Israel’s Leaders Find Allies Among the Global Far Right
The inauguration of Colombia’s new far-right President, Abelardo de la Espriella, was attended by a cast of his ideological fellow-travellers from around the region. Present at the ceremony, held in the southwestern city Cali, on Friday, were the Argentinean President, Javier Milei; the Ecuadorian President, Daniel Noboa; and the Chilean President, José Antonio Kast—whose electoral victories, combined with de la Espriella’s success, in June, and triumphs for the right in Peru and Bolivia, seem to cement a broader shift in Latin American politics. Leading the American delegation was Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer to President Donald Trump who was still awaiting confirmation as the U.S. Attorney General. Also among the dignitaries present was the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, who came to Colombia amid a wider mission to shore up support for his nation.
He did not leave disappointed. By Monday, de la Espriella had already restored diplomatic ties with Israel—which the previous leftist administration of President Gustavo Petro had severed in response to Israel’s devastation of Gaza—vowed to move the Colombian Embassy to Jerusalem, and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights. That last move, one of de la Espriella’s first decisions in office at a time when his country is reeling from a deadly earthquake, made Colombia the only nation in the world apart from the United States to view the annexed territory as part of Israel. De la Espriella’s government is also planning to withdraw Colombia from supporting South Africa’s ongoing genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Sa’ar, on X, described the Golan Heights recognition as a “historic” act in support of Israel. After meeting with de la Espriella a day before the inauguration, he had hailed a new “golden age in relations between Colombia and Israel.”
For Sa’ar, it was likely a welcome change. Israel has been fighting a losing public-diplomacy battle on many other fronts, including in the United States. Much of the good will and sympathy that was extended to Israel after the horrific attacks of October 7th has dissipated, and antipathy toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and the ruinous legacy of its war against Hamas in Gaza, as well as the ongoing dispossession and harassment of Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers, is reshaping Democratic Party politics and has influenced the outcomes of some primary elections. A Pew poll earlier this summer found that almost two-thirds of Americans surveyed have an unfavorable view of the Netanyahu government, while, according to a recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll, the majority of Americans want U.S. military support for Israel reduced or ended. That includes nearly three-quarters of Democrats surveyed. Some Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterms openly describe Israel’s conduct as genocidal, reflecting a view currently shared by much of the Democratic base.
There’s friction among Republicans, too. Last month, Vice-President J. D. Vance, who had been tasked with negotiating a way out of the war with Iran launched by Trump and encouraged by Netanyahu, called out figures within the Israeli “system” for “manipulating and trying to change American public opinion” in favor of continuing the conflict. When some Israeli cabinet members were agitating against U.S. diplomacy with Tehran in June, Vance scolded them, arguing that Trump was “the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.”
In July, at an event hosted at the Council on Foreign Relations, in Washington, D.C., I asked Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, about Vance’s remarks and the impression that Israel is gradually becoming more isolated. He said he hadn’t “detected a scintilla of antipathy towards Israel” after “dozens of meetings” with Vance. He blamed Israel’s travails in the court of global public opinion on a young generation overly influenced by social media. “People’s minds are being poisoned by all sorts of ideas,” he said, and rejected the suggestion that Israel was alone. Leiter pointed to burgeoning defense ties with India and close coöperation with the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan. “We have many friends,” he said.
But the ranks of Israel’s detractors have unquestionably grown. Pew also surveyed public opinion about Israel in thirty-five other countries and found broadly negative attitudes toward Israel prevailing. The numbers of respondents in major Western countries, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy, who disapprove of Israel spiked by almost ten points from when Pew had conducted the same survey last year. Various governments have tried to impose consequences on Israel, largely through symbolic measures. Countries such as Brazil and South Africa recalled ambassadors; Spain and Norway recognized a Palestinian state at the U.N. and cajoled European partners to ratchet up sanctions on Israeli settler entities and to reconsider existing agreements with Israel. Others, including a coalition of Global South countries known as the Hague Group, urged embargoes on weapons sales and the enforcement of International Criminal Court warrants, and have repeatedly called out Israel’s alleged violations of international law as well as U.S. hypocrisy in shielding Israel from censure and helping equip its military.
