Broadcasters from Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Iceland and Slovenia have pulled out of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, turning a long-simmering dispute over Israel’s inclusion into a full boycott. Their withdrawals leave the 35-country contest smaller before it has even reached the stage.
The decisions landed after a year in which Eurovision’s politics spilled far beyond the usual backstage noise. Israel first entered the contest in 1973 and has won it four times, but this season its participation has become the fault line. Some broadcasters said they were boycotting in protest at the military offensive in Gaza that began in 2023 after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage. According to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, more than 72,000 people have been killed in the offensive. Some broadcasters have also accused Israel’s government of genocide, a charge Israel strongly denies.
The latest rupture follows last May’s contest in Basel, Switzerland, where Yuval Raphael drew middling points from the judges but outperformed every other participant in the public vote. Two people later attempted to storm the stage during the grand final, and paint thrown in the chaos hit a Eurovision crew member. The result set off a fresh argument over whether the public vote reflected the mood of viewers or the force of a political campaign. The European Broadcasting Union said the vote had been independently checked and verified, said there was no evidence that voting up to 20 times disproportionately affected the final result, and later described the outcome as “a valid and robust result.”
That defense did not close the issue. Graham Norton said those watching the contest from the sidelines “will be breathing the largest sigh of relief that they're not faced with a Tel Aviv final next year,” a line that captured how far the argument has drifted from song-and-spectacle and into national politics. VRT, meanwhile, called the result “a fair reflection of the opinion of viewers and listeners,” underscoring how divided broadcasters remain over what the public vote actually means.
The boycott now hangs over a 70-year history that has usually survived disputes by pretending they were temporary. This one is not. The broadcasters who walked away are signaling that Israel’s place in Eurovision is no longer a procedural question but a test of whether the contest can keep its old promise of neutrality while war, grief and public anger follow it onto the scoreboard.
The immediate question is whether the European Broadcasting Union can keep the field from shrinking further before 2026 is locked in. If it cannot, Eurovision may discover that the bigger threat is not one disputed vote, but the collapse of the shared illusion that the contest sits above politics at all.
