Israel is emerging from the carnage as the regional hegemon with a string of military victories. But the country’s fight against Palestinian militant group Hamas also has left it increasingly politically isolated and at risk of losing long-term Western support that has been vital to its survival.
The deaths of more than 67,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to local authorities, have revived global calls for Palestinian statehood and put Israel at odds with a solidifying international consensus.
Once recovered from the initial shock of the Hamas breakthrough and murderous spree on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s military has delivered a succession of crippling blows to the entire constellation of its strategic foes.
Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have been decapitated, the Assad regime in Syria has collapsed, and Iran’s military leadership, missile and nuclear programs have been badly damaged.
“Regionally, Israel is less under less threat than it was two years ago,” said Shalom Lipner, a fellow at the Atlantic Council who served as an adviser to several Israeli prime ministers. “But internationally, it’s between a rock and a hard place, and the long-term trends are not working in its favor.”
Anger at Israel has spread from the Muslim world to Europe and increasingly the U.S., where large parts of the Democratic Party and a growing part of the MAGA movement have now turned against American assistance to Israel.
While President Trump has remained supportive, Israel’s new isolation has given him unusual leverage—a power that he has already exercised to block plans for annexing the West Bank, to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologize for a strike on Qatar, and to make Israel acquiesce to the latest Gaza cease-fire plan.
This alienation of Israel’s erstwhile friends around the world stands to erode, in a potentially lasting way, not only the standing of Netanyahu and his successors but also the long-term viability of Israel’s founding project.
From American university campuses to European high schools, solidarity with the Palestinian cause—and hostility to Zionism—have become the political markers of a new generation.
“Ordinary Jewish and Israeli people, not soldiers and politicians, are going to bear the brunt of that for years to come,” said Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the United Nations last month that many world leaders have praised him privately.
Netanyahu, in last month’s speech at the United Nations, said that many “weak-kneed world leaders who appease evil” by blasting Israel publicly thank him privately, saying they buckle under fear of “biased media, radical Islamic constituencies, and antisemitic mobs.”
Elements of antisemitism and Islamist radicalism are present in the anti-Israel protests that have swept Western nations—with protesters in some cases carrying Hamas and Hezbollah flags and engaging in anti-Jewish chants.
But this mass mobilization—as seen with Italy’s general strike on Friday—is driven above all by broad anger at the treatment of Palestinians and Western governments’ support for Israel, said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome and a former senior foreign-policy adviser at the European Commission.
“Israel has gone over the top because it has been allowed to do so by the West. Its friends were not very friendly in a sense, because they didn’t stop it from committing suicide in the long term,” she said.
While the damage to Israel’s global standing is real, allies argue that it could quickly bounce back.
“I don’t think it is permanent. Israel has survived lots of different assaults, campaigns of delegitimization in the past,” said Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank that supports Israel. “When the war ends, the channel will change and people will go back to business as usual, more or less.”
Others, however, say a return to business as usual—at least in the near term—would be unlikely, especially if Netanyahu remains in power.
To repair Israel’s standing in the world, “first the war needs to end and quite possibly a new Israeli leadership needs to emerge for it to be a viable project,” said Daniel Shapiro, who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Obama administration and as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in the Biden administration. “The climb will be steep and it will take time.”
When Hamas invaded Israel two years ago, killing some 1,200 civilians and soldiers, and taking another 251 hostage, it was betting on a military blow weakening the Jewish state—perhaps with Hezbollah’s and Iran’s help—and on a renewed global focus on Palestinian aspirations that would scuttle Israel’s growing acceptance in the region.
Hamas leaders in Gaza failed on the first count, and most of them have been killed. Cease-fire plans pushed forward by Trump with the backing of Arab nations aim to replace the Hamas government in Gaza with a new technocratic authority.
Netanyahu, in a speech Saturday, trumpeted the military victories of the past two years as “historic achievements that will be recorded in the annals of Israel and also in the annals of nations.”
Netanyahu has long held up the power of Hamas, which wants to wipe out Israel, as a reason why any movement toward a Palestinian state is impossible. That would be less of a compelling argument if the cease-fire in Gaza takes effect and the new authority there becomes functional.
In recent weeks, major Western nations led by France, the United Kingdom and Canada have already moved to recognize a Palestinian state, ignoring protests from Netanyahu.
“The issue of Palestine is regionally and internationally on the center stage again, after it was almost forgotten until two years ago,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor at Al Azhar University of Gaza who now lives in Cairo. “So there is a political gain—but the Palestinian people have paid a very high price for it, the price that they never paid before.”
Israel’s demonstration of military superiority in the Middle East, while weakening its enemies, has also triggered a long-term reassessment among its potential partners. Much of the logic behind the 2020 Abraham Accords that Israel and the Trump administration had hoped would be extended to Saudi Arabia was meant to contain Iranian influence.
But now that Israel bombed not just Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen but also a Hamas compound in Qatar, many governments in the Middle East have come to see Israel’s unbridled might as a greater concern than Iran’s weakened theocracy.
Saudi Arabia’s recent security pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan, as well as tighter cooperation between Arab nations and Turkey are all part of that regional response to the Israeli military strength, said retired British Air Marshal Martin Sampson, who heads the Middle East office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and served as the U.K. government defense adviser to the Middle East.
“You see the development of beginnings of relationships with Iran and of sympathy for Iran over Israel,” he said. “The region never wanted a single dominant power in the region. They always thought it was going to be Iran, and now they’ve got one and it’s Israel. And Israel is a regional dominant power that freely exercises its hard-power capabilities.”
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
