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Few matters are able to rile global publics quite like war in Israel-Palestine. Following Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which left more than 1,200 dead, people have taken to the streets around the world to express solidarity with Israel or to condemn its punishing military response in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 22,000 Palestinians to date.
Few matters are able to rile global publics quite like war in Israel-Palestine. Following Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which left more than 1,200 dead, people have taken to the streets around the world to express solidarity with Israel or to condemn its punishing military response in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 22,000 Palestinians to date.
The war has significantly raised tensions in the Middle East, with the battlefield already having expanded to Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and the Red Sea. Beyond the Middle East, the conflict’s ripple effects have been felt around the world, leading to pitched battles over freedom of speech, intense diplomatic wrangling at the United Nations, and a surge in hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, and Arabs.
This all comes as some 40 percent of the world’s population is set to go to the polls this year in more than 40 countries. And in several of them, the Israel-Hamas war is creating or exacerbating political rifts that could have real electoral consequences. Here is a look at how the conflict could echo through world politics in the coming year.
Outside of Israel itself, the war’s political repercussions will likely be most keenly felt in the United States, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a foreign-policy issue of singular importance to voters. President Joe Biden has resolutely stood by Israel since the Oct. 7 attack, rushing additional U.S. military aid to the country to bolster its Iron Dome missile defenses, pushing Congress to pass a substantial aid package for Israel, and exercising the U.S. veto to block a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza.
As criticism has grown both internationally and from within his own party over Israel’s conduct in the war and the staggering civilian death toll, Biden has taken a tougher stance on what he has described as Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza, but he has steadfastly refused to attach conditions on U.S. military aid to the country as a means to alter its tactics.
Growing up in the wake of the Holocaust, Biden’s support for Israel is personal and deeply rooted. He has described himself as a “Zionist in my heart.” But he presides over a country and a party deeply divided over how to respond to the war. The Democratic Party’s once-unwavering support for Israel has increasingly been called into question by its progressive flank.
Amid the electorate at large, the picture is equally complicated. A New York Times/Siena College poll published in December found that 57 percent of respondents disapproved of Biden’s handling of the conflict. That figure rises to 72 percent among young voters, a key constituency behind his 2020 victory over Trump.
Foreign policy takes a back seat in U.S. elections—a little more than 1 percent of respondents listed the conflict as the most pressing issue, according to the same poll. But in a presidential race that could come down to the wire, Biden’s staunch support for Israel could cost him precious votes in swing states such as Michigan, which has a large Arab and Muslim population.
U.S. support for Israel has also complicated Washington’s efforts to persuade the global south to stand alongside Ukraine amid its ongoing war with Russia. Biden has sought to tie the two wars together, framing Ukraine and Israel as two democracies at war with foes that seek their annihilation. “History has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction,” he said in an Oval Office address in October.
But many observers have accused Washington and the wider West of double standards for their vociferous response to Russia’s occupation of Ukraine and the more muted response to Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories.
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Hundreds of millions of Indians go to the polls in the spring in general elections in the world’s largest democracy. As in the United States, foreign policy is unlikely to be the primary factor in determining the vote’s outcome, but that doesn’t mean it won’t feature at all.
After eschewing diplomatic relations with Israel for decades and only formally establishing them in the 1990s, India has deepened its ties with the country in recent years—particularly since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. This has largely been driven by pragmatism, as India has sought a wider array of partners in the Middle East; Israel today is India’s second largest arms supplier after Moscow.
Israel’s drift toward religious nationalism has also been taken as inspiration by some of Modi’s followers. “India’s Hindu chauvinists see Israel much like they imagine India: as an ethnonationalist majoritarian state facing the existential threat of Islamist terrorism,” writes Daniel Markey for the United States Institute for Peace.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has long been accused of fanning the flames of Islamophobia in India, tweeted out a video hours after the Hamas attacks that compared the assault to India’s own struggle with Islamist terrorism.
“Comparisons with the situation in Gaza, and broadcasting the BJP’s alleged counterterrorist credentials, has been seen as a powerful mobilizing force in the perspective of the coming elections,” said Nicolas Blarel, an associate professor at the University of Leiden, in an email to Foreign Policy.
