For decades, Israel’s greatest political asset was not its military strength, its nuclear arsenal, or the supposed sophistication of its intelligence services. It was the protection offered by the major powers of the West: the United States supplied weapons and diplomatic immunity, Germany transformed responsibility for the Holocaust into unconditional support for the Is/raeli state, Britain helped erase its own colonial responsibility for the dispossession of Palestine, and Canada, Australia, France, and other Western governments repeated the claim that Israel was a democratic outpost surrounded by irrational hostility. Whatever Israel did was presented as self-defence, while whatever the Palestinians did was removed from the history of occupation and described as terrorism. That consensus is now beginning to break apart.

Israel has not lost the governments that matter most to its military power, and it would be premature to speak of its complete international isolation. The US continues to arm it, protect it at the United Nations, and integrate it into Washington’s military architecture for West Asia, while Germany and Italy continue to obstruct decisive European sanctions. Yet the political climate has shifted dramatically. Governments that once defended Israel without hesitation now criticise it, recognise Palestine, sanction settlers, restrict arms exports, and warn that Israel is violating international law. Israel remains heavily armed, but it has become increasingly difficult to defend. This loss of standing is sometimes described as a public-relations crisis. That description is inadequate. Israel’s reputation has not collapsed because its diplomats chose the wrong words or its spokespeople failed to present compelling arguments. It has collapsed because people across the world have watched the destruction of Gaza unfold on their screens for nearly three years. They have seen neighbourhoods erased, hospitals attacked, universities destroyed, journalists killed, doctors detained, children buried beneath concrete, and an entire population subjected to hunger and displacement. No communications strategy can indefinitely conceal the reality of a society being systematically destroyed.

The change in Western public opinion is unmistakable. A Pew Research Center survey published in June 2026 found that across 36 countries, a median of 67 per cent of respondents held an unfavourable view of Israel, compared with only 25 per cent who viewed it favourably. In every European country surveyed, negative attitudes predominated. In Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, roughly half or more of respondents held a ‘very unfavourable’ view. This is not simply disapproval of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It reflects a deeper recognition that the conduct of his government cannot be separated from the political structures of occupation, apartheid, and settlement upon which the Israeli state has been built.

The erosion is visible even in the US, where support for Israel has been cultivated over generations through the political establishment, evangelical churches, media organisations, universities, and an enormously powerful lobbying apparatus. A Gallup survey published in 2026 found that, for the first time, Israelis no longer led Palestinians in the sympathies of people in the US. Among independents, 41 per cent sympathised more with Palestinians and 30 per cent with Israelis. Among Democrats, support for Palestinians stood at 65 per cent, compared with 17 per cent for Israel. Most strikingly, 53 per cent of people in the US aged 18 to 34 sympathised more with Palestinians, while only 23 per cent sympathised more with Israelis. Even among Republicans, support for Israel had declined by 10 percentage points since 2024.

Public opinion does not automatically determine government policy, particularly in an oligarchic political system such as that of the United States. President Donald Trump and the dominant sections of both major parties remain committed to Israel. But elected politicians can see the direction in which society is moving. The Block the Bombs legislation, which seeks to restrict certain US weapons transfers to Israel, had gathered 73 congressional co-sponsors by June 2026. It remains far from becoming law, but its growth would have been almost unimaginable before Israel’s assault on Gaza. Palestine is no longer a marginal question in US politics. It has become a fault line running through the Democratic Party, university campuses, trade unions, churches, cultural institutions, and increasingly through the Jewish community itself.

The shift among Britain, Canada, and Australia has been particularly significant. These are not states associated with hostility towards Israel. They belong to the innermost circles of US power and intelligence cooperation. Yet in September 2025, all three formally recognised the State of Palestine. Britain’s decision possessed a particular historical meaning. One hundred and eight years after the Balfour Declaration, the state that had promised Palestine to the Zionist movement while denying the political rights of the Palestinian people was compelled to recognise that those people possess a national existence that cannot simply be negotiated away by their occupier.

Recognition alone does not end an occupation. Nor does it restore stolen land, dismantle settlements, release prisoners, or stop weapons from reaching Israel. These governments surrounded their recognition with conditions placed upon the Palestinians and assurances offered to Israel. Nonetheless, the decision represented a breach in a longstanding Western position: that Palestinian statehood could come only with Israeli consent. Since Israel had made it clear that it would never grant such consent, the so-called peace process had become a mechanism for allowing colonisation to continue indefinitely. Recognition exposed, even if only partially, the fraud at the centre of that process.

