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.
The fact that Israel didn't win the popular vote suggests that the support for them is not particularly strong in Europe.
They came in second place. How is that "not particularly strong"?
And the difference between the popular vote and the jury vote was especially dramatic for Israel. No one expected anything else though......
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.
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.
Yes, definitely, that's what they did.
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?
There is a huge quiet population that is OKAY with 40k Palestinian bombed by Israeli regime.
I had no idea on Eurovision result and to see Israel to be second, I guess people are blind to the genocide
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.
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.
Actually, "normal" people should thing about these things if their tax dollar is funding the genocide against the Palestinians.
To be quiet on the killing is to be complicit.
> there is no genocide
One better thing for you to do is not spread lies.
Amos Goldberg, Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, Gabor Mate aren't "noisy activists", I don't think.
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.
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.