Brazil<\/a> moved toward Israel under Jair Bolsonaro, elected in 2018; backed away under Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, who won the 2022 election; and may change direction yet again in October, when Lula faces Bolsonaro\u2019s strongly pro-Israel son Fl\u00e1vio.<\/p>\nIn Hungary, the movement went the other way: P\u00e9ter Magyar\u2019s defeat of Viktor Orb\u00e1n in 2026 cost Israel its most dependable ally inside the EU and led Hungary to reverse its planned withdrawal from the ICC.<\/p>\n
Foreign policy always changes when governments change. But with Israel, the shifts are often unusually rapid, sweeping, and symbolic.<\/p>\n
Why? Why do relations with Israel flip-flop to such a degree?<\/p>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/images.jpost.com\/image\/upload\/f_auto,fl_lossy\/c_fill,g_faces:center,h_537,w_822\/733906\"\/)
An artwork on a wall depicts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pulling strings attached to former prime minister of Slovenia Janez Jansa, who is pulling strings of Anze Logar, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, March 19, 2026 (credit: REUTERS\/BORUT ZIVULOVIC)Israel ties become ideological marker as countries sever and restore relations<\/p>\n
The primary reason is that Israel has become an ideological banner in the domestic politics of other countries.<\/p>\n
For the populist Right \u2013 represented by leaders such as Jan\u0161a in Slovenia and de la Espriella in Colombia \u2013 supporting Israel is no longer merely a foreign-policy position. It has become a central element of a political identity built around nationalism, Western values, opposition to political Islam, and resistance to the established foreign-policy consensus.<\/p>\n
Conversely, for significant parts of the global Left, opposition to Israel and anti-Zionism have become a telltale sign of progressive identity.<\/p>\n
For the far Left in particular, the Israel-Palestinian issue is not simply another matter to be filed alongside trade relations with Japan or border disputes in Africa. It is a core identity issue. A politician\u2019s position on Israel signals what ideological camp he belongs to, what values he embraces, and how he views the world.<\/p>\n
Once Israel becomes an identity marker, changes in the political leadership naturally lead to significant changes in policy.<\/p>\n
There is also an unusually broad range of symbolic measures available to governments seeking to advertise those changes: recognizing a Palestinian state, moving an embassy to Jerusalem, imposing sanctions on Israeli officials, banning settlement products, joining international legal proceedings, or shifting votes at the UN.<\/p>\n
These are high-visibility steps that generate considerable political attention. Yet many of them can be taken \u2013 and reversed \u2013 relatively quickly. They generally do not require the restructuring of a country\u2019s economy or military alliances.<\/p>\n
Moreover, cutting or boosting ties with Israel often carries a high ideological reward but a relatively low immediate domestic risk.<\/p>\n
When Petro severed diplomatic relations with Israel, Colombia\u2019s GDP did not collapse, its borders were not immediately threatened, and most Colombians did not experience any change in their daily lives.<\/p>\n
That does not mean there were no costs: Colombia had benefited from Israeli military equipment, intelligence cooperation, and commercial ties. But the costs were neither immediate nor dramatic enough to outweigh the ideological benefit Petro derived from the move.<\/p>\n
The lack of an immediate price makes Israel an easy way for governments to signal ideological purity.<\/p>\n
How does Israel adapt its diplomacy amid shifting global alliances?<\/p>\n
Another factor is that many of these decisions largely fall within the executive\u2019s purview.<\/p>\n
A new leader can change a UN vote, recognize a state, recall an ambassador, or announce an embassy relocation without having to jump through all the legal and legislative hoops required to alter relations with a major trading partner or withdraw from a critical defense treaty.<\/p>\n
This phenomenon is not entirely unique to Israel. Cuba, Taiwan, Russia, and Venezuela have also become ideological symbols at various times and in various countries. But in Israel\u2019s case, this phenomenon is especially pronounced.<\/p>\n
As a result, Israel\u2019s foreign relations in many democracies have become highly vulnerable to electoral swings.<\/p>\n
So how can Israel navigate those shifts?<\/p>\n
This is not merely a European or Latin American concern. Increasingly, Israelis are asking what will happen after US President Donald Trump leaves office in January 2029.<\/p>\n
