Europe continues to turn away from Israel, frustrated by a state that has doubled down on attacking its neighbours, with no regard for the global economic shock its actions are contributing to.

Israel has long been warned of its increasing international pariah status, with the genocidal war on Gaza leading to large shifts in Western public opinion, along with its attacks on Lebanon and Iran. That public opinion has become difficult for European governments to ignore, despite their longstanding close ties to Israel.

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Italy’s right-wing government has become the latest European state to join a growing chorus criticising the country, which in recent weeks has included the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain. Calls have grown for Israel to halt its attacks on Lebanon and Iran and step back from a conflict that, analysts warn, threatens to tip the world into recession.

Earlier this month, Spain called for the suspension of the European Union’s trade agreement with Israel in light of its “intolerable” actions in Lebanon. France has previously barred Israeli firms from major defence exhibitions. Even Germany, possibly Israel’s staunchest European ally, has expressed concern over what it termed Israel’s “de facto partial annexation of the West Bank”.

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu turned on his European critics, claiming to be a defender of their values.

Europe today, he said, has become “afflicted by deep moral weakness”, before using language borrowed from the European far-right to argue that Europe was “losing control of its identity, of its values, of its responsibility to defend civilisation against barbarism”.

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“It has much to learn from us,” Netanyahu – who has an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza – said, “especially the essential lesson of the clear moral distinction between good and evil, which in moments of truth demands that we go to war for the sake of what’s good, for the sake of life”.

Defending the West?

The idea that Israel is waging war on behalf of many of the states that now repudiate its actions is nothing new among the Israeli right-wing, Eva Illouz, an Israeli professor of sociology at Paris’s School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, told Al Jazeera.

“This has been their line for years,” she said, adding that the Israeli right criticises what it sees as the “dark role played by radical Islamism”.

“Israelis view themselves as the elite combat unit defending the West,” Illouz said. “I wonder, however, if Israel and the West wage and fight the same war.”

Israel’s image of itself as a state forced by circumstance to undertake the West’s dirty work, rather than as an equal part of the family of liberal and secular democracies it once aspired to join, has been growing for some time.

And, in recent years, the entry of religious and political extremes into the centre of politics, including the appointment of the far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister and his fellow ultranationalist Bezalel Smotrich to head the Finance Ministry, has confirmed Israel’s trend away from its imagining of itself as a liberal democracy.

“I think the rift’s been coming for some time,” Chatham House senior consulting fellow Yossi Mekelberg said, describing a trend he said accelerated after the far right’s opposition to the 1990s Oslo Accords, which promised a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. “But did I ever think it would get this bad? No,” Mekelberg said. “I never imagined these endless wars of choice, widespread religiosity, and unrestrained settlement.”

Illiberal

Israel’s founding in 1948, forcibly displacing 750,000 Palestinians in the “Nakba”, as well as its continued occupation of Palestinian territory and apartheid treatment of Palestinians, has always sat at odds with the pretence that it is a liberal democracy.

Accusations of land grabs and human rights abuses have run parallel to attempts by Israeli leaders to establish themselves as a liberal outpost on an apparently lawless frontier. Yet for much of this period, Western political and public support remained broadly resilient, sustained by strategic alliances, Holocaust memory, and, critically, shared security interests.

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“You can’t style yourself a liberal democracy if you’re occupying someone else’s land and committing ethnic cleansing and genocide,” Israeli academic and filmmaker Haim Bresheeth said. “This isn’t the sort of thing liberal democracies do … However, if you’re in Israel and you choose to read just the Hebrew media, you can believe you live in a liberal democracy.”

Criticism from the West has yet to make many inroads into Israel’s political consciousness. Earlier this month, responding to growing tensions between his government and Spain, Netanyahu took to social media to say that “Israel will not remain silent in the face of those who attack us”.

“Spain has defamed our heroes, the soldiers of the [Israeli military], the soldiers of the most moral army in the world,” he said of the military force accused of genocide and torture.

Responding to relatively muted concern from Berlin over Israel’s policy towards the occupied West Bank, Finance Minister Smotrich went further still.

“The days when Germans dictated to Jews where they were permitted or forbidden to live are over and shall not return,” Smotrich wrote on social media. “You will not force us into ghettos again, certainly not in our own land.”

“Our return to the Land of Israel – our biblical and historical homeland – is the answer to anyone who tried or tries to destroy us, and we do not apologize for it for a single moment,” he added.

“I don’t think there’s any chance of self-reflection or internal reckoning,” Mekelberg said of how criticism may land among Israel’s political leadership and their backers. “There’s a sense that, if they don’t like us, then we must be doing something right.”