David Hearst – Middle East Eye Oct 9, 2025

This has been the longest, bloodiest and most destructive war fought by Israel against the Palestinians in the history of this conflict.

It will end in theatrics, largely orchestrated by US President Donald Trump, who will fly to Israel to welcome home the hostages who are still alive. There could also be a declaration, at the insistence of Hamas and Qatar, of a formal end to the war.

Israeli forces will pull back from all major cities in Gaza, and United Nations trucks will roll again into the enclave – for the moment.

But make no mistake: there is no agreement yet on the second or third phases of the deal, covering the disarmament of Hamas and the imposition of an international mandate to govern Gaza. And there is not likely to be.

Trump’s view of the losses Hamas has sustained in two years of war is, to put it mildly, at some variance with reality. The US president recently said that Hamas was on the brink of destruction, with its leadership wiped out and 25,000 fighters killed – roughly half of its fighting force.

Hamas’s own assessment of the battle damage is that its institutional integrity, command and control, and communications have all withstood the severest of tests, including assassinations of top leaders, along with the several Hiroshimas’ worth of high-powered explosives that Israel has dropped on Gaza.

It has as many fighters as it did at the start of the war, and can draw upon a virtually unlimited amount of small arms and explosives to fashion anti-tank rockets and improvised explosive devices.

Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries, does not regard itself as a defeated force – still less one that is now obliged to bend to Israel’s military will. The same is true for the other fighting factions in Gaza.

Far from ‘peace in our time’

The popularity of Hamas in Gaza has withstood the war, and in the occupied West Bank, it has increased. On Arab streets, and particularly in Jordan, the popularity of al-Qassam Brigades has reached legendary status.

There is no way it regards this moment in history, of all moments, as an end to armed conflict, as Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claim.

In the view of Hamas, a long-term hudna, or “pause”, in the fighting could only come about if Israel agrees to withdraw to the 1967 lines, and ends the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The group is in even less mood to allow an international body to take over Gaza, thus returning to the colonial days of the British Mandate, which began just over a century ago.

Clearly, this is very far from the “peace in our time” Trump will proclaim it to be – even if it marks the end of one particularly brutal and prolonged battle.

Hamas, other militant factions, and above all, the population of Gaza can claim strategic successes. They thwarted Israel’s most serious attempt at mass displacement since 1967. The population withstood a genocide.

It did all of this on its own. The support of neighbouring Arab states has been woefully lacking, and the only reason Egypt or Jordan blocked mass population transfer was to secure their own national interests. It was not out of any sympathy for Palestinians.

Yet staying on the land came at a huge cost: more than 67,000 lives, not counting all the bodies that are still under rubble, and the destruction of almost all of Gaza’s housing stock, hospitals, schools, mosques, and institutions. The population of Gaza will be traumatised, suffering the effects of starvation for all their lives.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, will boast that he smashed Hamas as a fighting organisation, just as he claims to have done with Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

He is getting all his hostages back and has laid the foundations for quiet on his western front for at least the next generation. Gaza will not be launching any more attacks on Israel for a long time to come.

Israel’s reputation shredded

Netanyahu has obliterated Gaza and rendered it all but unlivable. But in this process, Israel’s overwhelming and unrestrained kinetic force also smashed another asset that is just as important for Tel Aviv as the subjugation of a native people or their land.

It is one upon which Israel has depended for decades, and it is the basis of all the military hardware and money it has received from the US and Europe.

And that is Israel’s international reputation. After two years of genocide, it has been shredded.

For all of this century and most of the last, Israel’s narrative was that a “Jewish state” was an essentially moral project – a haven for Jews persecuted around the world.

This narrative became embedded as a moral code in all western countries that have the longest histories of antisemitism. Israel’s right to exist was intoned religiously by every major political party.

Self-identifying as a “friend of Israel” became a rite of passage for every aspiring politician – a proof of seriousness, and a licence to govern, whether they knew or cared at all about the Middle East.

Each time Israel launched a new war under the guise of a pre-emptive strike, the response from western nations was a deafening chorus of support for the “Jewish state’s right to defend itself”.

On 7 October 2023, this “right” became elevated into a righteous war in response to “Israel’s 9/11”. The mass hostage-taking by Hamas was seen as something that threatened Israel’s existence.

A huge edifice, or architecture, rests on the foundations of the support Israel gets from the US and Europe. If it falters or cracks start appearing, Israel has a problem.

But in two short years, it has done more than falter. It has collapsed.

Shifting support

This can be measured in four different ways: through opinion polls, in the dominant narrative on social media, through developments in the international courts, and finally, in how the political elites are reacting – although of the four, this is by far the slowest and most reluctant element.

Opinion polls are very clear not only about the speed of Israel’s fall from grace, but the direction of travel too. Staunch supporters of Israel, such as The New York Times and The Guardian, report a seismic reversal in support.

American voters broadly sympathised with Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas-led attack on Israel two years ago. At that time, 47 percent sided with Israel and 20 percent with the Palestinians. But last month, a new poll from The New York Times and Siena University revealed that for the first time in this conflict, more Americans side with Palestinians than with Israel: 35 percent and 34 percent, respectively.

The poll also found a majority opposing additional US military and economic aid to Israel. Six out of ten respondents said Israel should end the war, even if all hostages were not released, and 40 percent said they believed Israel was deliberately killing civilians.

Anti-Israel sentiment is reinforced by the political and generational divide. Around seven out of 10 voters under the age of 30 opposed further aid to Israel. Among Democrats, 54 percent expressed greater sympathy for Palestinians, compared with 13 percent for Israel.

Gallup’s findings mirror these trends, noting that 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, while around 30 percent approve.

