Yuval Raphael from Israel with the title “New Day Will Rise” on stage at the second semi-final of the 69th Eurovision Song Contest in the Arena St. Jakobshalle. Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa via Reuters Connect

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the Eurovision Song Contest, is enforcing new rules regarding its public voting ahead of the 2026 Eurovision in Vienna, Austria, following questions about Israel’s success in the competition this year, it announced on Friday.

In the 2025 Eurovision, held in Switzerland in May, Israel’s representative Yuval Raphael won first place in the public vote with her song “New Day Will Rise” and placed second overall in the competition, behind Austria, when the jury scores were counted. A number of countries — including national broadcasters in Spain, Belgium, Ireland, and the Netherlands — claimed the public vote was rigged in favor of Israel and asked for an audit. Eurovision Director Martin Green defended the results, saying at the time that the votes were “checked and verified,” and there was “no suspicion of bias or irregularities” in the voting process.

The EBU said on Friday it is now implementing new measures regarding its voting that are “designed to strengthen trust, transparency, and audience engagement.”

“We’ve listened and we’ve acted,” Green said on Friday. “The neutrality and integrity of the Eurovision Song Contest is of paramount importance to the EBU, its members, and all our audiences. It is essential that the fairness of the contest is always protected. We are taking clear and decisive steps to ensure the contest remains a celebration of music and unity. The contest should remain a neutral space and must not be instrumentalized.”

Fans will now be able to only cast 10 votes each — a decrease from 20 — via online, text, and phone call. Juries of music experts will also return for the semifinals for the first time since 2022, forming a 50-50 split vote between jury and audience votes at the grand final of the competition.

The number of jurors is increased from five to seven and there will be a greater range in their professional backgrounds. Jurors will now include music journalists and critics, music teachers, creative professionals, such as choreographers and stage directors, and experienced music industry figures. Each jury will now include at least two jurors aged 18-25, “to reflect the appeal of the contest with younger audiences.” All jurors will also be forced to sign a formal declaration confirming that they will vote independently and impartially; not coordinate with other jurors before the contest; and “be mindful of their social media use,” for example by not sharing their preferences online before the contest ends.

One of the jurors of the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest admitted that he refused to allocate points to Israeli singer Eden Golan because of his personal bias against Israel.

The EBU’s updates rules also “discourage disproportionate promotion campaigns” by third parties, including governments or governmental agencies. The EBU is barring its participating broadcasters and artists from “actively” engaging in, facilitating, or contributing to promotional campaigns by third parties “that could influence the voting outcome and, as outlined in the updated Code of Conduct, any attempts to unduly influence the results will lead to sanctions.” The EBU will strengthen its enforcement of its voting instructions and Code of Conduct to prevent “attempts to unfairly influence the vote.”

“These measures are designed to keep the focus where it belongs — on music, creativity, and connection,” said Green. “While we are confident the 2025 contest delivered a valid and robust result, these changes will help provide stronger safeguards and increase engagement so fans can be sure that every vote counts and every voice is heard. The Eurovision Song Contest must always remain a place where music takes center stage — and where we continue to stand truly United by Music.”

Demonstrators against antisemitism in London on Sept. 8, 2025. Photo: Campaign Against Antisemitism

Nearly half of British people now consider the country unsafe for Jewish communities, as the government maintains a strong anti-Israel stance over the Gaza war, seeking to undermine the Jewish state despite a US-brokered ceasefire that has held for over a month.

On Thursday, the London-based think tank More in Common released a study showing that six in 10 people worry about a rise in antisemitism, as British Jews continue to face an increasingly hostile environment and targeted attacks since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in late 2023.

The report also found that 45 percent of people consider the UK an unsafe place for Jews, especially after the Yom Kippur terrorist attack in Manchester, which left two Jewish men dead, and incidents leading up to and during the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer game in Britain last month. Meanwhile, 44 percent still believe the country is safe for Jewish communities.

By comparison, 37 percent of the population believe the country is unsafe for Muslims, while nearly a quarter feel personally at risk.

