10-10-2025
JERUSALEM: Two years into its war on Gaza, having killed more than 67,000 people, forced a famine upon countless others and attacked its neighbors 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.
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 media.
“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 ostracized,” he said.
“Israel and its politics is still in October 7,” Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, told media.
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 media 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. (Int’l News Desk)