Julio Messer is a former president of American Friends of Likud.
(Oct. 21, 2026 / JNS)
When U.S. Vice President JD Vance declared in June that Israel is “deeply isolated” and has “few friends in the international community,” he expressed a media narrative that has hardened into conventional wisdom, even among many in Israel.
But it is hard to square the narrative with reality: Israel maintains diplomatic relations with roughly 165 of the world’s 193 U.N. member states—a wider network of recognition than most nations enjoy. The “isolation” narrative rests less on the scale of Israel’s isolation than on the visibility and vehemence of a specific, and specifically ideological, subset of critics.
It’s worth asking, then, why so many previously anti-Israel governments are now reversing course.
The pattern is not subtle. Nearly every government that downgraded or severed relations with Israel—Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Brazil, South Africa—was led by a left-wing or “progressive” administration.
Their stated justification was always the war in Gaza. In particular, unadjudicated allegations of “genocide” and “war crimes” that remain exactly that: allegations contested in international courts that have not returned findings of the sweeping kind these governments asserted as settled fact.
That a legal process still in motion was treated as concluded and used to justify severing formal ties with a sovereign state suggests the legal claim was doing less work than the political instinct behind it.
The reversal now underway in Latin America confirms the political nature of the attempted “isolation.” As right-wing governments have replaced left-wing ones across the region, ties with Israel have snapped back, often within days. Equally often, relations have been expanded.
Chile and Honduras reinstalled ambassadors within a month of right-wing electoral victories. Venezuela restored consular ties after 17 years, aided by a broader realignment toward Washington.
Argentina’s Javier Milei has gone further, branding a set of security and trade initiatives with Israel the “Isaac Accords,” an explicit callback to the Abraham Accords. The Isaac Accords are driven by ideological affinity and religious sympathy—a growing evangelical constituency across the region is strongly pro-Israel—as much as strategic calculation.
This isn’t unique to Latin America. It has also occurred inside the European Union, where sanctions require unanimity among all 27 members, meaning a single government can veto them.
The reversal now underway in Latin America confirms the political nature of the attempted ‘isolation.’
For years, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary repeatedly blocked E.U. measures against Israeli settlers for explicitly ideological reasons: Orbán was aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on migration, sovereignty and skepticism toward international institutions.
When Orbán lost power in April 2026 to a government uninterested in defending Israel, Hungary dropped its veto within weeks and the European Union passed its first new sanctions package against Israeli settlers since mid-2024—a shift driven entirely by an election, not by any significant change on the ground.
Slovenia has been the mirror image of Hungary’s shift. Under left-wing Prime Minister Robert Golob, Slovenia became one of the most aggressively anti-Israel states in Europe. It banned arms trade with Israel, barred Netanyahu and his ministers from entry and recognized a Palestinian state.
Weeks after a right-wing government under Janez Janša took power in May 2026, however, every one of those measures was reversed. Slovenia then stepped directly into Hungary’s vacated role, blocking joint E.U. statements against Israel that even Germany supported. All of this was purely the result of who won an election.
Consider also the United Kingdom, where the new Labour Foreign Minister Ed Miliband imposed economic sanctions on Israel. Both the Conservative and Reform parties indicated they will immediately reverse these sanctions if and when they come to power.
Defenders of the governments that have reversed their stance would frame their moves not as ideology overriding facts, but as a corrective to ideological overreach in the other direction. But this argument rings hollow.
Brazil is the clearest test case. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has taken the sharpest anti-Israel line of any Latin American leader. Indeed, his government has compared the Gaza war to the Holocaust, straining relations to the point that Israel downgraded ties.
Brazil goes to the polls on October 25, and if the right-wing opposition wins, there is little reason to expect anything other than the same script that played out elsewhere: a rapid reversal, likely accompanied by renewed trade, security cooperation and perhaps symbolic gestures well beyond what existed before Lula’s presidency.
If that happens, the “isolation” narrative will have flipped in Brazil for the same reason that it flipped in Slovenia—not because Israel’s conduct changed, but because the electorate changed the ruling government.
None of this means Israel faces no real diplomatic problems. European public opinion, International Criminal Court proceedings and the genuine humanitarian toll in Gaza are a separate and more durable story than any single election cycle.
However, the countries that have reversed course suggest that apparent moral certainty from either side is, in fact, a proxy conflict over domestic politics, using Israel as the terrain, not the target.