According to the newly released study, the British population is deeply polarized over the war in Gaza and its impact on society, with right-leaning individuals “much more likely to be concerned about antisemitism than Islamophobia,” and left-leaning groups “relatively more concerned about Islamophobia than antisemitism.”

Across the country, public patience for both anti- and pro-Israel protests is fading, with two-thirds of respondents saying the most disruptive demonstrations should be banned.

Amid growing hatred and hostility, the report also found that Jewish people are altering their behavior and avoiding religious symbols in order to feel safe.

“Many British Jews have felt targeted by other Britons for their beliefs about Israel, or for what other people assume are their beliefs, or simply for being Jewish,” the study says.

“While many Britons don’t personally know any Jews closely, the rise in antisemitism has become a top concern for the British public more widely,” it continues.

The Community Security Trust (CST) — a nonprofit charity that advises Britain’s Jewish community on security matters — recorded 1,521 antisemitic incidents from January to June this year. This was the second-highest number of antisemitic crimes ever recorded by CST in the first six months of any year, following 2,019 incidents in the first half of 2024.

In total last year, CST recorded 3,528 anti-Jewish hate crimes — the country’s second worst year for antisemitism, despite an 18 percent drop from 2023’s record of 4,296.

These latest figures come amid the British government’s ongoing campaign against Israel, which has only escalated since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. 

In one of its latest efforts, UK officials are reportedly considering imposing a ban on the import of goods from Israeli communities in the West Bank, according to the Middle East Eye news outlet.

This week, the country’s armed forces refused to attend a major international conference in Israel aimed at sharing military insights from the Gaza war, according to The Telegraph.

Hosted south of Tel Aviv, the multi-day seminar drew high-ranking military officials from several countries, including the United States, France, Germany, and Canada.

Since the start of the war in Gaza, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been publicly critical of Israel, even falsely accusing it of genocide and leading international campaigns in various forums aimed at halting the country’s defensive campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

In September, the British government — along with other Western countries such as France, Australia, and Canada — recognized a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly, a move Israeli and US officials have criticized as rewarding terrorism.

Then this week, the UK voted for a UN Security Council resolution backing the US-backed Gaza peace plan, which notably acknowledges that no such state exits but rather “calls for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” once “the [Palestinian Authority] reform program is faithfully carried out and Gaza redevelopment has advanced.”

London has not clarified the apparent contradiction between its September announcement and its vote this week regarding Palestinian statehood.

Visitors enter the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA on June 3, 2025. Photo: Jason Bergman/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

Anti-Zionists at Harvard University, including the Harvard Crimson newspaper which endorsed boycotting Israel in 2022, are contesting the interpretation of the results of an undergraduate survey onto which the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) muscled a series of questions which asked students if they support “divesting” from the Jewish state.

On Thursday, the Crimson reported that Harvard students “report favoring divestment from Israel” while downplaying the Harvard Undergraduate Association (HUA) Election Commission’s saying that about 600 of “roughly 7,000 students in Harvard College,” or 8.4%, had “responded ‘yes’ to the question on divestment.” Slightly more of the student body, 9.3%, said they support Harvard’s disclosing “investments in Israel.”

The HUA added that over 80 percent of students either declined to answer the survey, skipped the divestment question, or registered an agnostic opinion regarding the matter. The Harvard Crimson, however, said it had obtained a partially redacted copy of the survey results showing that the majority of votes cast in the Sports Team Office Election, an unrelated vote in which respondents had to participate in order to answer the optional Israel-related questions, supported divestment.

“Based on similar calculations, a majority of students also said they thought Harvard should disclose investments in Israel,” the Crimson reported.

Nonetheless, the newspaper admitted that “the results still have a question mark hanging over them” and that “many students interviewed by the Crimson … said they were not aware of the survey questions.”

PSC later used Harvard’s reporting as the basis of its own propaganda, accusing the administration of censoring results “after the Harvard Crimson reports majority support.”

As previously reported, the PSC — a self-described revolutionary movement which issued some of the world’s first endorsements of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel — overcame objections expressed by the Harvard Undergraduate Association, a student government body, to place the idea on this academic year’s fall survey. Another group, working in concert with PSC, prevailed over the HUA as well, and added a survey question which aims to build a consensus of opposition to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.

