Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, famously said: “Our future does not depend on what the gentiles will say, but on what the Jews will do.” His argument was that the Jewish people could no longer be dependent on others as they had been for 2,000 years. Instead they were independent, self-reliant and creators of their own destiny.
Today, faced by mounting diplomatic isolation over its war in Gaza – to the extent that Israel is now seen by some nations as a pariah state – Ben-Gurion’s maxim has gained renewed traction for many Israelis. These include the far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who quoted it when rebutting an international court of justice (ICJ) ruling ordering Israel to cease its military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
A UK Foreign Office official says that for all Israel’s talk of public diplomacy, or hasbara, the reality is that the instinct within its military has always been to rely upon itself, and not to wrestle for world opinion. “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] does not care what people think about them. This is a security state. It does not want to be loved. It wants to be feared and respected. The IDF thinks the Israeli foreign office does the yoga, hot tubs and cleanups, but the IDF has always played hardball, relied on escalation dominance and never seen war as a popularity contest.”
Never has that been more clear than in recent days with Israel’s demolition of Hezbollah’s leadership, carried out without the political support of the US and now portrayed by a resurgent Benjamin Netanyahu as part of a newly declared objective “to change the balance of power in the region for years”.
International relations, like all politics, are a struggle for power, and Israel’s prime minister believes he is winning that struggle.
For some such as Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and his Middle East adviser during Trump’s first term, this is suddenly a moment of infinite possibility. “The Middle East is too often a solid where little changes. Today, it is a liquid and the ability to reshape is unlimited. Do not squander this moment,” he wrote on X.
And yet many Israelis, including some involved in advocating for the government professionally, admit to a sense of unease. They do not hear from Netanyahu any realistic endgame except more conflict and they admit to being traumatised by the speed with which Israel has forfeited worldwide sympathy, and the implications for the country’s future.
1.5%
Bank of Israel growth prediction in July for rest of year, down from 2.8%
It started with such clarity. On 8 October, the day after Hamas’s devastating attack on Israel, many of the world’s most recognisable landmarks, from the Eiffel Tower to Downing Street, were lit in the blue and white of the country’s flag.
Joe Biden travelled to Jerusalem to embrace a country in shock and to mourn the killing of 1,200 people, vowing: “I come to Israel with a single message: You are not alone. You are not alone. As long as the United States stands – and we will stand for ever – we will not let you ever be alone.”
Olaf Scholz, the chancellor of Germany – a country that sees Israel’s survival as a national responsibility – also visited and delivered a similar promise of unconditional solidarity: “In difficult times, Germany has only one place and that is by Israel’s side.” The French president, Emmanuel Macron, was equally unrestrained in his criticism of Hamas, saying: “The unspeakable has emerged from the depths of history.”
Six months into Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza, the world’s top court, the ICJ, found in an interim judgment that there was a risk of violation of the rights of the Palestinian people to protection from genocide. The well of sympathy had dried up. And now, a full year on, a key question is how Israel’s leadership and society handles the fact that much of the world has embraced the neglected cause of the Palestinians.
Certainly the roll call of condemnation from its one-time allies looks damaging. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York and the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the US, warned that Israel’s political and moral fabric was being frayed by Netanyahu’s leadership, adding: “Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.” Even Trump, an ally of Netanyahu, said Israel was “losing a lot of support”, and in a further twist blamed American Jews for putting at risk his election as president. The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, in July said Germany did not support Israel’s occupation policy, and in an repudiation of Netanyahu’s priorities she said relying purely on military pressure endangered the lives of hostages.
Among Israel’s neighbours, the king of Jordan said the bombardment of Gaza had exposed its “decades-long impunity”. He said: “For decades Israel has projected itself as a thriving western-style democracy in the Middle East, but the brutality of the war in Gaza has forced the world to look closer. Now many see Israel through the eyes of its victims, and the contradiction – the paradox – is too jarring. The modern advanced Israel admired from afar and the Israel that Palestinians have experienced at first hand cannot co-exist.”
-18.5
Average percentage point drop in Israel’s net favourability between September and December 2023 in 43 countries polled by Morning Consult
A US state department memo obtained by National Public Radio said Israelis were “facing major, possibly generational damage to their reputation”, an assessment echoing Biden’s December warning that Israel was losing support over its bombing of Gaza.
Signals of Israel’s ostracism, cultural and economic, are trivial and profound. The Israeli delegation at the Eurovision song contest faced a wave of criticism and ostracisation from other countries. Italian football fans turned their backs at Israel’s national anthem. Indonesia and the Maldives barred Israeli passport holders. Turkey cut all trade links. In the first half of this year, inbound tourism into Israel fell by 76% compared with the previous year. In its July 2024 forecast, the Bank of Israel revised its growth predictions down to 1.5% for 2024, from its earlier 2.8% prediction. The Moody’s rating agency downgraded Israel’s credit rating by two notches.
62%
Percentage of respondents to British survey in September who said they distrusted Israel to act responsibly in the world
Disinvestment movements, which were set to be outlawed by the UK’s previous Conservative government, are pervasive in universities. Protests across Europe have politicised a new generation.
Some Israelis comfort themselves in thinking that a silent majority still believe Israel remains the victim, but polls suggest otherwise.
