There is a particular kind of tragedy – quieter than war, slower than siege, but no less devastating – in watching a country dismantle, with its own hands, the very diplomatic architecture it spent decades painstakingly constructing, and it is this tragedy, more than any battlefield outcome, that will define Israel’s place in the 21st century long after the last shell has fallen on Gaza.
Israel, since its founding in 1948, has existed in a permanent state of diplomatic deficit, a nation born into regional hostility, sustained not by the consent of its neighbors but by the overwhelming fact of its military supremacy, and perpetually engaged in the exhausting, Sisyphean work of legitimation – the endless effort to convert raw power into something resembling acceptance.
For more than seven decades, that work proceeded unevenly, fitfully, sometimes cynically, but recognizably forward, and by the autumn of 2020, when the Abraham Accords were signed on the White House lawn, it appeared as though something genuinely new was emerging in the Middle East: not peace, exactly, and certainly not reconciliation, but a pragmatic willingness among certain Arab governments to set aside the Palestinian question – or at least to stop letting it veto every other strategic interest – and deal with Israel as the regional reality it had always been.
The accords represented the most significant diplomatic realignment in the Middle East since Camp David. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan – each for its own strategic calculus – chose to normalize relations with Israel, breaking a decades-old Arab consensus that had conditioned recognition on Palestinian statehood.
They were, from the beginning, transactional arrangements driven by arms sales, intelligence sharing, and American inducements – government-to-government bargains struck over the heads of publics who were never consulted and who, in many cases, remained deeply hostile to the entire enterprise.
In Morocco, where normalization was anchored to Washington’s recognition of sovereignty over Western Sahara, polls consistently showed widespread opposition to diplomatic ties with Israel, and protests accompanied every high-profile handshake. No honest observer mistook these agreements for peace between peoples; they were, at best, peace between palaces, and the distinction mattered enormously, though Israel – drunk on the spectacle of its own flag flying in Arab capitals – chose not to notice.
And yet, something real was happening, something that even the skeptics had to acknowledge. Between 2020 and 2023, dozens of bilateral agreements were signed across defense, agriculture, technology, and tourism; Israeli visitors discovered Marrakech and Dubai; Moroccan universities established research partnerships with Israeli counterparts; defense cooperation between Rabat and Tel Aviv deepened to the tune of nearly $2 billion; and the Negev Forum convened foreign ministers from six nations in a configuration that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. For the first time in Israel’s history, its flag flew in Arab capitals not as a provocation but as a diplomatic fact.
The normalization was imperfect, fragile, contested at every turn, and built on foundations that could not withstand a serious earthquake – but it was real, it was evolving, and for the first time in Israel’s history, there existed at least the outline of a pathway toward something other than permanent belligerence.
Then came October 7, 2023 – and Israel, in its response, did not merely stumble on that pathway but dynamited it entirely.
What must be said clearly, because the political environment demands it, is that Israel had every legal and moral right to respond to the Hamas attack, an atrocity that lasted hours, killed some 1,200 people in a single day, and shocked even those long accustomed to the region’s violence.
But the manner, the scale, and above all the duration of what followed – a military campaign that stretched across years, killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, reduced an entire territory to rubble, and provoked condemnation from virtually every international institution and court of law – betrayed a government that was not thinking about Israel’s long-term security or its place in the world.
It was thinking about the short-term survival of a prime minister – Benjamin Netanyahu – facing criminal charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, held hostage by a far-right coalition whose members – Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich – had built their entire political identities on the promise that no restraint would ever be shown, no Palestinian suffering would ever be deemed excessive, and no proportionality or exit strategy would constrain the war.
The prime minister himself had every personal incentive to remain a wartime leader and none to pursue the political compromises that peace would require. Critics have long accused him of prolonging the war to delay his own legal reckoning.
The catastrophic irony is that a more disciplined response – surgical, time-limited, modeled on the kind of targeted operations Israel conducts routinely in the West Bank – would have been tolerated, even endorsed, by much of the international community, would have preserved the diplomatic momentum of the Abraham Accords, kept the door open for Saudi normalization, and maintained Israel’s carefully cultivated image as a democracy acting, however imperfectly, in self-defense.
A campaign that concluded in weeks rather than years would have allowed the normalization states to weather the public backlash without retreating from their commitments, and it would have denied Israel’s adversaries the most powerful propaganda gift they have ever received. Instead, Israel chose maximalism – chose to flatten hospitals and refugee camps and universities under the banner of counterterrorism – and in doing so confirmed, in the eyes of billions of people watching in real time on their phones, every accusation its enemies had ever leveled against it.
