As fragile ceasefires strain on the Iran, Gaza and Lebanon fronts, Israel remains in a state its citizens know all too well: not quite at war, not quite at peace, suspended between possible escalation and temporary stability.
And yet, in the midst of this uncertainty, many Israelis are already looking ahead to the next Eurovision Song Contest. For a few hours, it offers something rare: the feeling of normal life restored. Not strategy or survival—just songs, votes and the simple hope of winning.
From the outside, especially across much of Europe, Israelis are often portrayed as a people shaped by conflict, perhaps even suited to it. The assumption runs deep: that years of confrontation have made war part of Israeli identity, that resilience has curdled into appetite.
That reading is wrong.
After more than two years of war, Israelis are not rallying around conflict. The word “ceasefire” has taken on an ironic edge, a technical term that rarely translates into actual quiet.
This is not abstract geopolitics. In northern Israel, sirens interrupt the night. Work schedules dissolve into reserve duty. Parents instinctively calculate the distance from the classroom to the nearest shelter. The uncertainty is structural, woven into the week even when violence is not.
Beneath the headlines, a quieter truth accumulates: Israelis are not longing for escalation; they are longing for boredom.
Ask ordinary people what they want right now, and the answers are strikingly mundane. A full night of sleep. A workweek that unfolds as planned. Children at school without the background hum of risk assessment. Even traffic has acquired a strange emotional value: gridlock means that the city is functioning and nobody is running for cover.
This is not a society that celebrates war. It is a society that endures it while fighting to preserve the texture of ordinary life.
The gap between this reality and the European perception reflects a deeper disagreement about security itself. Israelis evaluate threats by proximity and consequence. The actors involved are not distant abstractions, and their capabilities are not theoretical. Many Israelis look at Europe and see a continent that underestimates these dangers and places too much faith in diplomacy alone.
The critique can turn sharp. Some Israelis view Europe as politically naive, overly confident in institutional solutions and insufficiently attentive to long-term risk. They also point to what they see as contradictions: a continent that struggles with antisemitism in certain quarters while wrestling, uneasily, with tensions around Islam and immigration.
Yet this criticism coexists with something European observers rarely account for: a powerful and genuine affinity for Europe. Israelis travel there in large numbers. They follow its culture, music and sports with real devotion. European soccer clubs are household names from Haifa to Beersheva. And then there is Eurovision.
Eurovision in Israel is not background noise. It is a national event, something close to a civic ritual. Victories are commemorated. Losses are dissected. The contest offers what the news cycle seldom does: a sense of uncomplicated participation in European life, where the rules are clear, the outcome is finite, and the stakes are not entangled with survival.
Israel has won Eurovision four times. Each victory landed as more than a musical achievement. It was recognition. It was the continent’s viewers and juries saying, however briefly and however improbably, you are one of us.
That hunger to compete, to be seen through creativity rather than conflict, to stand on a European stage for reasons that have nothing to do with war, speaks to something the security discourse consistently obscures. Israelis do not want to be defined by their enemies. They want to be known for something else entirely.
In this sense, Eurovision, which begins this week, is not an escape from Israeli reality. It is a statement about what that reality should look like.
This dual relationship with Europe—admiration and frustration, connection and criticism, the feeling of being simultaneously misjudged and drawn in—is central to understanding Israeli society. Israelis can question European foreign policy in the morning and spend the evening arguing about whether the Finnish entry deserved more points.
These things are not contradictory. They reflect the same impulse: the desire to belong to a shared world and the frustration of feeling misread within it.
Political differences sharpen this divide. While much of Europe views U.S. President Donald Trump with skepticism, many Israelis judge him through a different lens shaped by regional security. The result can feel like parallel conversations about the same events.
Yet beneath all of it lies a shared foundation. Like Europeans, Israelis have built lives around routine. They work, raise families, follow sports, plan vacations and argue about things that do not involve survival.
War is not an identity. It is an interruption.
The longer this suspended condition persists, the more the fatigue shows. Not dramatic, not declarative, but steady and accumulating. It appears in conversations about sleep, in the relief when a night passes without sirens and alarms, in the shrinking capacity to plan beyond the near future.
Given the choice, Israelis would not choose war. They would choose to gather around a television, argue about songs and hope that when the votes are counted, Israel’s name sits at the top of the scoreboard.
The 70th Eurovision Song Contest will be held in Austria at the Wiener Stadthalle in Vienna. The contest features two semi-finals on Tuesday, May 12, and Thursday, May 14, with the Grand Final taking place on Saturday, May 16.
