Even before the announcement of the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement — brokered by Egypt, Qatar and Türkiye — Israel had been betting that the world would forgive and forget. But Western reports kept piling up, asserting that Israel’s isolation was no longer hypothetical, as Politico put it.
In recent weeks, Netanyahu found himself alone against the world. The scene at the United Nations crystallised the scattered clues into a single picture: the world on one side, and Netanyahu — ostracised and isolated — on the other.
That isolation showed in many small but telling details: his plane avoiding European airspace en route to the UN days earlier for fear that some countries might act on an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court; the pallid tone of his voice as he spoke to an emptied, cold chamber after many delegates had walked out.
At the same time, senior European figures openly accused Israel — in blunt, unvarnished language — of committing crimes tantamount to genocide. Calls grew in the United States for an arms embargo, even among some Democrats who had been staunch supporters, including former national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
In August, 28 Western states urged Israel to end its brutality in Gaza. Threats of cultural, academic and sporting boycotts also multiplied — measures the Israeli academic Nimrod Goren described as “very present in the public sphere,” adding that “most Israelis feel the world is against them and that nobody understands them.” That impression prompted former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert to concede recently: “We have become a pariah state.”
Ordinary Israelis, according to observers such as Shtraukler, were pinning their hopes on Trump and on Washington, reasoning that if the United States stood with them, the situation was not irreparable. Netanyahu, they believed, trusted that Trump’s bias would shield him and that the US would not force Israel to act against his will.
What Netanyahu did not foresee was the unprecedented pressure from a sitting US president — pressure on Israel not seen in recent memory, save perhaps for Dwight Eisenhower’s 1956 warning to David Ben-Gurion about potential political and economic sanctions. By mid-September, diplomatic isolation had become a concrete concern: Netanyahu warned publicly that Israel should prepare to become more economically self-sufficient, likening the country to an ancient Sparta.
A recent Pew survey showed that a majority of Israelis feel their country has lost international respect — 58% said Israel had lost the world’s respect ,while 39% believed it was still respected. In several countries, young people hold more negative views of Israel than older generations, especially in the high-income nations surveyed: Australia, Canada, France, Poland, South Korea and the United States.
Inside Israel, a nation exhausted by conflict, polls consistently showed most citizens wanting the war to end. Israelis became increasingly aware of the damage the war had done to their country’s image and of their growing international isolation. Given mounting internal and external pressure, the prospect of resuming full-scale war looked ever less likely.
Over the past nine months, Netanyahu also watched a US president do things no previous president had done: open direct channels with Hamas in March, strike deals with the Houthis in Yemen (deals Israelis only learned of after they happened), lift sanctions on Syria’s new government despite Israeli objections, and even express a willingness to negotiate with Iran.
Momentum for a negotiated settlement grew after Israel’s failed attempt to assassinate senior Hamas officials, including figures who had been involved in the Doha talks last month. That strike inflamed regional anger, including among some of America’s key allies. Trump’s team saw an opening to increase pressure on Netanyahu, accusing him of dragging Washington into a dispute with crucial partners outside NATO.
Many in circles close to the White House believed that, after the brazen Israeli airstrike on Doha, Trump concluded the war had to stop. He was frustrated with Netanyahu, convinced that the war’s public image had become intolerable and determined to seize the moment — not with a piecemeal arrangement, but with a comprehensive deal.
Hostility toward Israel swelled to a degree that signalled, for the first time, the potential abandonment by some long-standing allies — even in countries previously insulated from such sentiment. Four days before the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement, hundreds of thousands marched across Europe against Israel in demonstrations that the Israeli media called the most dangerous turning point in Europe’s historical relations with the Jewish state.
Some forward-looking analysts warned that Israel had set itself on a path toward gradual collapse and disappearance, perhaps even a collective return to where its people came from more than seventy years ago.
If Gaza — above all — needs an agreement to end the misery of millions of Palestinians, the entire Western world, including the United States and Israel itself, urgently needed such an agreement to salvage and rehabilitate its reputation. To many across the Global South, the West had been reduced to a geographical shelter for brutality and policies that looked like systematic extermination — exposing a raw “Darwinism” that recognised only white-supremacist hierarchies, the American male super-hero, the Israeli Rambo, and saw the rest of humanity as a disposable burden to be starved, displaced or buried beneath the rubble of destroyed, impoverished cities.
The world, for the first time in recent memory, stood united in the imperative to stop the war. Netanyahu had little choice but to set aside his pride and arrogance and accede — reluctantly — to global public opinion. He did so without achieving any of his stated goals, leaving his political fate uncertain and his future precarious; perhaps even facing removal from power and the prospect of imprisonment in an Israeli jail cell.
