Turns out you that you have to resort to desperate measures when all you did was base your society on a new form of apartheid, with some occasional genocide and land grabs mixed in.

The reputational damage wont be solved in my lifetime. Israel is deeply unpopular on my kids school.

Pretty much any mention of the contest should acknowledge the genocide and how multiple countries dropped out in protest impacting the results. The EBU should be ashamed.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) that organises Eurovision covers a larger range than just Europe. In theory, there's a bunch of Levantine and North African countries that could also take part (Morocco turned up in 1980, and Lebanon in 2005).

The more interesting question is why Australia is there, and that's because they were super fans who turned up as a one off in 2016. People liked having them around so they're permanent fixtures now

The referenced dataset[1] does not yet contain the results for 2026, and the calculated rating takes into account data since 2016 to 2025

[1] https://github.com/EurovisionAPI/dataset/tree/main/data/seni...