Considering the rise of democratic socialists in the Democratic Party, could a future Democratic president dramatically reverse policies toward Israel, just as governments elsewhere have done? Imagine, for a minute, US-Israel ties under a Ro Kahana or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presidency.<\/p>\n
If ideological affinity can disappear with one election, Israel cannot build its foreign relations on that affinity alone. That was the significance of a speech delivered last week by former strategic affairs minister and ambassador to the US Ron Dermer at an Israel on Campus Coalition conference in Washington.<\/p>\n
Dermer said favorable public opinion can provide \u201cshock absorbers when problems arise,\u201d but that ultimately \u201cbeing important to that country becomes more critical\u201d than whether its people believe they share values with Israel.<\/p>\n
This reflects what a senior Israeli official said during the Obama administration. His dream, he said, was to have military, intelligence, and business ties so intertwined that even if a president hostile to Israel were elected, he or she would be unable to break those ties, because it would significantly harm American interests.<\/p>\n
Israel has tried to apply that logic before.<\/p>\n
More than two decades ago, Ariel Sharon\u2019s government signed an agreement to import 50 million cubic meters of water annually from Turkey\u2019s Manavgat River for 20 years.<\/p>\n
The water was more expensive than desalinated water, but Sharon saw the agreement as more than a solution to Israel\u2019s water shortage. It was an effort to broaden a strategic relationship already anchored in military and intelligence cooperation, giving Ankara something more to lose if ties deteriorated.<\/p>\n
The water never arrived. The project was abandoned in 2006 because the cost of transporting it in specially built tankers made it economically unfeasible. Nor is there any reason to believe that it would have prevented the long deterioration in ties under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.<\/p>\n
But it might have raised the cost of that deterioration. And that is the point: Interdependence cannot guarantee friendship, but it can make hostility more expensive.<\/p>\n
Dermer\u2019s point was not that shared values are meaningless. It was that shared values alone are insufficient. Common interests provide greater durability when leaders, governments, and public opinion change.<\/p>\n
And that, essentially, is the lesson for Israel.<\/p>\n
Israel cannot prevent the election of leaders hostile to it. What it can try to do is build enough shared interests into its relationships to make them difficult and costly to dismantle.<\/p>\n
That means building ties beyond the government of the day. It means extensive military and intelligence cooperation, trade and investment, technological partnerships, and parliamentary relationships. It also means maintaining contacts across the political spectrum, including with opposition parties that may one day come to power.<\/p>\n
The more people, businesses, and government bodies benefit from ties with Israel, the harder it will be for a new leader to dismantle them with the stroke of a pen. Multiyear agreements, long-term defense cooperation, and deep business ties are harder to unwind overnight. They do not make reversals impossible, but they do raise the price.<\/p>\n
Moving an embassy to Jerusalem is a welcome diplomatic achievement. But it will not, by itself, keep Colombia in Israel\u2019s corner after de la Espriella leaves office. Defense cooperation, commercial relationships, and institutional ties may not do so either \u2013 as we have seen in the recent past \u2013 but they will ensure that a future Colombian government has something tangible to lose by reversing course.<\/p>\n
Israel cannot prevent electoral whiplash abroad. It can, however, weave enough strands of mutual interest into its relationships to make them harder to unravel. And the time to do that is precisely when a friendly leader is in power \u2013 using the goodwill of the moment to build ties that will outlast the leader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One could get whiplash watching governments dramatically change their policies toward Israel depending on who is voted into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584413,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4646,6557,18263,65,85,46,16632,43,10496,18413],"class_list":["post-584412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-colombia","tag-diplomacy","tag-foreign-ministry","tag-gideon-saar","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-latin-america","tag-news","tag-slovenia","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}