A single number now defines the gap between how Israel sees its position and how it is being priced by the rest of the world: 67 percent of adults across the countries surveyed held an unfavourable view of Israel. That figure sits against just 25 percent who viewed it favourably, a spread wide enough to behave less like opinion and more like a constraint.
Perception hardens into a constraint that reaches beyond politics into markets
The data did not emerge in a vacuum. Most interviews took place after the US and Israel launched their war against Iran on February 28, a campaign that has fuelled economic hardship globally. The sequence matters. The deterioration in perception followed an event that imposed costs well beyond the battlefield, and the survey captures that cost as it is being distributed across populations that do not vote in Israeli elections but do influence the environments in which capital, contracts and alliances are negotiated.
The hostility is not confined to regions where it might be dismissed as predictable. European publics were no less hostile. In Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, about two-thirds of adults or more said they held a very unfavourable view of Israel. These are not marginal markets. They sit inside procurement systems, regulatory regimes and financial networks that determine which companies can sell, borrow and insure.
That shift is already showing up in places that do not usually advertise political sentiment. Unfavourable views rose in 13 of the 24 countries where trend data were available. In Argentina, the move is measurable: 46 percent of adults held an unfavourable view of Israel in 2025, a figure that has now climbed to 55 percent. The direction is consistent. It is also accelerating.
Due diligence replaces protest as the channel through which sentiment exerts pressure
The mechanism that translates sentiment into constraint is not public protest but due diligence. The process of examining Israeli companies that operate in West Bank settlements involved the exercise of due diligence. Inside that process, committees do not declare sanctions. They adjust risk. A large number of those investment committees considered recommending to the banks to prohibit loans or aid of any kind to Israeli companies that operate in the West Bank, including those that grant mortgages to home builders or buyers across the Green Line. The language is technical. The effect is not.
What those committees are signaling is explicit: such recommendations function as a warning to investors that profiting off the occupation could leave a business ensnared in legal responsibility for crimes against international law. This is not a political statement. It is a credit judgment. It asks whether assets tied to certain geographies or activities will remain financeable under the legal regimes of the countries where capital is raised.
At the same time, the institutions that would arbitrate that risk are being engaged directly. Palestine’s foreign minister Riad Malki visited the Hague and submitted files to prosecutors at the International Criminal Court charging Israeli with war crimes and the crime of apartheid. Whether those filings succeed is not the immediate point. Their existence expands the set of scenarios that compliance departments and insurers are required to model.
Defence demand surges even as political systems begin to close
Against this backdrop, one sector appears insulated. Elbit Systems reported that its order backlog had crossed $30 billion for the first time in its history. The announcement came with the kind of quiet confidence that characterizes Israel's defense industry at its most assured. Demand, according to its chief executive, is running well above historical levels. On its face, this looks like the opposite of isolation.
The contradiction is only apparent. The same European system in which public opinion has hardened is also the one in which a sustained political campaign is underway to restrict, shame and in some cases formally exclude Israeli defense companies from procurement. The actions are no longer hypothetical. Spain suspended arms exports. Several NATO member governments have floated partial embargoes. Elbit itself was expelled from Euronaval after political pressure. Each measure is partial. Together they define a direction.
The backlog, then, is not a measure of insulation from that direction. It is a record of contracts signed under assumptions about market access that are now being revised in public. The company is the only one of Israel’s three defense giants that is publicly listed, which makes its accounts a proxy for an industry whose other major players are state-owned. What it holds—orders scheduled for delivery across jurisdictions increasingly willing to question whether those deliveries should proceed—depends on counterparties operating inside political systems that have already moved.
The balance sheet becomes the place where geopolitics is ultimately enforced
This is where the survey stops being descriptive. If Israel’s global standing continues to plunge, and if that plunge is concentrated in the very countries whose regulatory and financial frameworks govern procurement, financing and legal exposure, then the constraint is not external to the balance sheet. It sits inside it, in the enforceability and financeability of the backlog itself.
A defence company can report $30bn in orders. It cannot compel the political systems on which those orders depend to remain open.
