Türkiye has suspended trade with Israel. The world’s highest court is considering whether Israeli leaders have committed genocide. Protests have gripped cities and campuses around the world. Ireland and Spain say they will recognize Palestine as a state at the end of the month.
Even the United States, long Israel’s closest ally and benefactor, is threatening for the first time since the war began to withhold certain arms shipments.
Seven months after much of the world pledged its support for Israel following a Hamas-led terrorist attack, the country finds itself increasingly isolated. With a war that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians and left Gaza on the brink of famine, any international goodwill Israel built up on October 7 has all but been lost.
What worries Israel the most: the breakdown of relations with the United States. President Biden, once silent about his expectations that Israel limit civilian deaths and increase access to humanitarian aid, has become more vocal amid partisan political pressure in an election year. This week, Biden said the United States was withholding delivery of 3,500 high-payload bombs.
His warning on Wednesday that the pause could extend to more weapons was his biggest break yet with Israel’s government. He suggested that the outrage sweeping through capitals and universities would continue to spread, and it has. On Friday, in a largely symbolic gesture, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed Palestine’s bid for UN membership, and thousands of demonstrators in Sweden protested against Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest. Saturday.
“If we need to be alone,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Thursday, acknowledging and seeking to challenge his country’s growing isolation, “we will be alone.”
The backlash, which also extends to Israeli athletes and academics facing boycotts and protests, has surprised and confused Israelis, who are still recovering from the Hamas attacks in October and mostly see the war as justified. Many blame rampant anti-Semitism and American political parties for Israel’s isolation. Others struggle to analyze reasonable criticism through selective virtue signaling.
They ask why there isn’t more attention paid to Israeli victims and why there are no protests against China’s persecution of the Uyghurs or Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
“Most Israelis, and this includes leaders, are perplexed by the world’s attitude,” said Eytan Gilboa, a communications professor at Bar-Ilan University.
He argued that Israelis have a hard time understanding why some people at protests on American campuses conflate support for a Palestinian state with what he described as “calls for the elimination of Israel.”
“It is the slow-motion formation of a pariah state,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat.
But the complex and layered rebukes coming from around the world cannot be dismissed as mere whims of anti-Israel activists. Israel faces real consequences, from security to the economy.
And while the isolation is partly a byproduct of the way Israel has prosecuted the war, analysts and former officials say it also reflects international frustration with government restrictions on food aid, a shift in global policy that has pushed Israel down the list of priorities and the Israeli government. the public’s close attention to its own pain.
Israel has endured the world’s glare before, ignoring frequent criticism at the UN and a decades-long Arab boycott. Although Israel rules a spit of land no larger than Maryland, it has always had a centripetal pull, placing its wars at the emotional center of global politics. But this is not 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 or 2014, years with previous conflicts.
Before October 7, most of Israel’s allies in the West were focused on Ukraine’s fight with Russia and the challenge of a more assertive China. The Middle East had largely disappeared from the radar. Climate change was causing a retreat from oil. Israel and Saudi Arabia were openly discussing normalizing relations even as Israel’s democracy had become more polarized and parochial.
Exactly at that moment, Hamas attacked and Israel retaliated.
Biden’s first response was complete solidarity: “My administration’s support for Israel’s security is strong and unwavering,” he said on the day of the attacks. Other world leaders followed his example. The Israeli flag and its colors were projected on the Brandenburg Gate, 10 Downing Street and the Sydney Opera House.
Yet even as the gruesome details of Hamas’ killings and maimings sowed nightmares, there were signs of concern about Netanyahu’s government and its absolutist approach.
Netanyahu’s promise to “demolish Hamas” seemed to many military strategists too broad to be effective. And when Israeli forces began pounding Gaza’s populated cities with huge bombs, bringing down buildings on families and militants, support for Israel weakened.
Washington had been warning Israel to better protect civilians. Israel continued bombing. The United States and other countries pressured Israel to create corridors for aid. They demanded a plan to govern Gaza after the fighting. Israel intensified its assault on a territory roughly the size of Philadelphia, densely populated by two million people, many of them children, while keeping most independent journalists away and letting those under attack share images.
