If there are 25 candidates, how many votes do you need to come in second? And how many supporters do you need for those votes, when it's pay-to-vote and everyone can vote as many times as they want?
The fact that Israel didn't win the popular vote suggests that the support for them is not particularly strong in Europe.
You don't need much support to win when everyone else's votes are split between 24 candidates.
And there is already a precedent for strong popular support. In 2022, Ukraine won the popular vote with 439 points, with 239 points for the next country. This year, Israel lost with 323 points vs. 337 points for the winner. Ukraine, which came in third, also got pretty close with 307 points.
Similar forms of activism, such as petitions and protests, are supposed to demonstrate support for something, but they often end up showing the opposite. Because the absolute number of supporters rarely matters. What's more important is the number of supporters as a fraction of the total, or relative to the expectations.
Once upon a time, I was involved in something controversial. There was a petition opposing us, with a very large number of signatures for that context. But the petition ended up strengthening our case, because it showed that the opposition to our plans was no more widespread than what we had assumed. The next elections proved us correct. A large number of people with a particular opinion didn't matter, because they were a small enough fraction of the total.
OP described this system as "it's pay-to-vote and everyone can vote as many times as they want".
This sounds exactly like the scam that the right wing runs in America regarding the "Best Selling Book lists". There are a number of right wing books on the list each year but it turns out those books are purchased in large bulk by right leaning groups funded by billionaire donors and are then handed out for free at events or dumped on the clearance channels. It gives a fake impression that the books are more popular than they really are and is in effect a way to blunt the effectiveness of left wing thinking.
This is also done via channels such as PragerU. Right leaning groups funded by billionaires produce white papers describing their thesis which are then sent out to groups such as PragerU and Ben Shapiro in the form of talking points to be inserted into the narrative of their videos.
The main reason I can think of would be that they didn't need to 'astroturf' that many, due to europeans generally being conservative and anti-arab or anti-muslim. But they ran a campaign to get votes, and exactly how efficient it was is very hard to pinpoint.
Zionists have quite extensive tooling and robust parasocial networks for running propaganda campaigns. Why wouldn't they use that to try and become the next host of the Eurovision pop tournament?
Between so many options to vote on Israel could get the max points from each country with less than 5% of votes. Its disingenuous to portray this as if a majority of Europeans support Israel.
Maybe they are scared to talk because Pro-Israel supporters do things like scrape Linkedin profiles and search for Palestinians flag in a bio and then target those peoples employers for harassment?
Honestly it could go either way, there is a lot of astroturfing on both sides to make the noise level so absurd that its hard to see a clear picture.
I have never seen such a large physical response to Israel in my life though, that really leads me to believe that this may be a step change from past incidents regarding Israel/Palestine.
Also the fact that the rich Pro Israeli donors are freaking out more than in the past seems to indicate something has changed.
>They showed 24,686 dead which appeared to be a downward revision from the figure of about 35,000 which had been reported earlier in May, with 7,797 children and 4,959 women confirmed dead, about half the toll cited in previous reports. But the UN said on Monday that estimated overall death toll remained about 35,000.
>Farhan Haq, a UN spokesperson, said the new smaller numbers reflected those bodies which had been fully identified. The bigger figures included corpses for whom identification has so far not been completed. Haq said it was expected that, as the process of identification continued, the official tolls among women and children would also rise.
Or, and I assume you have not considered this, but maybe you should, there is no genocide. And virtually everyone except for some noisy activists knows this.
You live in a bubble if you think social media represents people. Social media represents the highly motivated ones. It does not reward quiet thinkers, it rewards "useful idiots" who have brainless slogans.
The normal people who actually think about things don't participate because they have better things to do than useful idiots.
And then you have people like me who also have better things to do, but feel obligated to post occasionally to at least try to reduce the amount of misinformation.
You are right in that Internet does not represent real life. I saw this during the Bernie 2020 campaign. While there were unbelievably large movements online and even in cities like NYC(that 30k+ rally was a historic day) at the end of the day it led to a false belief that things were much better than they really were.
I was concluding the same thing at the start of this Israel/Palestine conflict but then I saw amazing amounts of resistance to Israel, the likes which I have not seen before. People taking the time to protest in real life gives a more reliable indicator of the internet support. There has definitely been a step change in favor of Palestine. I predicted that i'd see this in my lifetime but I honestly thought it would have taken another 20+ years as more Pro israel older generations died off. The fact that it is happening now and that the rich Israel supporters are freaking out and doing whatever they can to "suppress" the narrative makes me think we are seeing some sort of slow moving shift.
So the ICC already decided on this? No? Well, then I wouldn't be so sure about this if I where you. Because starving a population, denying them water, fuel and medicine amounts to genocide in all but name.
No it doesn’t “amount to genocide in all but name”. Genocide is a very specific crime with a very specific special intent. All of what you named are possible without a genocide.
Not really. Go check the results of the popular vote for Eurovision. Israel came in second.
There's a huge quiet population that is pro-Israel. They don't make noise with protests though, so some people don't realize they exist.