Last week, on Thursday 4 December, EBU members met for the organisation’s scheduled General Assembly. At this meeting, Spanish broadcaster RTVE, along with seven other countries, called for a secret ballot on Israel’s participation, passing the threshold of five members required for the vote to take place. However, the EBU chose to tie this vote to its proposed new rules for the contest, creating a false dichotomy: accept the new rules with no vote on participation, or reject the rules and carry out a vote on participation. This put broadcasters in an unfairly difficult position, as they could only hold a vote on Israel if they had already rejected the new rules, and they had no guarantee a motion on Israel’s removal would pass, meaning a very real risk that they could reject the new rules and Israel stay in the contest, meaning that we’d be doomed to repeat the exact same scenario in 2026 as we’ve faced in the last two years. As a result, the new rules were approved and an Israeli delegation will be going to Vienna in 2026. It has since become apparent that this result was inevitable, as Roland Weißman, director-general of Austrian broadcaster ORF, went to Israel to assure president Isaac Herzog that he would do everything he could to keep Israel in the contest. And according to Israeli online newspaper Ynet, there was a months-long lobbying campaign carried out behind the scenes involving Herzog and many government advisors to secure Israel’s continued presence in the contest - the contest that we keep being told is staunchly apolitical. The team here at Douze Points are saddened and disappointed by the EBU’s handling of Israel’s participation, and we believe their actions have brought the contest into disrepute. The EBU has acted in bad faith throughout: refusing to take action after Israel’s manipulation of the televote in 2024, and then when it happened again in 2025, continuing to insist that the result was valid and legitimate. When finally forced into taking action by their members’ protests, they promised a vote on Israel’s participation in November of this year, only to cancel it and retable it for the General Assembly a month later, then disingenuously framing the vote in such a way as to stifle discussion. I have said before that I do not believe the proposed rule changes go far enough to prevent further attempts to manipulate the televote, nor do they hold Israel to account in any way for their attempts to fraudulently engineer a win in the last two contests. The original intent of the Eurovision Song Contest was the promotion of harmony and unity across a recently war-torn continent, celebrating the human desire to stand together and create music together even in our darkest moments. Unfortunately, the contest is now choosing to protect the interests of a country that is engaging in genocide: instead of championing the best aspects of humanity, it is encouraging the worst. By turning a blind eye to the horrific war crimes being carried out by Israel, the contest is complicit. But we don’t have to be. Following the meeting, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland and Slovenia all followed through on their promise to boycott the 2026 contest if Israel was participating. We stand with them. And that means, following this episode, Douze Points is taking an indefinite hiatus. Unless the EBU changes course, there will be no more episodes from us, because we simply cannot cover the contest the way we would like to without being morally compromised. Ultimately this was an easy decision to make, but it’s also been a hard decision: this is not the ending I envisaged for this podcast, and I wish it didn’t have to happen like this. I’ve loved creating this podcast, researching the history of the show, getting guests on who love the contest as much as I do to share their thoughts, reactions and...