Netanyahu and his allies dismiss criticism as the product of entrenched antisemitism and cast institutions like the United Nations as irredeemably biased. They also launched social-media broadsides at a host of foreign leaders, including nominally pro-Israel centrists such as the French President, Emmanuel Macron, who had irked Netanyahu by trying to restore international attention to the moribund two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Israel has traditionally avoided official dialogue with far-right parties in Europe, where many factions have direct antecedents in post-Second World War neofascist movements. But last year Sa’ar instructed Israeli diplomats to set up channels to France’s National Rally, Spain’s ultranationalist Vox party, and the far-right Sweden Democrats—all of which espouse virulently Islamophobic platforms.
The fact that Israel’s current leadership apparently feels more solidarity with European nationalists than with the Continent’s political establishment is a strange irony of the moment. The country’s diaspora minister, Amichai Chikli, lamented the “post-national” cosmopolitanism of Jewish communities in the West, arguing that it was better for Israel to court far-right activists in Europe, who are supposedly closer to “ordinary people” and who may find common cause with Israel in their animus toward Muslim immigration and political Islam. Last month, members of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, including Sa’ar and the defense minister, Israel Katz, hosted a visit by the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders. He posted an image of himself eating falafel in Jerusalem and toured an illegal West Bank settlement alongside a well-known settler leader against whom the Dutch parliament had passed a resolution urging European Union sanctions. Sa’ar called Wilders “a courageous leader and a true friend of Israel.”
In Latin America, Israel plays into the region’s profound political polarization: leftists still summon a Cold War history of Israeli assistance to a clutch of U.S.-aligned military dictatorships; the right sees both the Palestinian cause and armed groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah (which is linked to deadly terror attacks in Argentina) in the same light as the anarchic, leftist militants it has long sought to quash. The dynamic is leading to foreign-policy whiplash. Last December, Bolivia’s new right-wing government restored ties with Israel that had been suspended by its leftist predecessors. Chile’s Kast, who took office in March and is an admirer of the late dictator Augusto Pinochet, sent an ambassador to Israel to take the place of the one his center-left predecessor had recalled a couple years earlier. Milei has visited Israel three times since taking office in 2023, and earlier this year, in Jerusalem, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Honor, the country’s highest civilian award. In March, during a speech at Yeshiva University, in New York City, Milei said that he was “proud to be the most Zionist President in the world.” A month later, he and Netanyahu announced the advent of the Isaac Accords, a vague framework of agreements aimed at deepening ties between Israel and Latin America and inspired by the Trump-led Abraham Accords between Israel and a handful of Arab states. In the past two years, several right-wing Latin American politicians have made their way to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, including Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of the jailed former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. The younger Bolsonaro is running for the Presidency in October. If he defeats the current President, the leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—who infuriated Israeli officials when he compared the war in Gaza to the Holocaust—he has vowed to follow some of his neighbors and move Brazil’s Embassy to Jerusalem.
There are a number of factors driving these agendas. The growth of evangelical Christianity across Latin America has deepened commitments to Israel on the right. In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was baptized by a far-right Brazilian evangelical pastor and politician in the River Jordan. Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian German senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, suggests that Israel’s rejection of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and other elements of the international system fits into the politics of Latin America’s new right. “The support for Israel is an important element of a broader criticism of multilateralism, of ‘globalism,’ ” he told me. Then, of course, there’s Donald Trump. “If you are a Latin American President and you want the U.S. to support you in the fight against organized crime, to broaden security coöperation, to have access to U.S. intelligence and weapons, or if you want to have a bit more leverage to perhaps reverse some of the tariffs that the U.S. imposed on you, then embracing pro-Israel rhetoric may be a relatively cheap way to be seen as an ally by the Trump Administration,” Stuenkel said.
Netanyahu himself faces an election in October. Opposition politicians claim that ousting his government is necessary to rehabilitate Israel’s reputation, and that a post-Netanyahu foreign policy won’t engage in the partisan politics of other countries. “Israel’s foreign relations have never been at such a low point,” the former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said last month at an Israeli security summit. But he expressed hope that “there is an understanding around the world that Israel’s problem is not the country, but the government.” Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat and foreign-policy adviser to the late Israeli leader Shimon Peres and to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, is less sure. “For over fifteen years, Netanyahu has destroyed Israel’s brand and self-value,” he told me. “His politics, demagoguery, and sycophantic affinity to every and all illiberal quasi-democratic autocrats have not only devalued Israel but are a toxic mutation of Zionism.” He added: “The damage and degradation they have caused the Israeli brand may be irreparable.” ♦