Israel’s international isolation is deepening.
In recent months, Luxembourg, a hub for the issuing of Israel Bonds in Europe, said it would stop approving their sale. Britain announced a ban on the import of goods made in West Bank settlements and sanctions on anyone who finances or profits from them. Canada and France joined it and nine other European countries expressed support for the move. For the first time, G7 states have now normalized the idea of sanctioning Israelis.
The hope of many Israelis and Israel’s supporters around the world is that elections on Oct. 27 will usher in a new government and slow the slide into greater isolation. New leadership could ease Israel’s isolation temporarily.
But will a deeper shift be possible? That depends on what the next government does about the escalating settler violence, de facto annexation of the West Bank and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Based on their campaigns, none of the candidates seeking to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown readiness to make changes beyond merely going back to a policy of managing the conflict. Maintaining the status quo raises the possibility that Israel itself, not just the settlements, could soon face sanctions.
Israeli politicians attribute the sanctions to European meddling in the elections, spiking antisemitism and well-funded influence campaigns which were reportedly put in place to undermine the country. That certainly may be true, but it’s only part of the story. For decades, Israel formally treated the occupation of Palestinian territory as a temporary situation that would eventually be resolved through negotiations. It genuinely tried to negotiate in Oslo, Camp David and Annapolis, but the process failed again and again. Both Israelis and Palestinians are responsible for those failures, deferring the question of how to share the land.
The international community, for the most part, built its own posture on that same premise: that, despite the illegality of the settlements, the occupation itself was acceptable as long as it was considered temporary. Regular condemnations were enough.
But after the war in Gaza, and once Israel stopped treating the West Bank’s status as negotiable, Europe stopped treating its own response as negotiable, too.
A decision over a strip of land east of Jerusalem known as E1 appeared to be the breaking point. For years, establishing a settlement in this area was avoided because it would cut the West Bank in two and prevent the existence of a continuous Palestinian entity. In the past, potential E1 settlements were discussed, planned, threatened and delayed, but never built. In August, the Netanyahu government moved forward with plans for construction there. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said out loud that the plans were designed to bury the idea of a Palestinian state.
The move came on top of a large-scale increase in West Bank settlement and illegal outpost construction. It came as Jewish terrorists, who enjoy impunity from the government, escalated the frequency and ferocity of attacks on innocent Palestinian residents of the West Bank and government ministers spoke openly of what amounts to ethnic cleansing. The E1 decision forced many Western governments to stop pretending.
Britain explained that its ban was not meant to target Israel, but rather the settlements. But its impact will spread into business within Israel proper, because Israeli banks, builders and shippers do not differentiate between territories. Even more risky for Israel is that new measures could target Israel as a whole. Sanctions rarely stay narrow; the pressure tends to run toward broadening them, not lifting them. Given European threats to suspend trade concessions with all of Israel, and pressure by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, that risk is no longer hypothetical.
Washington, meanwhile, is drifting. The Trump administration did not order Israel to stop the E1 move, but reportedly did not press Britain to hold back, either. Support for Israel is thinning in Congress: stalwart pro-Israel Democrats have refused to back arms sales to Israel out of concern that they would not be used in accordance with U.S. and international law, or have introduced measures to impose sanctions on settlement activity. Among Republicans, a populist wing has started breaking with decades of reflexive G.O.P. support for Israel, pushing to cut or place conditions on aid.
Israelis and their defenders are increasingly alarmed by these developments, but most still treat the threats as something to survive, rather than prevent. Replace the government, they say, and get ready: build financial buffers, deepen integration with U.S. defense and financial systems, run contingency planning the way Israel plans for military threats. These measures are important in their own right, but they will not be enough.
Israelis have embraced a sense of Spartan defiance and self-sufficiency, but facts are stubborn. Israel needs the world more than it likes to admit; it depends on its allies for diplomatic cover, arms, trade, technology and the research partnerships that keep its economy and its security running.
Israel has a great deal to offer its partners, too. For a Europe threatened by Russia and forced to reduce its strategic dependence on the U.S. for defense and technology, Israel is positioned to help fill the gap. For a Washington seeking a lighter footprint in the Middle East, Israel remains its most capable and willing partner (when it restrains its proclivity for regional arson). As Iran and its Houthi allies squeeze Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, reports of Israeli intelligence-sharing on the Houthi threat show how valuable Israel can be.
That value is most likely why the bans, for now, target the settlements alone rather than Israel as a whole. And that’s why if a new government embraces a new approach, not just new rhetoric, it should be able to help Israel’s standing. That would require Mr. Netanyahu’s leading rivals to pursue a very different agenda than the ones they are advocating now.
Among these rivals, Avigdor Lieberman proposes to dissolve the Palestinian Authority, annul the Oslo Accords and hand day-to-day administration of Palestinian life in the West Bank to Jordan, while Israel keeps overall security control. Naftali Bennett, who is running jointly with Yair Lapid, calls for Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, while giving the rest for Palestinian “autonomy,” not sovereignty. In an interview this week, Gadi Eisenkot presented a modest plan to better manage the conflict and ease pressure on the Palestinians, but has ruled out a Palestinian state.
Election slogans say more about what candidates think wins votes right now than about what any of them would do with actual power. Nothing in their statements, in their record in past governments, or in their easy assumptions that the diplomatic damage could be undone, gives much reason to expect a substantial change from their campaign oratory.
Nor would change be easy. Reversing a trajectory five decades in the making with a public that has moved to the right and a security establishment increasingly enmeshed with the settlement project is a heavy lift. Just curbing settler violence, which is not a politically difficult issue, would take more than periodic arrests of bad apples. It would require pulling settler-heavy reserve battalions from West Bank duty and cutting off the funding and land that sustain illegal outposts. It requires an Israeli government willing to treat settler violence as a governance failure rather than a public relations problem.
History offers some reason for optimism. In the late 1970s, Menachem Begin, a lifelong Likud hard-liner, became the first Israeli leader to make peace with an Arab state, returning Sinai to Egypt to get there; Yitzhak Rabin was a hawkish general pursuing peace when he was assassinated; Ariel Sharon designed the settlement enterprise before he evacuated settlements and pulled Israel out of Gaza.
Each broke with their instincts and their base when they judged the cost of not doing so to be higher. That is the choice now. A government that curbs settler violence, freezes annexation and reopens a horizon for Palestinian sovereignty could begin recovering much of the standing, the markets and the alliances Israel has spent the last few years burning up.
For decades Israel has behaved like the mother in David Grossman’s novel “To the End of the Land,” a character who walks the Galilee to evade news of her son’s possible death, as if not hearing it could keep it from being true. No amount of walking is going to make the Palestinian question go away. The current government tried to settle the matter for good, seeking to bury the idea of the Palestinian question once and for all.
Instead, this government may have exhumed it, turning it into a domestic issue in nations around the world and leaving whichever government comes next no choice but to finally reckon with it.
Shira Efron is the Israel policy chair and a senior fellow at RAND.
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