisation is twitter (and I can't even find the tweets there), so I'm inclined to doubt it's true given nobody's even reported on it, never mind people coming out and saying it's happened despite the number of people in multiple countries who would be required to be sworn to secrecy to get something like that to work
Honesty politics of some form happens at every euro v. We are always hearing about nations using votes to express their like or dislike for other nations.
It seems to just be a fact of life with this comp. Most just laugh it off in the media afterwards.
People are people prejudices and nationalism is always going to show when it has a hold in a nation.
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.
I saw an article on the Torygraph titled something like "I voted for Israel in Eurovision to spite the woke", and there were people in the comments talking about how they'd sent in 20 votes for Israel. And others talking about how "the left" are relentless bullies for making the Israeli singer cry, etc.
I'm wouldn't be surprised if Israel did try to influence the votes, but I think there are plenty of right-wingers willing do do it for free, too.