Israel Is Winning the War but Losing the World

No shit! I told you so over a year ago.

Forgetting the morality portion of this mess, it's just plain stupid. Sorry, that doesn't cover it. I need to trot out the R Word to describe Bibi's tactics here.

First, he torches a City of 2 million (half of which are children) because it's necessary to crush Hamas. He practically guarantees success. A year later, Hamas is still there, and they're going in a second time.

When you ask Bibi's merry band of misfits why they have no sympathy for the poor schmucks they just flattened, they comically respond..." they don't like us". No kidding!

Israel Is Winning the War but Losing the World

After nearly two years of fighting in Gaza, the Jewish state risks becoming a pariah, even among longtime allies.

By David Luhnow and Joshua Chaffin, WSJ

Sept. 12, 2025 10:55 am ET

Israel’s Gaza campaign has diminished global sympathy, risking its status even among allies, due to civilian casualties and social media’s reach.

In the days after the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks on Israel by Hamas, the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower and the Brandenburg Gate were lit up in the blue and white colors of Israel’s flag—a sign of how many Western nations rallied to the country’s side after the worst loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust.

But in the nearly two years since, Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza has eroded that sympathy and threatens to turn Israel into a pariah state, even among longtime allies. The repeated military assaults in Gaza have killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced hundreds of thousands and led to widespread hunger and possibly famine. All of this has unfolded in an age of social media where images of the destruction regularly appear on billions of phones worldwide.

“The war for hearts and minds is lost,” Howard Wolfson, a veteran Democratic strategist, said recently on a podcast. “The reality here is that public opinion is shifting very quickly and very dramatically away from Israel.”

This week’s strike by Israel on Hamas’s political leadership in Qatar was the latest controversial move by an Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that has grown increasingly brazen in attacking its enemies, regardless of international opinion. Israel has previously carried out targeted assassinations in hostile countries like Lebanon and Iran, but this one took place in the territory of a U.S. ally and targeted Hamas leaders who had gathered to discuss a U.S. ceasefire proposal for Gaza. The implication was clear: Israel is not interested in negotiating right now.

President Trump said he sympathized with the impulse to eliminate Hamas, but he sharply criticized the strike and said it did not “advance U.S. or Israeli interests.” Germany and the U.K. condemned the strike, and Canada said it was “evaluating its relationship” with Israel.

Trump is among many longtime allies of Israel who worry about the damage it is doing to its reputation as the lone democracy in the Middle East. “They may be winning the war, but they’re not winning the world of public relations, you know, and it is hurting them,” he said last week.

Sixty percent of Americans now say they disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza. Only 32% say they approve, down from over 50% in the month after Oct. 7. More Americans now say they sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel in the conflict (37% to 36%), for the first time since the question began to be asked in 2001. And half of Republican or Republican-leaning voters under age 50 now say they have negative views of Israel.

Across Europe, Israel now registers record-low approval ratings. Nearly half of British adults say Israel is treating the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews in the Holocaust, and antisemitic attitudes in the U.K. have doubled in the past five years. The ongoing conflict is leading to a surge in antisemitism across the globe, complicating life for millions of Jews and raising an uncomfortable question about the purpose of Zionism: Should protecting Jews in Israel come at the price of exposing Jews elsewhere to new threats?

Israel has made itself safer in the short-term by decimating Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as setting back Iran’s nuclear program. But many analysts believe the last two years of war could end up undermining the country’s long-term security by heightening hostility in the Arab and Muslim world, including among moderate Gulf states, and weakening support among Israel’s allies, especially the U.S., the U.K. and Germany.

“When the war stops, things won’t go back to status quo ante. People’s image of Israel is going to change in enduring ways, and that brings all kinds of impacts on Israel economically, diplomatically, militarily,” says Michael Koplow at the Israel Policy Forum, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

The consequences for American politics could be profound. Koplow thinks that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be the Democrats’ single biggest foreign-policy issue during the next presidential election and that the next Democratic administration—whenever it happens—may restrict arms sales to Israel. Democratic strategists wonder if Israel’s unpopularity will doom Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor and a longtime supporter of Israel, should he seek the Democratic Party’s 2028 nomination.

It has also fueled the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist and vocal critic of Israel who is currently favored to win New York’s mayoral race in November. That would make him the first Muslim mayor of the city with the second largest Jewish population in the world, next to Tel Aviv. “I would argue that there’s no Mamdani if there’s no Netanyahu,” said Bradley Tusk, a prominent Democratic strategist. Prominent figures in Trump’s MAGA movement have also turned against Israel, including Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.

From David to Goliath

Israel has always been sensitive to how it is perceived abroad. Part of that is the need for a small country in a hostile neighborhood to have powerful allies. But it is also emotionally important for the world’s only Jewish state to have an accepted place in the world. The war seems to be risking both.

A number of Western countries traditionally friendly to Israel, including France, the U.K., Canada, Australia and Belgium, plan to formally recognize a Palestinian state later this month, a move they had long resisted. Israeli officials say it will be seen in the Arab world as a reward for Hamas’s attack. Germany, Israel’s second biggest arms supplier, has suspended some arms exports.

“We did not hesitate to defend Israel, but at the same time we cannot remain silent now in the face of a reaction that has gone far beyond the principle of proportionality,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a longtime supporter of Israel, said recently.

Dozens of universities, mostly in Europe, have ended relationships with Israeli universities. The head of the medical school at Tel Aviv University says there is a creeping boycott against Israel in the medical field, including barring Israeli doctors from internships abroad.

