Eurovision 2019 will be held in Tel Aviv and not Jerusalem, it has been announced.
Following Netta’s win in this year’s Song Contest, Israel is staging the 2019 live final, with the host city being confirmed on Thursday.
The news cleared up some of the confusion surrounding next year’s competition, as it was initially thought it would be held in Jerusalem.
There was subsequently a backlash due to the event and its semi-finals overlapping with Holy days, and the government later dropped their demands over fear of the show being boycotted.
Many other cities subsequently sought to host the 2019 competition, but it was Tel Aviv that Eurovision bosses chose due to its “creative and compelling bid”.
The city is Israel’s cultural and commercial capital, and is also LGBTQ-friendly.
The Song Contest will come live from the Tel Aviv Convention Center on 18 May 2019 in front of a crowd of 10,000.
It will be the third time Israel has played host to Eurovision, but the first for Tel Aviv. Jerusalem previously hosted the show in 1979 and 1999.
Israeli singer Netta won this year’s Song Contest with her version of the energetic, beatbox-heavy track, ‘Toy’.
Despite Eurovision jurors having selected Austria as their winners, the voting public’s votes boosted Netta to the top of the leaderboard with an impressive 529 points. Her closest competitor, Cyprus’s Eleni Foureira scooped 436.
After collecting her award from last year’s champion Salvador Sobral, she thanked viewers for “choosing different”, “accepting differences between us” and “celebrating diversity”.