The BJP’s embrace of Israel also underscores a key foreign-policy distinction with its main opposition, the Indian National Congress party, which has long sympathized with the Palestinian struggle for statehood. While condemning Hamas’s assault on southern Israel, the party railed against India’s abstention in an October U.N. vote calling for an immediate humanitarian truce.
“India’s response to the conflict may become a wedge issue among the Indian electorate,” said Emmett Potts, a watch operations manager for the Middle East and North Africa region at the risk management consultancy Crisis24, in an email to Foreign Policy.
In 2008, when then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Israel, she declared the country’s security to be Germany’s Staatsräson, or “reason of state”—meaning it is a foundational priority of the German state, part of the country’s deep commitment to reckoning with its Nazi history. But in recent years, a quiet debate has simmered as to whether Germany’s staunch support for Israel has begun to tread on the toes of freedom of speech when it comes to legitimate criticism of Israel’s government.
The east German state of Saxony-Anhalt is set to require new applicants for German citizenship to confirm in writing that they affirm Israel’s right to exist and “condemn any efforts directed against the existence of the State of Israel.” Antisemitism and denial of Israel’s right to exist are explicitly proscribed by Germany’s Basic Law, by which all citizens are expected to abide.
Yet German intellectuals have traded open letters about the country’s handling of the war, while the country’s famed art scene has seen a wave of events canceled and collaborations suspended over artists’ critiques of Israel or use of the word “genocide” to describe the country’s actions in Gaza.
Some see the extent of the coverage of this debate in the international press as overwrought. “I’m a bit exasperated by this connection that people make about Germany’s ‘vergangenheitsbewältigung,’ coming to terms with our past, and the supposed misjudgment of the German government of the right stance towards Israel in Gaza,” said Jorg Lau, an international correspondent for the German newspaper Die Zeit.
“It’s not unconditional and it’s much more complicated,” he said, noting that German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock had spoken out extensively about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza during trips to the region.
The spotlight on Germany’s memory culture could come with a cost, playing into the “Germany first” narrative of the far-right Alternative For Germany party, which is projected to win big in regional elections later this year, alongside a new populist left-wing party. “They both share this idea that we should do away with these constraints of the German past, for different reasons,” Lau said.
In late October, lawmakers in the Tunisian Parliament put forward legislation that would criminalize any efforts to normalize ties with Israel in an attempt to erect a firewall against the wider regional trend of diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and Arab countries that was well underway before the war. The legislation had already been under discussion before the Hamas attack, but it was brought forward quickly in light of the war. Sympathy for the Palestinians is deep and long-standing in Tunisia, which hosted the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1980s.
The bill carries stiff penalties of up to 10 years’ imprisonment what it describes as the “crime of normalization.” It would also criminalize any contact with Israeli citizens or companies, which would be difficult and draconian to enforce.
In a surprising turn, the country’s president, Kais Saied—who had previously described any efforts to normalize ties with Israel as treasonous, came out against the bill. Saied, who has a history of making public antisemitic remarks, offered a convoluted explanation that there was no need to criminalize ties with a country that Tunisia doesn’t recognize.
However, some Tunisian lawmakers have alleged that Saied’s U-turn came because the United States intervened in a bid to stop the bill. Referring to what he called “official correspondence from the US Embassy in Tunis addressed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” one member of parliament involved in the process told Le Monde that the United States had threatened to impose sanctions on Tunisia if the bill passed. The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the allegations.
Saied has been accused of steadily dismantling Tunisia’s democratic institutions, so it’s unlikely that his surprise rebuke of parliament over the bill will impact the outcome of presidential elections later this year. But the perception that Western countries have stood by Israel as it has laid siege to the Gaza Strip has had a profound impact on Arab public opinion.
An Arab Barometer poll, the survey period of which straddled the Oct. 7 attacks, found that favorability ratings of countries with strong or warming ties with Israel dropped sharply as Israel’s military campaign got underway. Tunisia is just one country, but the study’s architects noted in a piece for Foreign Affairs that the country has historically been a robust bellwether for public opinion across the Arab world.
“It’s going to have lasting impacts,” said Fadil Aliriza, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute. “We’ve seen people rejecting prizes that they’ve gotten from the EU, we’ve seen people publicly rejecting honors they’ve been given from the West,” he said. “They believe that the West has really been complicit in the war.”
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