This collapse in support has been heightened and accelerated by social media, where Israel is also heavily outgunned by sympathy for Palestinians.

Two years ago, Republicans accused TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, of engineering its algorithm to manipulate American public opinion on the war. Today, such a charge cannot stand up; while pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli content is roughly equivalent in terms of views, pro-Palestinian videos have a greater tendency to go viral.

In September, the research centre Cybersecurity for Democracy found that for every pro-Israel post, there were 17 posts supporting the Palestinian position.

The loss of social media as a terrain for Israel, despite its many attempts to own chunks of this real estate or to buy up influencers, has direct consequences.

International justice

Israel’s reputation has suffered no less harm in the international courts, despite a very determined effort that Middle East Eye was the first to chart – although others are following suit – to nobble Karim Khan, the British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and the judges of the International Court of Justice, which is still hearing a case of genocide against Israel.

This overt campaign to pervert the course of international justice utterly undermines the West’s claim to uphold the international rule of law.

Netanyahu has been guilty of as many – if not more – war crimes in Gaza as Russian President Vladimir Putin has been in Ukraine. To attempt to shield one from international justice while unleashing the hounds on the other has become impossible to justify on any world stage.

All of this is producing record demonstrations across Europe, in all the countries upon whose governments Israel could formerly count: Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and Britain.

To cite just one witness, analyst Mouin Rabbani wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “I grew up in the Netherlands. During my youth, it was easily the most pro-Israeli country in Europe. So pro-Israeli that visiting Palestinians would say it was easier to reason with Israelis than the Dutch about the Middle East.”

But during a weekend protest, Rabbani added, “a quarter of a million Dutch citizens, of all backgrounds, of all stripes and colours, turned out to draw a ‘Red Line’ against the Gaza Genocide. I never anticipated I would witness such scenes during my lifetime, and am genuinely humbled.”

He continued: “Israel has irreversibly lost the Dutch public, and future Dutch governments will find it increasingly difficult to hold the line on behalf of the genocidal apartheid regime.”

The same outrage is seen across Spain, where hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have marched in Barcelona and Madrid, and where the Israeli cycling team was repeatedly disrupted during the recent Tour of Spain race. More than 40 Spaniards, including a former Barcelona mayor, were removed from the 42 Global Sumud Flotilla boats that Israel intercepted earlier this month.

And the same is occurring in Italy, where unions staged a 24-hour strike. According to Italy’s interior ministry, up to 400,000 protesters came out across 29 locations, although the real number could have been much higher.

Threshold crossed

Will this unprecedented show of support for the Palestinian people dissipate with the end of the Gaza campaign? My answer to this question is a firm no.

Firstly, in releasing all the hostages, both alive and dead, Hamas and Gaza’s other armed factions will have relieved themselves of a major burden. This burden created the argument among liberal supporters of Israel that Hamas was as bad and as guilty of perpetuating this war as Netanyahu was.

The ongoing detention of the hostages helped Israel disguise the truth that Netanyahu had repeatedly sabotaged previous attempts to secure their release through negotiations, and that, consequently, many hostages were killed by Israel’s own military actions.

If, as I think will happen, the ceasefire agreement does not extend to a second or third phase, Netanyahu will willingly opt for the same type of situation in Gaza that he has obtained in southern Lebanon, Syria and Iran: quiet, interrupted by sporadic air strikes on selected targets.Quiet in Gaza will not, however, mean quiet in Al-Aqsa Mosque, where the zealot Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, claimed victory this week after two consecutive incursions by Israeli settlers. Nor will quiet remain in the occupied West Bank, where de facto annexation will proceed in salami slices.In these conditions, the protests in Europe will not just continue, they will gather force.

It is not fanciful to now judge that the threshold for support for Palestinian rights around the world, and particularly in the western world, has been crossed – and that this process is irreversible.

Tipping the balance

This leads to the last category of change, but also the most recalcitrant one.

As research by Andrew Feinstein and Jack Cinamon on Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has revealed, Oslo has divested from some Israeli companies, but its $2 trillion fund remains heavily invested in arms companies supplying Israel’s military.

Israel is part of the DNA of the West’s political, financial and arms supply industries. Unpicking that connection, and truly isolating Israel, will be the work of decades, not years.

Nonetheless, more countries now support a Palestinian state than ever before – and although this is cynical sop to public opinion, it still represents movement. At the very least, it will open governments like the UK to challenge. How does it map a viable path to Palestinian statehood where none exists?

But even at the granular level of politics, supporting Israel may no longer be the career move for young politicians that it once was.

As The New York Times noted, a majority of first-term Democratic House members once attended Aipac’s annual pilgrimage to Israel. Two years ago, 24 House Democrats travelled with Aipac to Israel. This year, just 11 out of 33 first-term House Democrats attended.

Two years ago, the Palestinian cause was dead on its feet. Today, it has reached its highest-ever level, particularly in the Palestinian diaspora.

The relative wealth and high levels of educational and professional achievement of the Palestinian diaspora do not create apathy. Rather, the enormous suffering of Gaza has only engendered guilt, and the question of why the diaspora is not doing more. The Palestinian struggle has energised a whole generation to fight for its completion.

If Trump thinks a “peace process” such as the one he has declared in his plan for Gaza will stop in its tracks this wave of energy for Palestinian liberation, as the Oslo Accords stopped the sympathy created by Israel’s suppression of the First Intifada, he has another thing coming.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has tipped the balance of western opinion, and no quantity of food trucks or rebuilding of Gaza can now reverse this trend.

Many consequences will flow from this in the years to come. Israelis are far from realising just how significant this change of opinion will be for them.

But this is true for all colonial settlers in history. None of them foresees their own end.

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