Three events from Germany, just in the past week: Germany’s Left Party decided to adopt the "Jerusalem Declaration" on antisemitism—a definition that, in practice, allows many on the left to express antisemitic sentiment under the guise of criticism of Israel. A few days later, a Nakba Day demonstration drew more than a thousand participants, during which a police officer was dragged into the crowd, beaten in the face and body, suffered a broken arm, and had to be stabilized with a defibrillator by rescue teams.
Meanwhile, Der Spiegel, the country’s most prominent magazine, ran a major cover story under the headline “Alienation?” raising questions about the state of Israeli-German relations in the shadow of the war in Gaza.
At the same time, two other developments—unrelated on the surface—reflected deeper shifts. Alternative for Germany (AfD), a nationalist party whose entire parliamentary bloc has been classified as “far-right” by the German domestic intelligence agency, recently reached first place in several national polls. In the February federal elections, it won a record 20% of the vote, becoming the second-largest party in the Bundestag. And then came Eurovision: the German public awarded Israel’s singer, Eden Golan, the maximum 12 points in the popular vote.
That last data point deserves a closer look. While the official juries gave Israel full marks only once and placed her squarely in the middle of the pack, the public vote told a different story—Israel received the maximum score from 13 countries and led the popular vote by a wide margin. That support can be attributed to the song’s quality, Golan’s strong performance, and her moving personal story.
But it’s also worth noting which countries gave Israel their top marks: Australia, where antisemitism has been on the rise; Azerbaijan; France, whose president had just issued harsh criticism of Israel days before the contest; and Germany itself. Luxembourg, one of the European countries that recently announced plans to recognize a Palestinian state, also gave Israel full points, as did Portugal, Sweden—arguably the EU country with the most aggressively antisemitic street demonstrations—Britain, and Switzerland, where pro-Palestinian protesters burned Israeli flags just a day before the competition, injuring three police officers.
The Netherlands awarded Israel full marks despite the fact that its foreign minister recently called to reassess trade relations with Israel, and a Dutch man attempted to storm the stage during Golan’s performance. Belgium and Spain also gave Israel top scores—two countries that have said they would recognize a Palestinian state and used Eurovision as a platform to criticize Israel, with the Spanish prime minister even vowing on the day of the contest to initiate proceedings against Israel at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
None of this is scientific, of course—but the pattern is hard to ignore. Instead of offering fair criticism of Israeli policies, the political, media, academic, cultural, and judicial elites in these countries have chosen to wage a one-sided campaign of incitement against Israel.
Zeev AvrahamiThe public, however—the average viewer sitting at home—sees something else: brutal, indiscriminate antisemitism directed at Jews and Israelis by radical Islamists and far-left extremists; public spaces and city streets overtaken by the Palestinian narrative in ways that threaten the Judeo-Christian values these societies were built upon; massive government spending to police demonstrations; injured police officers; violent protests on university campuses; Holocaust comparisons and outright denial—all met with silence or justification by elites.
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There is a chasm as wide as the Sahara between how elites try to shape the Israeli-Palestinian narrative for their societies and how those societies actually understand it. Between who is seen as right, and who is seen as wrong.
The elites in their ivory towers don’t take the punches the public does. They can afford to ignore antisemitism, misogyny, or hostility toward LGBTQ+ communities when it aligns with their ideology. Eurovision may just be a sentimental song contest, but in this case, it reflected something deeper: the growing alienation of the public from the people who claim to represent them, a weariness with governments that seem more concerned with symbolic gestures than with the issues their citizens actually care about.
That disconnect goes a long way toward explaining the troubling and steady rise in support for far-right parties across Europe.