“Should Harvard disclose its investments in companies and institutions operating in Israel?” asked PSC’s question, which was originally framed to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. “Should Harvard divest from companies and institutions operating in Israel?”

On Friday, Middle East expert and columnist Alex Joffe told The Algemeiner that the Crimson confected a story which serves its ideological bias.

“Campus media is both politicized and incompetent,” he said. “The latter is not surprising and is forgivable, as no one should expect careful reporting from teenagers, even ones at Harvard. But the manner in which activists insert themselves into campus media is obvious, and the obfuscations in this particular case indicate how students tendentiously ‘report’ results — in this case fragmentary and contradictory ones — in order to present the conclusion that Harvard students ‘support divestment.’”

He added, “Better documented and reported surveys have suggested that a hard core of students on campus do indeed support divestment and other anti-Israel measure but that a majority are uncertain or disinterested in these issues. Painting all college students as anti-Israel is certainly false but campus media, and certainly mainstream media, almost exclusively feature anti-Israel voices.”

The Crimson has since reported another, similar story including the same numbers showing that over 85 percent of students declined to take the survey. This time, however, the Harvard administration used the occasion to restate its opposition to boycotting Israel, citing a 2024 statement regarding the matter.

“Harvard leadership has made clear that it opposes calls for a policy of boycotting Israel and its academic institutions,” the university said. “In the words of [former] President Bacow responding to a 2022 editorial in the Harvard Crimson that had endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions [BDS] movement, ‘targeting or boycotting a particular group because of disagreements over the policies pursued by their governments is antithetical to what we stand for as a university,’ and ‘academic boycotts have absolutely no place at Harvard, regardless of who they target.’”

The Harvard Crimson has promoted anti-Zionism before, curating facts and quotes.

In 2022, the Crimson’s editorial board endorsed the BDS movement, which seeks to isolate the world’s lone Jewish state on the international stage as a step toward its eventual elimination.

“Palestinians, in our board’s view, deserve dignity and freedom. We support the boycott, divest, and sanctions movement as a means to achieving that goal,” the board wrote. “In the past, our board was skeptical of the movement (if not, generally speaking, of its goals), arguing that BDS as a whole did not ‘get at the nuances and particularities of the Israel-Palestine conflict.’ We reject and regret that view.”

It also pushed back against “accusations” of antisemitism over its stance, condemning “antisemitism in every and all forms, including those times when it shows up on the fringes of otherwise worthwhile movements.”

“BDS remains a blunt approach, one with the potential to backfire or prompt collateral damage in the form of economic hurt. But the weight of this moment — of Israel’s human rights and international law violates and of Palestine’s cry for freedom — demands this step. As a board, we are proud to finally lend our support to both Palestinian liberation and BDS — we call on everyone to do the same.”

Anti-Israel animus, while present at Harvard for years, exploded across campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

After the atrocities, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a statement blaming Israel for the attack and vowed to pressure the university to cut ties with the Jewish state. Later, students stormed academic buildings chanting “globalize the intifada”; a faculty group posted an antisemitic cartoon on its social media page; a mob followed and surrounded a Jewish student, screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” into his ears; and the Harvard Law School student government passed a resolution that falsely accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

While largely present among left-wing campus groups on campus, such sentiments have recently emerged among Harvard’s far right.

Earlier this year, a conservative student magazine published an article that echoed the words of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The Harvard Salient published an opinion piece in September which bore likeness to key tenets of Nazi doctrine, as first articulated in 1925 in Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, and later in a blitzkrieg of speeches he delivered throughout the Nazi era to justify his genocide of European Jews.

Written by David F.X. Army, the article chillingly echoed a January 1939 Reichstag speech in which Hitler portended mass killings of Jews as the outcome of Germany’s inexorable march toward war with France and Great Britain. Whereas Hitler said, “France to the French, England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans,” Army wrote, “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans.”

Army also called for the adoption of notions of “blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.