Ankur Desai
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
A dilemma then.
I spoke to our music correspondent, Mark Savage.
Well, it's going to be a very tense meeting.
Like you say, Eurovision's organisers have been struggling to resolve the tension over Israel's participation really since the invasion of Gaza.
There have been protests outside previous contests.
This year, there were two people tried to invade the stage and throw paint over Israel's contestant.
Feelings are running very high.
As you've said, there are some countries that really want Israel to be part of the contest and some that feel that because of the human rights issues in Gaza, they should be excluded.
The first thing that's going to be discussed, however, at this meeting today is the integrity of the voting process.
Because there were some accusations last year that Israel's government had mounted a campaign to encourage votes for Yuval Raphael.
There were lots of paid campaigns on YouTube, on social media.
The Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even put up a post to his 1.5 million Instagram followers encouraging them to vote for Israel.
And Yuval topped the public vote.
She hadn't done so well with the juries.
And there are some people who say that that sort of government intervention in the public vote shouldn't happen.
So the first thing that they'll discuss today is a raft of measures to tighten that up.
New technology to detect voting block patterns and all sorts of things like that.
If that is not enough to satisfy the delegate members, and these are all of the countries who take part in Eurovision, then there will be a vote on whether Israel should be allowed to participate next year.
And in terms of some of the rules and regulations that are being looked at, as well as this issue, do we know how some of this might be resolved?
Because there are a lot of obviously participating countries involved in this.