A Morning Consult survey of people in 43 countries found an average drop in net favourability towards Israel of 18.5 percentage points between September and December last year. A June poll by Ipsos and the Policy Institute at King’s College London of 23,800 people across 31 countries found that Israel was the country that the most people said “used its influence for bad”. A British Foreign Policy Group survey published this month found 62% of Britons distrust Israel to act responsibly in the world, just nine percentage points lower than the proportion of Britons who distrust China (71%).
71%
Percentage of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents in US who said they had little or no confidence in Netanyahu, in Pew Research published in May
Pew Research found in May that although most Americans still sympathise with Israel, those under 30 do not, and seven in 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (71%) have little or no confidence in Netanyahu.
The antipathy is mutual. The more international organisations criticise Israel, the more Israelis reject their legitimacy. According to Pew, three-quarters of Israelis have an unfavourable view of the UN.
Even among key defenders of Israel’s policy, such haemorrhaging of support was seen as avoidable.
“The battle for the narrative is extremely important, but it does not appear as if the country really is aware of how important that battle is and, if it is aware, it has a very odd way of showing it,” Jonathan Conricus, the IDF’s international spokesperson during the conflict’s opening stages, told State of a Nation, a podcast presented by Eylon Levy, a British-born former Israeli spokesperson.
He said Israel had made a strategic mistake by not blaming Iran, as Hamas’s chief backer, for the 7 October attacks from the outset, and by focusing its communications message excessively on the Israeli public. He said that in internal strategy sessions he argued that the IDF needed a humanitarian message on how Israel intended to extricate Palestinian civilians from the battlefield. His case was rejected, he said, because the IDF “only rides essentially on one track, and that is an Israeli one. It is very understandable the Israeli public did not want to hear anything about Israel taking care of Palestinian civilians. There was tremendous rage and an urge for revenge.”
Nor was it possible to run two different messages in parallel for domestic and international audiences. “Those messages will clash because today unlike three decades ago everyone reads and hears and sees everything, so gone are the days when you can compartmentalise between different audiences and when you can say one thing in Hebrew and think that the international media will not pick up on it,” Conricus said.
He said the humanitarian narrative had become “the most potent dagger or sword that our enemies, detractors, Israel’s haters in media, the Hamas fan clubs are using against Israel very hypocritically”. He said Israel’s critics “don’t care about human life, Palestinians or people surviving,” but he admitted: “Israel has been dragged, kicking and screaming to do what it should have been doing anyway – providing humanitarian aid, opening the borders, providing electricity, helping with the water, helping with the sewage and providing food and the basic necessities.”
Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel’s domestic security service, said the key strategic mistake was more political, specifically the refusal of the cabinet to discuss what happens to Gaza after the war ends. “Once we do not know how to describe the day after, we do not have any concept of victory, we do not have any political goal. We tend to forget that war is only a means to achieve a better political reality. This is the definition of victory. Our leaders do not understand that when we fight a war against a terror – ideological, theological, radical terror organisation, we are fighting in two dimensions. One is a battlefield, but in order to defeat Hamas we have to win the war of ideas. And we cannot do it by the use of military power. The only way to do it is to create or to present a better idea.”
The consequences of Israel’s isolation are contested. Levy says Israel’s world standing matters hugely, and he is constantly fighting to persuade Israelis that the narrative matters and can be turned around.
The legal reckoning, for instance, may have only just begun. In July the ICJ further ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestine was illegal, but it is contested what obligations if any this places on other states to enforce that opinion. The prosecutor for the international criminal court is still awaiting judicial clearance that he can seek the arrest of Israel’s elected leader for alleged war crimes.
At the UN general assembly, Israel is regularly left in a minority of about 14 including the US and some south Pacific microstates, as between 130 and 150 countries queue to dismiss its claim it is acting in self-defence. But as each resolution is passed and ignored, their real-world impact is unclear.
One concern for Israel is that the US, its most crucial ally, may in future turn to the Gulf states as an alternative. Certainly the Gulf monarchies, initially cold-shouldered by Biden, are now seen as a source of security. They condemn Israel’s actions but, unlike Turkey or Iran, not enough to challenge the US pre-eminence in handling the crisis. Qatar is welcomed as an honest broker. For Mohammed bin Salman, Israel’s conduct in Gaza has been a passport back to respectability for Saudi Arabia. It was the United Arab Emirates president, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who was granted a White House audience with Biden during UN week.
But in the wake of Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, even this loss of status may be seen as tolerable by Netanyahu, who feels he has seized the initiative, moved the debate on from Gaza, and believes the Gulf states will be privately delighted by his weakening of the Lebanese group.
It raises the question of what Netanyahu will do with his recovery, and whether he can be constrained. “In some ways he is a one-man show, totally unpredictable and immune to pressure,” said Dr Alon Liel, who served in the Israeli diplomatic service for three decades and worked alongside Netanyahu on a daily basis for many years. “But he cares about the US, the Congress, the Republican party and the evangelicals and he cares about The Hague since it would paralyse him diplomatically.”
Liel said Israel’s biggest weakness may be that it was no longer credible simply to ignore the Palestinian people. “The concept marketed by the Israeli government that Hamas was contained and deterred, and that Israel could be integrated into the Middle East region without addressing the Palestinian issue – an idea that had been conveniently adopted by western leaders – collapsed on October 7.”
But he warned that this was not the consensus view inside Israel. “The wide call for the release of hostages is not necessarily a call to fully end the war and definitely not a call to end the occupation.”
He suggested that may change “if the war lasts another year or two and society keeps bleeding. Then our existence as a liberal democratic society will be in question, and also the basis of our proximity to the western world.”