The breach has widened through sanctions. In June 2026, Britain coordinated with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway to impose measures on organisations and individuals that finance or facilitate settler violence in the occupied West Bank. The European Union, after years of paralysis, agreed in May to impose travel bans and asset freezes upon extremist settlers and organisations. The European Commission had already proposed suspending trade concessions under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, whose human-rights clause Israel has violated with impunity. Spain has adopted an arms embargo, while Slovenia has prohibited the import, export, and transit of weapons to and from Israel. These measures remain fragmented and insufficient, but their political direction is clear.

The most dramatic aspect of Israel’s isolation is that institutions created and controlled largely by the West can no longer entirely shield it. South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice forced the world’s highest court to confront the charge of genocide. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. United Nations agencies, human-rights organisations, doctors, legal scholars, and humanitarian workers have assembled an enormous body of evidence concerning collective punishment, forced displacement, starvation, torture, and attacks upon civilian life. Israel and the US have attacked these institutions precisely because the evidence can no longer be contained within the old language of ‘security’.

Yet it would be a mistake to exaggerate the extent of the rupture. Many Western governments have learned to substitute gestures for action. For instance, these governments sanction individual settlers while continuing to trade with the state that arms, protects, and incorporates those settlers into its colonial project.

They recognise Palestine while refusing to compel Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory.

They condemn starvation while permitting the transfer of aircraft components, surveillance systems, ammunition, and intelligence.

They criticise Netanyahu as though he were an unfortunate deviation from an otherwise legitimate system, rather than the political product of decades of occupation and impunity.

Germany remains the clearest example of this contradiction. Its government occasionally rebukes Israeli ministers, yet continues to block serious measures at the European level. German officials speak of historical responsibility while police repress demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine. But responsibility for the Holocaust cannot mean complicity in the destruction of another people. The lesson of fascism is not that one state must be placed above international law. It is that racial supremacy, collective punishment, forced removal, and exterminatory violence must be opposed wherever they appear.

Israel’s changing international position is therefore the product of two opposing forces. On one side stand the military and political establishments of the United States and Europe, which regard Israel as a strategic fortress in West Asia, an intelligence centre, a testing ground for weapons and surveillance systems, and a reliable instrument against popular sovereignty in the Arab world. On the other side stand millions of ordinary people whose protests, encampments, strikes, boycotts, legal campaigns, and acts of solidarity have made unconditional support for Israel increasingly costly. It is this second force that has driven the diplomatic changes. Governments did not discover Palestinian humanity through private reflection. They moved because students occupied campuses, dockworkers refused to handle weapons, trade unionists demanded an embargo, artists rejected institutional complicity, and vast demonstrations filled the streets from London to Sydney and from Toronto to Cape Town. The Palestinian people, through their extraordinary steadfastness, have transformed the moral and political consciousness of an entire generation.

India stands uncomfortably outside this movement. From Jawaharlal Nehru’s opposition to Zionist colonisation to India’s recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the State of Palestine, solidarity with the Palestinian people was once a cornerstone of Indian foreign policy. The Modi government has hollowed out that tradition. India has become Israel’s largest weapons market, while military, surveillance, agricultural, and technological cooperation has deepened. In February 2026, Modi travelled to Israel and addressed the Knesset, even as other former allies were distancing themselves from Netanyahu’s government. Hindutva and Zionism increasingly recognise themselves in one another: both present religious majoritarianism as national revival, treat a minority population as a demographic danger, and convert colonial violence into a permanent security doctrine. This alignment does not represent the Indian people. Across the country, Left parties, trade unions, student organisations, women’s movements, writers, artists, and ordinary citizens have continued to stand with Palestine. They understand that solidarity is not charity extended to a distant people. Palestine concentrates within itself the central questions of our time: whether colonialism can be revived under the name of security, whether powerful states may destroy a people without consequence, and whether international law applies only to the enemies of the West.

Israel’s leaders can see the walls closing around them. Netanyahu himself has acknowledged that Israel faces growing isolation and must prepare its economy accordingly, but an economy cannot easily adapt to moral revulsion on a global scale. Universities will find Israeli institutional partnerships harder to sustain, corporations will face boycotts and divestment campaigns, soldiers will confront legal risks when travelling abroad, and politicians who embrace Israel will increasingly pay an electoral price. The mythology of Israel as a liberal democracy has been shattered by the visible reality of Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel has not yet lost its most powerful protectors, but it is losing the people of the countries that protect it, and this contradiction cannot persist forever. The task is to turn public revulsion into material pressure: a comprehensive arms embargo, the suspension of preferential trade, sanctions against officials responsible for war crimes, the severing of military cooperation, and full support for Palestinian self-determination. Reputation is not the central issue, but the central issue is power. Israel’s loss of legitimacy matters because it opens the possibility of weakening the structures that have allowed occupation and dispossession to continue. The Palestinians have already won the argument before humanity. The urgent task is to make governments act upon the verdict.