On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced it would call up sixty thousand reservists as part of the government’s plan to take control of Gaza City. If the government follows through on the plan, it would mark a dramatic escalation in the conflict—and one with potentially irreversible costs to Israel’s alliances and reputation.
The plan was pushed forward in recent weeks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, backed by the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. It comes on the twentieth anniversary of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon making the opposite decision, to disengage. In August 2005, Sharon said, “Gaza cannot be held onto forever. Over one million Palestinians live there, and they double their numbers with every generation. They live in incredibly cramped refugee camps, in poverty and squalor, in hotbeds of ever-increasing hatred, with no hope whatsoever on the horizon.”
His words were prescient. Over the past two decades, the number of Gazans has more than doubled. Poverty levels even before the current war were astronomical. And hatred toward Israel was further fanned by Hamas’s takeover of the strip in June 2007. Gaza became a haven for terrorism, the apex of which was realized on October 7, 2023, when Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages, twenty of whom reportedly remain alive in captivity.
Since October 7, most Israelis have felt that their individual and collective futures are frozen in time—paralyzed by a war that now lacks a realistic military objective and that an overwhelming majority of Israelis want to end, rather than continue based on an illusory promise of “total victory.”
As Amos Yadlin, the retired Israeli major general and former head of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate, recently told me, “‘Total victory was never a realistic goal, and it isn’t a pathway for strategic success.” Yadlin continued, “Israeli security doctrine calls for swift military victories that can be harnessed for political achievements; the war in Gaza is the opposite of that.”
If Netanyahu follows through on his plan to “take over” Gaza City—and possibly move on to other areas—it might be politically advantageous for him. But the costs are likely to be the lives of additional soldiers and possibly the remaining hostages, a continuous quagmire, and the further hemorrhaging of global support for Israel, including in the United States.
US support for Israel is declining
On August 5, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned of Israel’s falling standing in the United States in a long post on X. He noted that Israel is increasingly viewed as a “pariah state.”
US support for Israel has been declining for years—but the Gaza war has sharply accelerated the decline, especially among younger Americans across the political spectrum.
A majority (53 percent) of American adults have an unfavorable opinion of Israel today, an 11-percentage-point increase from March 2022, according to Pew Research Center. Self-identified Democrats are far more likely to have an unfavorable opinion of Israel (69 percent) than Republicans (37 percent). But among those Republicans aged eighteen to forty-nine, 50 percent have an unfavorable view of Israel, a 15-point increase from 2022.
Just as many in the MAGA movement have been critical of President Donald Trump’s support to Ukraine, a similar shift on Israel may not be far behind.
US Vice President JD Vance is reported to have been skeptical of striking Iran, and MAGA-aligned activists, such as Charlie Kirk, highlighted how foreign policy issues are causing a rupture within the movement. US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene labeled the war in Gaza a “genocide.” Even evangelical Christians—long viewed as a core pro-Israel bloc—are generationally divided, with younger ones deprioritizing Israel.
A MAGA-driven decline in Republican support would align well with left-leaning Democrats, who would be thrilled to cut military aid to Israel. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 63 percent of Democrats think the United States is too supportive of Israel. Perhaps more concerning for Jerusalem, so too do 47 percent of self-professed independents.
Global support for Israel is collapsing
But US support for Israel looks quite good compared to most of the world. No country in the Americas, Europe, or Asia has a majority positive view of Israel, according to Pew Research Center polling; Arab populations are dangerously negative on the country.
The once seemingly inevitable momentum toward Arab normalization, led by Saudi Arabia, has reversed, as Michael Robbins and Amaney A. Jamal of the public opinion research organization Arab Barometer recently explained in Foreign Affairs. In Morocco, which signed the Abraham Accords, they note that the share of Moroccans supporting normalized relations has dropped from 31 percent in 2021-22 to just 13 percent in 2023-24. In Jordan, which has a peace accord with Israel going back to 1996, the number is under 5 percent.
