When Israelis go to the polls in October, they will be voting on one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s legacies: Israel’s growing isolation. The prime minister himself acknowledged this in September 2025, as symbolic recognition of the State of Palestine gained ground at the United Nations. The more wars Israel fights, the deeper that isolation grows.
Devastating images for Israel continue to pile up, such as the video published on Sunday, April 19, showing an Israeli soldier smashing a statue of Christ with a sledgehammer after it was thrown to the ground in a Christian village captured in southern Lebanon. The images can be allegorical, such as the shocking cover of Italian magazine L’Espresso on April 10. It illustrated the arbitrariness reigning in the West Bank through a confrontation between an armed settler and a Palestinian woman. The effect of these images remains the same: They drive Israel further away from its European and American allies than ever before.
On April 13, during Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu preemptively blamed Europe for that isolation, arguing it had “forgotten so much since the Holocaust.” According to the Israeli leader, this Europe is “infested today with a deep moral weakness. Europe is losing control over its identity, its values and its commitment to protect civilization from barbarism.”
‘Contortions’
This rhetoric followed the national security strategy published by Donald Trump’s administration in December 2025. Yet it came after the electoral defeat of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who had served as Netanyahu’s ideological counter-example in Europe. Orban was the only leader in the European Union who continued to host his Israeli counterpart despite the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for the conduct of the war in Gaza after the October 7, 2023, massacres perpetrated by Palestinian group Hamas. Orban’s successor, Péter Magyar, said that this exception was now a thing of the past.
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