As foreign elections shape Israel’s alliances, Jerusalem seeks to control the diplomatic whiplash

One could get whiplash watching governments dramatically change their policies toward Israel depending on who is voted into office.

On Monday, just three days after the inauguration of its new right-wing president, Abelardo de la Espriella, the Colombian government announced that it was recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, making it only the second country, after the US, to do so. The new government has also announced its intention to move the country’s embassy to Jerusalem.

Why is this so significant? Because just a few months ago, Colombia was firmly in the anti-Israel camp.

Under left-wing president Gustavo Petro, the country reversed what had been strong Israeli-Colombian ties. It intervened against Israel in South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice, suspended purchases of Israeli arms, banned coal exports to Israel, and – as a final blow – severed diplomatic relations.

This from a country that, during the early part of the century, was one of Israel’s closest partners in Latin America, with particularly strong military ties.

Colombia’s reversal is unusually dramatic, but it is not unique. Israel has become more than just another country on the diplomatic map. It has become an ideological marker, a means by which political movements advertise who they are and what they stand for.

Under its previous left-wing government, Slovenia recognized a Palestinian state, imposed an arms embargo on Israel, banned imports from Israeli settlements and took a leading role in efforts to pressure Israel inside the European Union.

Its national broadcaster also boycotted this year’s Eurovision Song Contest because Israel was allowed to participate, refusing even to air the event and broadcasting Palestinian films instead.

Then Janez Janša returned to power.

His new right-wing government revoked the restrictions on arms trade, moved to reverse Slovenia’s recognition of a Palestinian state, and announced that it would relocate the country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Israel, in turn, announced that it would open its first embassy in Ljubljana.

Hugo Chávez severed relations with Israel in 2009, and under Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, hostility toward Israel was part of Venezuela’s close alignment with Iran.

On Tuesday, following Maduro’s removal and the interim government’s turn toward Washington, Venezuela and Israel agreed to restore consular services – a limited step toward normalization that followed Israel’s humanitarian mission after June’s devastating earthquakes.

It is not yet a restoration of full diplomatic relations, but it shows how quickly relations with Israel can change when a government moves away from Iran and closer to the US.

The electoral pendulum has swung elsewhere as well.

In Hungary, the movement went the other way: Péter Magyar’s defeat of Viktor Orbán in 2026 cost Israel its most dependable ally inside the EU and led Hungary to reverse its planned withdrawal from the ICC.

Foreign policy always changes when governments change. But with Israel, the shifts are often unusually rapid, sweeping, and symbolic.

Why? Why do relations with Israel flip-flop to such a degree?

The primary reason is that Israel has become an ideological banner in the domestic politics of other countries.

For the populist Right – represented by leaders such as Janša in Slovenia and de la Espriella in Colombia – 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.

Conversely, for significant parts of the global Left, opposition to Israel and anti-Zionism have become a telltale sign of progressive identity.

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’s position on Israel signals what ideological camp he belongs to, what values he embraces, and how he views the world.

Once Israel becomes an identity marker, changes in the political leadership naturally lead to significant changes in policy.

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.

These are high-visibility steps that generate considerable political attention. Yet many of them can be taken – and reversed – relatively quickly. They generally do not require the restructuring of a country’s economy or military alliances.

Moreover, cutting or boosting ties with Israel often carries a high ideological reward but a relatively low immediate domestic risk.

When Petro severed diplomatic relations with Israel, Colombia’s GDP did not collapse, its borders were not immediately threatened, and most Colombians did not experience any change in their daily lives.

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.

The lack of an immediate price makes Israel an easy way for governments to signal ideological purity.

Another factor is that many of these decisions largely fall within the executive’s purview.

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.

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’s case, this phenomenon is especially pronounced.

As a result, Israel’s foreign relations in many democracies have become highly vulnerable to electoral swings.

So how can Israel navigate those shifts?

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.

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.

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.

Dermer said favorable public opinion can provide “shock absorbers when problems arise,” but that ultimately “being important to that country becomes more critical” than whether its people believe they share values with Israel.

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.

Israel has tried to apply that logic before.

More than two decades ago, Ariel Sharon’s government signed an agreement to import 50 million cubic meters of water annually from Turkey’s Manavgat River for 20 years.

The water was more expensive than desalinated water, but Sharon saw the agreement as more than a solution to Israel’s 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.

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.

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.

Dermer’s 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.

And that, essentially, is the lesson for Israel.

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.

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.

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.

Moving an embassy to Jerusalem is a welcome diplomatic achievement. But it will not, by itself, keep Colombia in Israel’s corner after de la Espriella leaves office. Defense cooperation, commercial relationships, and institutional ties may not do so either – as we have seen in the recent past – but they will ensure that a future Colombian government has something tangible to lose by reversing course.

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 – using the goodwill of the moment to build ties that will outlast the leader.