In 2019, Israel hosted Eurovision, the annual song contest. “Back then,” Israeli journalist Amit Segal recalled on a recent podcast, “Israel was a state of tourism. You could see ads for Jerusalem or Tel Aviv in London or Paris. Nowadays, Israel represents Gaza, famine, starvation.” The European Broadcasting Association will meet in December to vote on whether to kick Israel out of Eurovision; Ireland has said it would not compete if Israel does. The Italian soccer coaches’ association has called for Israel to be suspended from the global soccer body FIFA.

Older people are more likely to remember Israel as a scrappy young country fighting for survival against hostile neighboring states, as well as Palestinian terrorism from the 1972 Munich Olympics to the first and second intifadas. They may also recall how Palestinian leaders repeatedly turned down past offers of a state in the West Bank and Gaza.

But a younger generation now sees Israel as the enforcer of a brutal occupation of Palestinian territories. At the same time, Israeli politics has shifted to the right, and the idea of permanent annexation of the West Bank—which most Israelis refer to by the biblical names of Judea and Samaria—has gone from fringe to mainstream. As a result, Israel is now seen less as David than as Goliath.

In past conflicts with Hamas, Netanyahu has argued that world opinion of Israel always recovers once the fighting ends, but this war has gone on much longer than previous ones. Other Israelis appear to have given up on explaining themselves, convinced that the world will always be biased against them. They point to the accusations of genocide that emerged almost as soon as Israel began its counter-attack.

Many friends of Israel, including Jews, are upset by the country’s disregard for its image. “Either they don’t understand what’s happening, or they don’t understand the implications of what’s happening,” said Wolfson.

There are two battlefields in any war: a kinetic one where the fighting takes place, and an information and public relations war to win hearts and minds. In the Gaza war, Israel clearly has the upper hand on the battlefield, but it faces longer odds in the information space.

The Oct. 7 killings, and the sheer scale and barbarity of the attacks, lasted one day, compared with nearly two years of Israel’s military response. The few public images of the Hamas attack were displaced within days by pictures of destruction in Gaza and dead civilians, images now repeated for 23 months.

“Israel has not internalized the nature of today’s battlefields, which…now include global public arenas and the chaotic vortex of social media—spaces in which the orchestrator of one of the most atrocious terror attacks in memory, Hamas, is now viewed as an emblem of heroic resistance,” wrote Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister.

‘Isolation Matters’

The war appears very different inside Israel than outside. Israeli TV hardly ever shows images of dead Gazans; instead Israelis have been focused on the ongoing drama of the hostages (251 were seized and 48 are still captive, only 20 of whom are still alive). As a result, many can’t understand why the world is so upset, especially since Hamas started the conflict.

Peter Lerner, a former IDF spokesman, says that Israel has strong arguments to counter accusations of war crimes or genocide in Gaza. If over 60,000 Palestinians have died, he said, and one-third are Hamas militants, that is a relatively low proportion of civilian deaths compared with other modern wars, especially in crowded urban areas where refugees have nowhere to flee. Lerner acknowledges that those arguments are undercut by heart-wrenching images of Palestinian suffering.

Accusations of genocide have gained credibility from the rhetoric used by Israeli leaders since Oct. 7. In late 2023, South Africa launched a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, using the words of Israeli government ministers as evidence of genocidal intent. Netanyahu invoked the biblical Israelites’ ancient enemy Amalek in a letter to IDF soldiers, urging them to “spare no one.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “fighting human animals,” and promised that no electricity, food, water or food would enter Gaza. “We will eliminate everything,” he said.

Lerner says the Israeli government has lacked a coherent and consistent story about why it is fighting in Gaza. The official goals of freeing the hostages and ensuring Hamas’s control of Gaza is over, replaced by a non-threatening actor, have been repeatedly undermined by comments from various Israeli officials about moving Palestinians out of Gaza or annexing the West Bank. “You need a clear endgame, an attainable goal that people understand, synchronized across all bodies of state,” Lerner says. “Otherwise it’s every man for himself, sowing confusion and mistrust among Israel’s allies.”

Segal, the Israeli journalist, said he estimates that war has cost Israel 300 billion shekels, some $89 billion. But he doubts 1 billion shekels have been spent on public relations initiatives, like inviting delegations of policymakers or social-media influencers to Israel.

Eliyahu Stern, a professor of Jewish history at Yale, says that in the past Israel has been strategically savvy, balancing what it wants with the reality of the world around it. When the country was founded in 1948, it accepted a U.N. partition plan that gave Israel far less territory than it wanted—something Palestinian leaders were unwilling to do. Over the following decades Israel engaged in compromises, trading land won in battle for peace.

But the stated goal of the current war—to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities—runs counter to that pragmatism, Stern says. “Israel never used that kind of eliminationist language before. It never said it was going to eliminate Iran. You’re not going to eliminate all your enemies. You have to manage those challenges,” he said.

In strategic terms, says Stern, the marginal benefit of killing more Hamas fighters needs to be weighed against the strategic risk of continuing the war in Gaza. If the International Court of Justice rules that Israel has, in fact, committed genocide, Israelis may dismiss the ruling. But what happens when a former IDF soldier tries to travel through Europe or South America?

“Israel is a small country; isolation matters,” Stern says. Israel’s government is right in wanting Hamas to be uprooted, but “what is it really worth being right if you are left isolated?”

Lerner, the former IDF spokesman, puts it this way: “Hamas in its current state poses no strategic threat to Israel. It can only gain from a continued war effort, one which isolates Israel further, adds to deeper distrust in the region and permanently derails normalization with Saudi Arabia and others. So from Hamas’s perspective, it is succeeding in its strategic goals.”

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