Eurovision 2025 ended in a win for Austria—and a moral victory for Israel.
Following a week of threats to Israeli entrant Yuval Raphael—a survivor of the October 7th Nova music festival massacre—she finally got to perform. Spanish television station RTVE set the hostile tone for the evening, prefacing its transmission of the show with the message:
When human rights are at stake, silence is not an option. Peace and justice for Palestine.
From hereon it was Eurovision business as usual, with queer-friendly pop anthems, novelty songs and operatic riffing. Except, of course, until Raphael took to the stage. Her Hebrew, French and English piano ballad ‘New Day Will Rise’ was met with with two pro-Palestinian protesters attempting to rush the stage during her performance, leaving the singer “shaken and upset.”
According to Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR,
At the end of the Israeli performance, a man and a woman tried to get over a barrier onto the stage. They were stopped. One of the two agitators threw paint and a crew member was hit. The crew member is fine and nobody was injured. The man and the woman were taken out of the venue and handed over to the police.
Red paint, of course, is used to symbolise the blood of innocents—a medieval libel dating back centuries and presenting Jews as killers of children. Raphael herself is familiar with spilled blood, having ended her previous attendance at a music event concealing herself under a pile of corpses, including some of her friends, to escape from the Hamas-led pogrom.
Fittingly, Raphael won the popular vote, in many cases taking the maximum 12 votes from individual nations, to the rage and consternation of the permanently online (in)activists willing Israel to lose. A ‘10’ from Ireland, which was also a hotbed of anti-Israel agitation in the build-up to the competition, was also a welcome show of independent thinking, if not solidarity with the Jewish state.
At one point Israel was top of the leaderboard, prompting even more online fury and bedwetting from the haters. While we can never know what motivates voters in the Eurovision secret ballot, a credible second place finish for Yuval Raphael is a welcome sign that decent people do not see Israel as uniquely evil.
The win for ‘Wasted Love’ by self-declared ‘queer’ Austrian-Filipino singer-songwriter JJ (born Johannes Pietsch) over the weekend of May 17th to 18th now obliges Austria to host next year’s festivities.
