Two years into its war on Gaza, having killed more than 67,000 people, forced a famine upon countless others and attacked its neighbours repeatedly, Israel stands isolated on the world stage and divided at home, analysts say.
Taking the podium at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in late September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced an audience of backs as delegate after delegate walked out in protest over what many call Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
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Internationally, Israel is arguably more isolated and more reliant on the absolute support of the United States than ever as allies like the United Kingdom, France and even Germany condemn its war on Gaza.
At home, two years of war have shattered the image of what observers long described as a progressive liberal democracy, replacing it with something much darker, forbidding and extreme.
Fatigued and violent
“Israeli society is in excruciating pain over what it feels is its condemnation at the hands of world opinion,” Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador and consul general in New York, told Al Jazeera.
“In October 2023, the British Parliament, the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building were lit up in white and blue in support of Israel. Now, it’s ostracised,” he said.
“Israel and its politics is still in October 7,” Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, told Al Jazeera.
For two years, the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, during which 1,139 people were killed and about 200 were taken captive, have been repeated and amplified across Israeli media.
Analysts described to Al Jazeera how political actors claimed that October 7 should define Israeli society and justify whatever action they choose to take in its name.
“The world has moved on, but Israel is stuck there. … That’s the justification for everything it does and why it still sees everyone in Gaza as complicit in that attack, even as it’s killed more than 65,000 of them,” Mekelberg said.
Political scientist Ori Goldberg told Al Jazeera that “Israel has become fatigued and more violent at the same time,” adding that people have split into shifting camps, divided between those supporting, opposing or ignoring a war that continues regardless of public opposition.
Goldberg described people in everyday places finding ways to avoid “embarrassing” subjects – such as the captives who remain in Gaza despite 24 months of unrestrained assault by what they were told was one of the most powerful armies in the world.
Equally absent from public conversations is any mention of the escalating death toll in Gaza or of the famine and repeated displacement endured by those who have survived so far.
Meanwhile, the fate of the captives taken two years ago continues to consume their families and supporters, whose mass protests demanding a political deal to free them have persisted throughout the war.
Reinforcing that sense of trauma has been the return of thousands of reservists to their lives and families in Israel. Suicide, domestic abuse and what doctors in Israel have described as an epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder have been the result.
“The toll of the war is visible everywhere,” Goldberg said.
Drivers on Israel’s roads have stopped using turn signals, oblivious or indifferent to other road users. At the beachside Gordon swimming pool in Tel Aviv, which has operated since 1956, a letter was sent to members in August urging them to “avoid any expression of physical or verbal aggression”.
Fighting for its soul
The sense of dislocation from the slaughter in Gaza is echoed in Israel’s parliament, where resistance to the war from the official opposition has focused only on the details of its prosecution while opposition to the war itself has been relegated to its fringes.
Meanwhile, with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich now key to sustaining Netanyahu’s coalition, the far right has essentially gained a veto over policy.
“Israeli politics is in a fight for its soul,” Mekelberg said. “This didn’t start with the war, though the war’s accelerated it. It began with the last election and the legitimisation of far-right messianic forces by an opportunistic and cynical prime minister.”
From his re-election in 2022 to the onset of the war, Netanyahu has struggled to build and maintain a coalition to govern Israel.
In part, this has been due to the clash of his own right-wing policies, intended to appeal to the hard right and pro-settler groups. In part, analysts also attributed it to his ongoing trial on multiple corruption charges going back to 2019.
“Netanyahu is lucky in that his opposition is incompetent,” Pinkas said.
“They joined him for limited periods before leaving, which gave him legitimacy,” he said of how figures like opposition leader and Netanyahu’s former rival for prime minister Benny Gantz joined him in the security cabinet after the October 7 attacks.
“All the while, they’re captive to this outdated idea that when the military are fighting, we must all support the government.
“The public can see that’s not true, but it doesn’t really matter. As long as Netanyahu holds these right-wing lunatics close, he can survive,” Pinkas said.
From the destruction of Rafah in May 2024 to the breaking of a ceasefire in March and the ongoing assaults on Gaza City, the views of the extreme right have prevailed over those of the public, the military, the international community and the families of those still held captive in Gaza.
Israel’s messianic right and settler movements see themselves as being on a mission to permanently subvert Israeli democracy – a process the war has helped to advance, Mekelberg explained.
“This is why they want control of the ministries, why they want control over the domestic affairs of the West Bank,” he said, describing a “dark period” in Israel’s history, recovery from which is uncertain.
Pariahs
In recent months, previously stalwart backers such as the UK, Canada, France and Australia, prompted by the mounting death toll in Gaza and violent raids in the occupied West Bank, condemned their ally’s war on Gaza and recognised the State of Palestine.
The European Union, another historical supporter, is considering suspending its trade agreement with Israel and sanctioning its far-right ministers.
Within the UN, 159 of the UNGA’s 192 member states – and four of the five permanent members of the Security Council – now recognise Palestine. Only the US refuses to do so.
“At first, people said it was a misunderstanding or anti-Semitism – all the usual cliches,” Pinkas said.
“Then they said it was a Netanyahu problem, but that doesn’t work. People came to realise that, as far as the world is concerned, a country is its actions. In Israel’s case, over the last two years, that’s been to inflict a humanitarian catastrophe on Gaza, to commit war crimes and to be accused of genocide.”
In 2019, Pinkas recalled, Netanyahu ran an election campaign featuring images of himself alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi under the banner headline: A different league.
Israel is in a different league now, Pinkas said – “one where it is as reviled internationally as North Korea”.