Expansion of the Abraham Accords was always going to have to wait until a few years after the war in Gaza concluded and public anger had a chance to subside. A sweeping new Israeli operation in Gaza will ensure that timeline is pushed out even further.
But Arab state buy-in is also key to any realistic post-Gaza conflict plan. Israel expanding operations in Gaza risks alienating Arab states from “day after” planning, lest their publics accuse them of being complicit with Israel’s failure of strategic planning.
An Arab official, speaking on condition of anonymity, recently lamented to me that “Israelis take their friends for granted sometimes and choose to ignore the bigger picture.”
A different poll shows a plurality of Europeans across six countries believe Israel’s response has gone too far—not that it shouldn’t have responded to October 7 at all. These are the publics Israel must win back to repair its global standing.
The alternative is increasing isolation on the international stage, prompting decisions by traditional allies that contradict Israel’s foreign policy goals, such as the moves by the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Portugal, and Australia to formally recognize a State of Palestine at the United Nations next month.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar responded that recognizing a State of Palestine is a “prize for terror,” aptly summing up the criticism from Israelis across the political spectrum. Their fellow citizens—parents and children, friends and colleagues—were killed and kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. They’re finding it impossible to comprehend that the outcome is increased global recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state next door, even as Hamas continues to support the elimination of Israel and the eradication of Jews.
The recognition is also occurring at a time when the Palestinian governance structure, the Palestinian Authority—which has lacked any power in Gaza since the 2007 civil war, when Hamas took over the strip—is also struggling to assert authority in various portions of the West Bank, undermining Israeli confidence that a sovereign state could ensure its security even if it wanted to. Plus, the long illusory final status issues for a two-state solution—borders, security, water, refugees, and Jerusalem—are further from resolution today than at any point since the 1993 Oslo Accords.
The recognition decisions are a strategic risk that will have no practical impact—as the 147 other countries that previously recognized a State of Palestine can attest—aside from ensuring that London, Paris, Ottawa, Canberra, and other capitals lose future leverage with Israel. That won’t be just on issues related to the Palestinians, but potentially across the Levant, such as French interests in Lebanon.
But two things can be true at once. And for these countries, recognition of an independent Palestine is not a move of strategic idealism but of desperation. With few available meaningful levers to oppose the Israeli government’s policies—combined with Israel’s strategic and diplomatic failure to provide a future roadmap for Gaza—this was the most immediate practical step.
The view of those capitals recognizing a State of Palestine is that the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and the starvation of millions, is untenable morally and politically. And the only way to ensure that it does not happen again is for Palestinians to have sovereignty over the territory in which they live.
It’s also worth noting that this move was a political necessity for the leaders of Britain, France, Canada, and Australia—all of whom are ideologically in the center or center-left. Cross-party support for recognition has grown in all four countries, especially from left-wing and centrist members of parliament.
But regardless of the leaders’ ultimate motivations, the message is clear. Traditional Israeli allies are becoming increasingly disillusioned with Jerusalem. And Israel’s global isolation is likely to worsen if it expands operations in Gaza, with Germany already halting all arms sales to Israel and Saudi Arabia calling a takeover of Gaza City “ethnic cleansing.”
The myth of unilateral defense
With global support for Israel plummeting, Jerusalem would be wise to reconsider its long-held doctrine that, at the end of the day, Israel has to be able to defend itself, even if that means going it alone. In reality, Israel has always relied on its allies.
During initial skirmishes between Israel and Iran in April and October of 2024, the United Kingdom, France, and Jordan joined the United States and put considerable effort and resources into intercepting incoming Iranian attacks on Israel. During the twelve-day war, the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars defending Israel, including deploying interceptor systems, rerouting the USS Nimitz, and launching seven B-2 Spirit bombers to strike the Fordow nuclear site.
This urgently needed assistance complemented the $3.8 billion in military aid Israel receives yearly under the Obama administration’s agreement and additional billions in supplemental aid the Biden and Trump administrations have provided during the war. And Israel gets nonfinancial support as well, one prominent example being the US-negotiated Israel-Lebanon cease-fire that remains at risk but is holding.