The numbers tell a story that no amount of diplomatic spin can rewrite. A Pew Research Center survey conducted across 36 countries in 2026 found that a median of 67% of respondents held an unfavorable view of Israel; in the United States, Israel’s indispensable patron, unfavorable views rose from 42% in 2022 to 60% by 2026, a collapse without precedent in the bilateral relationship; and confidence in Netanyahu declined in 13 of 24 countries where trend data existed.
Israel now ranks dead last on the Nation Brands Index, behind Russia, behind countries whose reputations were already in tatters, and the damage has metastasized beyond government policy to encompass attitudes toward Israeli citizens themselves – a distinction that previous military operations, however brutal, had never erased.
The Abraham Accords survive today, but in a state of suspended animation that satisfies no one and advances nothing. No signatory has formally withdrawn, but the substance has drained from the framework. Bahrain recalled its ambassador; air links between Morocco and Israel were severed; the Negev Forum has not convened since the war began; and the people-to-people ties that were always the weakest, most vulnerable dimension of normalization have all but vanished, replaced by discreet back-channel cooperation – defense contracts honored quietly, intelligence shared behind closed doors, trade flows maintained in whispers – that amounts to the diplomatic equivalent of a relationship conducted entirely in the dark. The public face of Arab-Israeli rapprochement has been shuttered.
The deeper problem for Israel is structural and, in a sense, existential: a state that cannot exist without periodic wars – against Hezbollah, against Hamas, against Iran – is a state that must constantly rebuild its international standing from the ashes of its own military operations, each cycle of violence erasing years of painstaking diplomatic investment.
But the Gaza campaign has broken even this grim pattern, because previous operations – Cast Lead in 2008, Protective Edge in 2014, Guardian of the Walls in 2021 – lasted days or weeks, killed hundreds or low thousands, and were absorbed by international memory within months.
What has unfolded since October 2023, meanwhile, is of an entirely different magnitude: a devastation so thorough, so prolonged and so relentlessly documented, with the scale of destruction, the duration of suffering and the sheer volume of visual evidence transmitted in real time to billions of screens producing not a temporary dip in global sympathy but a structural shift in consciousness that no rebranding campaign, trade delegation or carefully staged cultural exchange will reverse in a generation.
The damage runs in both directions. In the Arab world, where a small but real base of acceptance had begun to take root – tentative, fragile, nothing like warmth, but enough to build on – that ground has been scorched entirely, and with it any foundation for the kind of grassroots advocacy that might one day have given normalization a popular mandate rather than merely a governmental one.
According to the Arab Barometer, in Morocco – the Abraham Accords’ most promising case study – public support for normalization with Israel stood at 31% in 2022, modest but the highest in the Arab world and enough to suggest that something was taking hold, before collapsing to 13% after October 7. According to the 2025 Arab Opinion Index, that figure sank further still, to a mere 6% – a level indistinguishable from countries that never normalized at all. This means that even those Moroccans who had cautiously extended Israel the benefit of the doubt have now withdrawn it, and winning them back will prove infinitely harder than persuading them the first time, because this time they did not refuse out of inherited hostility but out of lived witness.
And in the West, where Israel had long enjoyed the comfort of majority support as a matter of bipartisan reflex, it now faces something it has never faced before: not criticism from the margins, but a sustained erosion of sympathy from the center – from the very constituencies whose backing Israel always assumed it could take for granted.
The Hebrew state has trapped itself in an endless, nihilistic loop – build a reputation, wage a war, destroy it, start over, wage another war – and the result, after seven decades, is not progress but a treadmill, each cycle leaving less credibility to rebuild with than the one before.
Netanyahu will, eventually, leave office – the corruption trial grinds forward, his coalition fractures, and even the most durable political survivors eventually exhaust the patience of their own publics – but the reputational wreckage he leaves behind, the decades of diplomatic capital incinerated to keep one man in power and one coalition intact, will endure long after his name has faded from the headlines, and Israel will discover, as nations always do when they confuse military dominance with strategic wisdom, that the hardest siege to lift is the one you have imposed upon yourself.
Israel now faces a challenge it has never confronted: rebuilding its reputation not from a low point but from a crater – and doing so in a world that has seen too much to simply look away again.