Colombia Embassy in Jerusalem: The Boycott Wave Just Lost a Whole Country
Two years ago a Colombian president cut Israel off completely, called Israel's prime minister a war criminal and shut his country's embassy in Tel Aviv. This week his successor's foreign minister stood in Jerusalem, watched the Colombian flag go up and watched a mezuzah fixed to the doorpost of Colombia's brand new embassy in Israel's capital.
Colombia opened that embassy on Wednesday and became the tenth country in the world to place its mission in the city Israel calls its capital. A day earlier the two governments exchanged the diplomatic notes that brought their free trade agreement back to life after Gustavo Petro had torn it up. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar hosted his Colombian counterpart Omar Bula Escobar at the ceremony. Jerusalem's mayor came. Colombia's new ambassador came. Escobar said Israel is a strategic partner and will be even more of one from here, and that the relationship should never have been severed in the first place.
Sa'ar offered the one detail that tells you where all of this is heading. When he took over the foreign ministry less than two years ago, five countries had embassies in Jerusalem. Now there are ten.
Why does the Colombia embassy in Jerusalem matter outside Colombia?
Because of what Petro's break was supposed to prove. When he severed relations in the spring of 2024, recalled his ambassador and closed the embassy in Tel Aviv, it was the loudest rupture any government in the Western hemisphere had attempted, and it was sold as the opening move of a wave. Governments that were not willing to go that far borrowed pieces of it instead, announcing arms embargoes, banning trade with Israeli communities beyond the Green Line, and recognizing a Palestinian state with reform conditions attached that nobody intended to police. The theory running underneath all of it was that isolation would pile up on Israel until Israel changed its behavior to make the pile stop growing.
Colombia has now demonstrated the shelf life of that theory, and it comes out to roughly one election cycle. Abelardo de la Espriella campaigned on putting his embassy in Jerusalem, won, took office in the summer and had the trade agreement restored and the embassy open before his third month on the job. Sa'ar's own summary was that most of the damage of the Petro years has already been undone. A policy that can be erased that quickly carried no real leverage, only a bill, and the bill landed on Colombians.
That is the part worth sitting with for a minute. Israel did not run out of coal suppliers, flower importers or trading partners when Bogota walked away. Colombian exporters lost access to a wealthy market and Colombian industry lost access to Israeli technology, while the Palestinians in whose name the rupture was staged received nothing at all from it, not food and not one hostage walking home. Hamas enjoyed the headline for an afternoon and went back to work.
The Jerusalem half of the story carries even more weight than the trade half. Most of the world still parks its embassies in Tel Aviv, and the stated reason is that Jerusalem's status has to wait for a final agreement with the Palestinians. In practice that habit says something much simpler, which is that Israel is the one country on earth expected to let foreigners decide where its capital sits. Ten governments now reject that premise, among them the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Kosovo, Fiji, Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Somaliland, while Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia run embassy branches in the city. Samoa has already said it means to be next. Ten out of nearly two hundred countries is a minority and nobody in Jerusalem pretends otherwise. The direction of travel is the thing that makes foreign ministries uncomfortable, because the number keeps moving one way.
Most reports filed this story as a partisan swing in Latin America. A conservative replaced a socialist, so naturally the embassy moved. That reading is comfortable and it skips the two things that will decide whether any of it lasts.
The first is the speed. Restoring a trade agreement and standing up an embassy within weeks of an inauguration does not happen unless the groundwork was laid long before anyone took the oath. Sa'ar and Escobar had already reached their understandings at a meeting in Washington over the summer. Israel spent the Petro years quietly building ties with everyone in Colombian public life who was not Petro, and that patience paid for itself.
The second is the content of the new relationship, which the political framing buries. The cooperation now on the table covers security and defense, transnational organized crime, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, technology and investment. Colombia has a cartel problem and a guerrilla problem that no amount of ideology has ever solved, and Israel happens to be exceptionally good at the things a country fighting armed networks needs. Relationships built on capability survive changes of government in a way that relationships built on sentiment never do. If a future Colombian president wants to repeat Petro's gesture, he will first have to explain to his own security services why he is throwing away tools they have come to depend on.
There are a few places to watch from here. Other Latin American governments that downgraded ties may quietly follow Bogota back, since not one of them collected anything for leaving. The European capitals that recognized a Palestinian state on conditions of reform and elections have gone very quiet now that those elections have been pushed somewhere over the horizon, and that silence is being read in more capitals than Jerusalem. The embassy list itself is the number to track, because every government that moves makes the move cheaper for the one after it.
Israelis have a phrase for seasons like the one that just closed. Gam zeh ya'avor. This too shall pass. The boycotts, the recalled ambassadors, the speeches about war criminals and the committees of inquiry all arrive loudly and leave quietly, and the country they were aimed at is still standing when they go. Yerushalayim is still the capital. This week a government that once tried to punish Israel for existing came back and said so on a brass plate screwed to a wall here. Colombia spent two years boycotting Jerusalem and walked away with an address in it.
Comments