The costs are worth it. Defending the United States’ closest ally in the region is important to Middle East stability. Without it, a war between Israel and Iran would have almost certainly been more destructive and lethal for the entire region—and jeopardized US national security. But if Israel continues to insist it will defend itself by itself, then Jerusalem should not be surprised if leading MAGA and far-left policymakers team up to accept such a proposition. They might even seek to end US financial and military support, jeopardizing Israel’s security and forever altering the US-Israel alliance.
How Israel can correct course
There is a fundamental juxtaposition that Jerusalem needs to balance. The lesson Israelis across the political spectrum learned on October 7 is that they need to be more forward leaning on eliminating threats. Israel needs to eradicate such threats before they grow to the level that Hamas reached.
But that lesson is being internalized at a time when much of the region and the world is looking for Israel to go the opposite direction.
Intensifying the war in Gaza will further challenge other countries’ willingness to engage Israel, and it is likely to result in increased calls for Israel to be sanctioned, even though Netanyahu may be able to sustain a close relationship with some leaders.
Instead, Israel should undertake three lines of effort to correct its course—whether under Netanyahu or the next Israeli government, whenever that may arrive.
Do not take over Gaza City—or additional territory in the strip. The IDF’s moves around Gaza City this week are preliminary, and there is still time to cancel a new operation to take over Gaza City and for a cease-fire to emerge. But if Netanyahu follows through on his planned takeover, then an eventual new government should reverse that decision and seek to withdraw as soon as feasibly possible.
As six hundred retired Israeli security officials recently stated in a letter to Trump, Hamas “no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel.” There is therefore no strategic military objective left to achieve by continuing the war, let alone taking over Gaza City and managing the inevitable fallout among the hundreds of thousands of Gazans living there. Israel should work instead to expel remaining Hamas leaders and prevent the terror group from being part of Gaza’s next government—goals that are achievable with Arab support.
Reestablish bipartisan US political support. Bennett’s recent post on X implied that Democrats were already lost allies. That sentiment is an exaggeration, but the strain is real. The inflection point was not months into the Gaza war but a decade ago when Netanyahu delivered a partisan address to Congress on US negotiations with Iran.
A US-Israel relationship predicated on hoping only non-MAGA Republicans win elections is doomed to fail. Jerusalem needs to put the hard work into restoring the alliance as a bipartisan one, which means being willing to genuinely engage Democrats and Republicans on areas of disagreement and work through them.
Reestablish alliances quietly, not through PR. Israel’s poor international messaging is problematic. But the reason for its low international standing is its policies.
Israel’s military prowess is not questioned, and many of its regional relationships limited to security and intelligence cooperation may remain. But to reenergize its international standing, Jerusalem has to go further.
Israel still has much to offer the region and the world, including with its technological capabilities in agriculture, desalination, and healthcare. These strengths should form the basis for quiet but robust public-private partnerships to help repair frayed alliances.
Israel is at an inflection point. If it proceeds in “taking over” Gaza City, then it will risk further diplomatic and economic isolation in support of unachievable tactical military objectives. And in the long run, going it alone will only make Israel less safe.
Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East at the US National Intelligence Council.
Further reading
Tue, Aug 19, 2025
How Trump can drive an end to the war in Gaza
New Atlanticist By Daniel B. Shapiro
A narrow opportunity exists to avoid stretching the Gaza tragedy into 2026. The US president needs to seize it.
Tue, Aug 5, 2025
Did the Israel-Iran war expose China’s Middle East policy?
MENASource By
The region’s importance in Beijing’s foreign policy is limited and, thus, not much energy and resources are invested in long-term planning.
Fri, Aug 8, 2025
Israel’s gamble in Gaza City signals a push toward negotiation—but risks a long insurgency
New Atlanticist By Alex Plitsas
Israel’s decision to occupy Gaza City is aimed at ending its war with Hamas. But without careful planning, it risks starting a new conflict against a brewing insurgency.
Image: An Israeli soldier stands next to military vehicles as seen from the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border, Israel August 18, 2025. REUTERS/Amir Cohen