The results were dire: By late November, experts said, people were dying in Gaza faster than during the deadliest moments of the U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were widely criticized by human rights groups. .
Less than two months later, Israel was losing support in Europe and the United States, before student protests escalated into clashes with police, before calls for divestment, before polls showed the unpopularity of the The war affected Biden’s chances of re-election.
After seven aid workers, many of them foreign, from World Central Kitchen were killed on April 1 and children in Gaza starved to death, words like “genocide” and “evil” became more commonly applied to the campaign than Israel insisted it was simply self-defense.
“The poor and impoverished people of Palestine were sentenced to death by Israel’s bombs,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday as he announced that his country, once Israel’s closest Muslim partner, would suspend trade.
Nimrod Novik, a former senior Israeli official and analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, said it cannot be denied that the government ignored both a moral and political imperative by pursuing a “stingy approach” to aid and a war plan without a vision. of peace.
“Our government’s policy fell short of its claim that our war is against Hamas, not the Palestinian people,” Novik said.
The military says aid is being slowed by security measures aimed at restricting weapons smuggling. On Sunday, Hamas attacked one of the few border crossings where aid is allowed in, killing four Israeli soldiers.
For many, it was a reminder that the context of Israeli life is still marked by the country’s own suffering. What Israelis talk about at dinner is friends called to fight. What they see are cities and towns covered in portraits of unreturned hostages, apps that send alerts about regular Hezbollah rocket attacks along the northern border, and graffiti in Tel Aviv that reads: “Hamas = ISIS.”
“There is a complete disconnect between how Israelis see the situation and how the world sees it,” Novik said. “Mentally, we are not in the seventh month since October 7. Mentally, we are in October 8.”
Many Israelis believe the international community is deliberately ignoring their plight, with soldiers dying and groups widely considered terrorists firing on the country. In northern Israel, more than 100,000 people have been displaced from their homes by regular rocket fire. The children are not in school. Deep within Israel’s borders, air raid sirens pierce daily routines.
Genine Barel, a New Yorker who moved to Israel in the 1990s and now lives in Safed, the home of Kabbalah, or mystical Judaism, said it hurts to lose international sympathy.
“It would be bad enough if we were just going through this war, and the loss and the heartbreak,” she said, sitting in the empty restaurant of the hotel she owns with her husband, where business has completely dried up. “But at the same time we are being vilified.”
“It’s like they’re bullying you,” he added, “and at the same time accusing you of being a bully.”
Nathalie Rozens, 37, an actress and writer who grew up in Europe, said the debate within Israel about the war had evolved to include more criticism. (A poll released Friday showed declining confidence in Israel’s military leadership since March.) But outside the country, she said, Israelis are reduced to caricatures.
In his view, Israel’s critics don’t understand its nuances, that this is a place where many people hate Netanyahu and lament the slaughter of innocents in Gaza, but they have a brother fighting there and are only two generations away from the attempted destruction of Gaza. Israel from the Holocaust. world judaism.
Banning Israeli artists from festivals, protesting against singers at Eurovision, refusing to finance Israeli films: “the pressure, in a way, hits the wrong people,” he said.
“I don’t feel aligned with this government and I’m Israeli,” she said. “There is no space for my voice within the country or abroad.”
As dangerous as Hamas or Hezbollah may be, many believe that declining American support for Israel would be far more catastrophic for the country. Israel needs the United States as a patron, and this government has “no patience, consideration or understanding of Israel’s status in the world,” said Nahum Barnea, a veteran columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper. “So they choose to ignore it.”
Total isolation still seems a long way off. Israel is not North Korea. Biden has said he would keep Israel supplied with defensive weapons, and Republicans have sided even more strongly with Israel. However, according to many international analysts, what Israelis want to see as a tremor may become a fault line as turmoil with Israel continues to escalate.
“They’ve lost the young people,” said Ian Bremmer, an associate professor of public and international affairs at Columbia and president of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “They were not present and do not know about the Holocaust. “What you see is an incredibly powerful Israel that is engaged in a war for seven months and is indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians.”
Johnatan Reiss contributed with reports.