Israel’s ties with Europe are fraying. Can its election change that?

While marking Israel’s 75th anniversary, Ursula von der Leyen offered solidarity.

“Europe and Israel are bound to be friends and allies,” the European Commission president said on April 23, 2023.

That friendship reached beyond diplomacy. Israel played international football in Europe, competed in Eurovision and shared intelligence with European governments. Its weapons industry was woven into European production lines.

Those ties still exist, but have since become battlegrounds after Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza, which has killed at least 74,000 Palestinians.

European countries have withdrawn from Eurovision over Israel’s participation. European footballers have refused to play the Israeli team. Some declarations of friendship have been recast as condemnation.

Ireland and Spain have long led criticism of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

At the recent UN General Assembly, Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheal Martin said Israel’s actions in Gaza “will shame the world”, while Spain’s Pedro Sanchez spoke of “condemning unequivocally the genocide that Netanyahu continues to perpetrate in Gaza”.

Recently, in a sign of how much has changed in three years, Britain, whose Balfour Declaration helped lay the foundations for Israel’s creation, imposed a ban on goods from illegal settlements, while its foreign secretary accused Israeli settlers of ethnic cleansing.

On Saturday, a group of settlers attacked European diplomats and officials from Belgium, France and Poland who were visiting Palestinian olive harvesters near the village of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank. The assault, which came a day after settlers attacked a United States journalist north of Ramallah, drew widespread international condemnation.

Scarred relations between Europe and Israel may never fully repair, experts said as Israel heads to an election on October 27 that is too close to call.

Will the result affect Europe-Israel ties?

Yossi Mekelberg, a Middle East analyst at Chatham House, said if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returns with the far right, “certain things will become irreversible. The damage caused by this government is deep”.

Nicola Perugini, a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Edinburgh, warned that the re-election of the leader, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), would see Gaza’s population continue to struggle under “unliveable” conditions.

A Netanyahu coalition with more liberal parties might slow settlement expansion. But having a premier wanted by the ICC at the helm would likely lead to a continued deterioration of the Israel-Europe relationship. Replacing Netanyahu would not necessarily mean a break with the policies driving European criticism, experts said.

For instance, Gadi Eisenkot, former military chief and leader of the centrist Yashar party, viewed as Netanyahu’s main challenger, has opposed Palestinian statehood.

An annual public opinion survey by Israel’s Mitvim Institute last year showed that 67 percent of Israelis regarded the EU more as an adversary, compared with 14 percent who saw it as a friend.

Mekelberg sees potential for a different relationship under a more liberal government.

“The conversation with Europe would be more reasonable and rational,” he said, but warned that the picture would not change overnight.

More humanitarian aid could be delivered to Palestinians and the rate of settlement expansion could slow, analysts said. The E1 settlement plan could be abandoned.

But Julie M Norman, an associate fellow at Chatham House, said that may not be enough for European governments to make amends.

Rather, Europe would look for concrete moves towards Palestinian statehood and ending the occupation.

“But so far, we’re not seeing that under the current government and probably not under the next,” she said.

‘Ruling elite in several countries trying to align with the public’

At the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, Western leaders supported Israel’s campaign.

But sustained pressure from groups demanding action to stop the onslaught in Gaza and violence in the occupied West Bank – from civil rights organisations, international courts, trade unions and professional bodies to millions of protesters across the world – forced governments to act, analysts said.

“Now the ruling elite in several countries is trying to align itself with the public,” Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University in London, told Al Jazeera, adding that the pro-Palestine movement had changed the “common sense” position of governments.

Pew Research Center polling in the UK found that the proportion viewing Israel unfavourably rose from 61 to 69 percent between spring 2025 and spring this year, from 66 to 75 percent in Italy and from 64 to 73 percent in Germany, one of its strongest allies.

Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist, linked that pressure to recognition of Palestinian statehood, moves towards suspending the EU-Israel association agreement and bans on settlement imports.

“If anything has had any impact on European policy towards Israel, it is precisely the wave of protests over the last few years,” she said.

Norman at Chatham House said European states have shifted from targeted measures, such as sanctioning far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, towards “broader structures, in terms of scrutiny of the Israeli state itself”.

But support for Israel persists in parts of Europe, noted Oxford University professor Janina Dill.

Two successive German governments have been “utterly unwilling to act on justified public criticism of Germany’s diplomatic and material support for Israel”, she said.

With support generally on the decline, Israel has cultivated ties with Europe’s far right, finding common ground in nationalism and hostility towards Islam, despite historic and current ties to anti-Semitism.

Menachem Klein, a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, told Al Jazeera, that the current government has caused “huge damage to relations with friends and allies” – and scars will take time to heal.

Mekelberg added that improving relations requires concrete steps towards a peace process and a different future for Palestinians. Even then, the damage will endure.

Israel’s isolation

The election debate in Israel has focused on security, rather than the morality of the continued killing of Palestinians or the country’s international standing.

Israel’s wars abroad appear to have widespread domestic support.

An Israel Democracy Institute survey in April found that 92 percent of Jewish Israelis highly rated the military’s management of the Iran war. Eighty percent supported continuing the fighting against Hezbollah, even at the cost of friction with Washington. In September, Jewish People Policy Institute polling found that 72 percent of Jewish Israelis would not accept withdrawal to Gaza’s border without retaining an Israeli security perimeter inside the territory.

Israel’s diplomatic isolation might therefore seem an obvious election issue. Instead, “it is barely discussed”, Yaakov Katz, cofounder of the Middle East American Dialogue Forum, wrote in an article for Chatham House.

Rather, the main talking points are the degradation of Hamas and the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran, while the opposition promises to lower living costs, investigate the failures surrounding October 7 and draft members of the ultra-Orthodox community into the military.

“It is not that Israelis are unaware of the campus protests, the arms embargoes, growing European sanctions and recognition of a Palestinian state, and the International Criminal Court arrest warrants,” Katz wrote. “The 7 October attack has shaped public opinion in Israel to such an extent that when a foreign government criticises Israel … Israelis see only two viewpoints: that the criticism is either antiSemitic or it is ignorant.”