Israel’s isolation is no longer theoretical.
On his way to the United Nations last week, Benjamin Netanyahu’s jet largely steered clear of European airspace in an apparent effort to avoid countries that might decide to enforce an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
Then, after several Western countries clubbed together to recognize a Palestinian state, the Israeli prime minister was left to address a thinned-out General Assembly as delegates walked out to protest the ground assault on Gaza City and a strike against Hamas leadership on Qatari soil.
Netanyahu, who has prosecuted a two-year war with little regard for Israel’s international standing, isn’t likely to have been rattled by the optics. But the message is clear: Diplomatic isolation, symbolic or not, is becoming a long-term problem. When the bombing stops and the guns fall silent, how does Israel claw itself back into the good graces of the international community?
Less than a week after his U.N. appearance, Netanyahu sketched out part of his answer. Together with U.S. President Donald Trump he unveiled a 20-point plan for Gaza — charting out a future for the territory Israel has pummeled since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
“Instead of Hamas isolating us, we turned things around and isolated Hamas,” he said. “Now the whole world, including the Arab and Muslim world, is pressuring Hamas to accept the terms.”
It’s a big bet for a leader facing mounting international criticism. If he and Trump can deliver, they might yet pull the rabbit out of the Middle East hat. But there’s plenty that can go wrong. Several Arab countries have already bristled at the plan’s ambiguity on an Israeli withdrawal and the path to Palestinian statehood.
For Israel, the bigger question is whether even flawless execution would bring rehabilitation.
Roughly 66,000 Palestinians are believed dead, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry. Israel acknowledges that about half were civilians. Criticism of Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid, which a U.N. agency has classified as contributing to a famine, has helped sour Western public opinion. Net favorability toward Israel has reached new lows in key Western European countries, according to pollster YouGov.
The low points for Israel have come fast and furious. The International Criminal Court has issued war crimes warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The International Court of Justice has said Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank is unlawful and must end, and in a separate case ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide and ensure unhindered aid to Gaza.
More recently, senior European figures have accused Israel of genocide — while in the United States, calls for arms embargoes have mounted even among normally supportive Democrats, including former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. In August, 28 Western countries urged Israel to end the offensive. Appalled by a military campaign that has razed much of Gaza, displaced nearly all of the strip’s 2.3 million residents and driven a rising death toll, European governments have weighed sanctions.
Even in Germany — long one of Israel’s staunchest allies — majorities oppose the Gaza war. In the U.S., Israel’s most important partner, opinion has shifted as well. Polls over the past six months point to fatigue that goes beyond Gaza. That bodes ill for the long term.
Despite Netanyahu’s swagger, anxiety inside Israel about mounting isolation is now audible: Threats of cultural, academic and sporting boycotts are a steady drumbeat, says Nimrod Goren, an Israeli academic and fellow at the Middle East Institute. “You hear about it on the news the whole time, about this boycott and that boycott and that protest. It’s very present in the public domain.”
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a fierce Netanyahu critic, has warned of heavy consequences. “We have become a pariah state,” Olmert lamented recently to POLITICO. And it is clear why, he says: “There’s an ever-widening gap between the appalling atrocities Hamas inflicted on Israelis on Oct. 7 and what we are now inflicting on the Palestinians.”
“We’re losing the kind of international support [that] always tied Israel to the strongest, most powerful, most important, most enlightened elements in the Western world,” he added.
Olmert is skeptical of the Gaza proposal’s chances of success, arguing that the last-minute additions Bibi managed to sneak in, including slowing and limiting the Israeli withdrawal and vague language about the prospects for a Palestinian state, were likely a sabotage maneuver to force Hamas to reject the deal.
“The original proposal President Trump introduced was different,” he said. “What will happen if Hamas will try to stick to Trump’s original deal? That could create the difficulties for the Israeli side. But in any event, Bibi doesn’t want an agreement, and he doesn’t want to stop the war.”
Opposition politician Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party, is warmer about the deal and has praised the peace effort, but has also regularly sounded a general alarm, pointing to his 2021–2022 record as foreign minister and prime minister to argue that Israel’s isolation is not inevitable. Earlier this month he dubbed Netanyahu the “main culprit behind [Israel’s] diplomatic isolation.” He added: “Everything is amateurish, careless and arrogant.”
For now, Netanyahu’s casting of international criticism as antisemitic still resonates at home. Many Israelis are predisposed to believe the state is one war from annihilation — a sense of existential risk that Oct. 7 only deepened. “Most Israelis continue to feel the world is against us and that nobody understands us. That’s the right-wing narrative and now plays, I think, to Netanyahu’s advantage,” said Goren.
The rally-round-the-flag effect has encouraged officials to scoff at outside pressure. “Israel isn’t isolated, not at all,” a senior official in Netanyahu’s government told POLITICO, requesting anonymity to speak freely. “Don’t be confused by the noise of the loud minority and the radical left,” the official said, adding that in Britain, France and Canada, polling shows majorities are against recognizing a “Palestinian terror state.”
Nor, he argued, are investors deterred. “What are foreign investors doing? They’re investing in Israel. Our market’s gone up more than 50 percent, more than any other market in the past 12 months. And in the middle of a seven-front war. Why? Because we’re winning the war and people think that there’s a great future in Israel,” he said. “How’s the market going in Australia and the U.K.?”
As if to prove his point, Israeli stocks soared after Trump and Netanyahu unveiled the peace plan.
The Israeli prime minister is also in step with domestic public sentiment. Many Israelis don’t believe a Jewish state can live alongside a Palestinian one, and support for a two-state solution among Jewish Israelis has sagged to roughly a quarter in recent surveys.
For Netanyahu’s camp, the view is straightforward: Win the war on Israel’s terms and the rest will normalize, said Nadav Shtrauchler, a former Netanyahu political strategist. Rehabilitation strategies are unnecessary; success will make them unneeded.
“The way they see it is that when it’s done, things will just go back to normal,” he said. “They will not love us more than they did before October 7. The countries and people didn’t love us before that. They’re not going to be Zionists right now, but it will change.”
In the meantime, Netanyahu is betting on Trump. “For average Israelis, they look at Trump, they look at Washington, and if the U.S. is on our side, then it’s okay, things are not that bad,” Shtrauchler said. “Netanyahu sees that Trump is aligned with him, and won’t force him to do things, and will back him. He feels confident being aligned with Trump. If it were Kamala Harris in the White House, I don’t think he’d feel the same way.”
Israelis will be hoping their prime minister is right. Anxieties about diplomatic isolation bubbled to the surface in mid-September when Netanyahu warned Israel will have to be prepared to become more economically self-sufficient, like Sparta in ancient times.
“We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics,” he said.
The pushback was immediate, with industry groups among the first to sound the alarm. “An autarkic market will be a disaster for Israel’s economy and will influence every citizen’s quality of life,” fumed the president of the association of Israeli manufacturers, Ron Tomer.
Arnon Bar-David, the head of the Histadrut trade union federation, was more blunt. “I don’t want to be Sparta,” he lamented.
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