Israelis are days away from choosing their next government. The opposition bloc, led by Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israel Defense Forces military chief, has a modest lead in the polls. But the election has played out on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s terms.
The opposition bloc’s main leaders have, in crucial ways, accepted Netanyahu’s worldview, and even run to his right. Eisenkot has sworn his opposition to the formation of a Palestinian state and said he would end Hamas’s rule of Gaza within 18 months, by military means if necessary. Yair Lapid said that Netanyahu has not gone far enough in bombing Iran’s energy infrastructure. Naftali Bennett called Turkey “the new Iran” and described Qatar as an enemy state. Avigdor Lieberman called for the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority. All of the bloc’s main leaders, save the left-wing Yair Golan, have ruled out adding Arab-Israeli parties to their coalition. Netanyahu may lose, but only because his opponents so fully accepted his premises.
Most Israeli Jews now see the world the way Netanyahu has long seen it. That is Netanyahu’s great victory. But it is matched by his great loss: Much of the world now sees Israel the way Gazans see it. In this, it is not only Netanyahu who has achieved much of what he sought but also Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who planned Oct. 7 and was killed in 2024. Their successes have been, for their people, catastrophic.
To revisit what they sought, and what they received: Before Oct. 7, Netanyahu had spent years propping up Hamas using Qatari money. This was widely understood as a strategy to keep Palestinians divided and thwart international pressure on Israel to permit a Palestinian state.
The prevention of that state had long been one of Netanyahu’s proudest accomplishments. “There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River,” he said in 2025. “For years I have prevented the creation of that terror state, against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad. We have done this with determination, and with astute statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, and we will continue on this path.” Netanyahu’s coalition partner Bezalel Smotrich has described Hamas as “an asset”
On Oct. 7, 2023, Sinwar’s fighters swarmed into a sleeping Israel, murdered about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. For Israel, this was traumatizing — the single worst day of Jewish death since the Holocaust — and Israel’s response was overwhelming, as Sinwar must have known it would be. In the war that followed, Israel killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, of whom more than 21,000 were children, and reduced Gaza to rubble.
Sinwar had long been willing to trade Palestinian lives for political gain. Years earlier, Yuval Bitton, the Israeli intelligence officer who knew Sinwar best, asked him whether his goals were worth the loss of life they would inevitably demand. Sinwar’s reply was unflinching. “We are ready to sacrifice 20,000, 30,000, 100,000,” he said. With Netanyahu’s relentless, brutal cooperation, that is exactly what Sinwar did.
Sinwar traded these lives to transform the way the world views both Israel and the Palestinians. The “Palestinian question,” which had faded from geopolitical interest, is now a central cause worldwide. More than 150 countries, including Britain, France and Canada, now recognize a Palestinian state. There is no near-term chance of an accord between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Israel is credibly accused of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and it has already been convicted of genocide in global public opinion. A majority of young Americans and nearly 40 percent of American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza — and, for the first time, a plurality of all Americans now sympathize more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis.
None of this was inevitable. After Oct. 7, there was an outpouring of global sympathy for Israel. President Joe Biden flew to Israel to embrace Netanyahu and grieve with its people. Germany lit the Brandenburg Gate with the Israeli flag. France projected a Star of David onto the Eiffel Tower. Australia illuminated the Sydney Opera House in Israel’s national colors. More limited counterterrorism approaches would have allowed Israel to hunt Hamas’s leaders without squandering the sympathy and horror the world then felt on Israel’s behalf. Restraint would have kept the focus on Hamas’s attack.
But Netanyahu wanted to risk more to achieve more. He flattened Gaza in search of a nebulous “total victory” over Hamas — a goal prioritized over the lives not just of Gazans but of the Israeli hostages. He took the opportunity to decapitate Hezbollah and ultimately re-invade parts of southern Lebanon, demolishing dozens of villages and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. And, ultimately, he achieved the dream that had animated him for decades: persuading America to join him in an attempt to destroy the Iranian regime.
In the months after Oct. 7, Netanyahu’s political career looked to be finished. Three years later, he has achieved more of his geopolitical aims than seemed possible. And where has it gotten him, or Israel? For all the damage Israel has meted out against its enemies, the Iranian regime stands. Hezbollah stands. Hamas stands. And America’s special relationship with Israel is drawing to its end.
Unflinching support for Israel is becoming anathema in the Democratic Party. Rahm Emanuel, whose father fought in Israel’s war for independence, declared, “The days of taxpayers subsidizing Israel militarily, that’s over.” He flew to Tel Aviv to warn Israelis that “you have turned from being known for your technological prowess to being considered primarily a territorial pariah.”
It is well known that Vice President JD Vance is far more skeptical of Israel than Trump is, and given the prominence of voices like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and now Nick Fuentes on the right, it seems unlikely that the Republican Party will back Israel in the future as it has in the past.
“Israel is entering diplomatic isolation,” Netanyahu said in 2025. “We will have to deal with a closed economy. The world is dividing into blocs, and we are not part of any bloc.”
“Catastrophic success” is a term that entered the American lexicon in 2004, after the initial victory America achieved in Iraq revealed itself to be a mounting disaster. It refers to getting more than you thought possible militarily and then realizing you have no way out of the strategic and political morass you have created. It applies exactly to both Sinwar’s and Netanyahu’s achievements.
The Palestinian people have more international sympathy, but they live in more misery and under more domination than before, facing an Israel that is ever more violently opposed to their self-determination and even to their existence.
The human losses in Gaza are incalculable and most of the territory remains under Israeli military control. Palestinians in the West Bank are beset by what, at this point, can be described only as a regime of terror. In a searing investigation built on thousands of testimonies, B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, described this campaign as “a comprehensive mechanism of elimination that works to dismantle the conditions for continued Palestinian existence in the West Bank, while deepening Jewish control and supremacy in an irreversible manner.” The world is increasingly seeing this oppression and violence firsthand, as foreign journalists and politicians are being beaten by settlers and detained by the Israel Defense Forces.
Has all this made Israelis safe? It has certainly left them regionally dominant. But the world now sees Israel as a brutal aggressor. Israel is riven by terrible religious and political divides at home, it is losing many of its most productive citizens to an easier life outside its borders, and it is staring down a future in which it cannot count on unstinting American or European support and will likely face international isolation as an apartheid regime.
The very meaning of Israel has changed, as the country formed in the aftermath of genocide may be found responsible for genocide at the International Court of Justice. Just this weekend, Netanyahu suggested that Israel might need to turn to cryptocurrency to get around the international sanctions he expects in the future, triggering a rare rebuke from Israel’s central bank, which warned that crypto cannot be used to evade sanctions. “We won the Middle East, but we lost the world,” Ari Shavit, the Israeli political commentator, told me.
“Strong against Hamas” was Likud’s slogan in the 2006 election. Likud’s view of the world has long been proved by Hamas; Hamas’s view of Israel has long been proved by Likud. The result is a trap from which neither Israelis nor Palestinians have been able to escape. If Israel’s opposition bloc wins, it will win within this ruinous logic. To succeed, it will need to find a way to escape it.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Netanyahu Won the Middle East and Lost the World appeared first on New York Times.
