Alongside the defeat suffered by the “resistance axis” in Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon—though to a lesser extent in Iran and Yemen—a new indicator has emerged, one we’ve not seen since Israel’s founding: a profound shake-up in Israel’s image in the West. This is no trivial detail. Israel, which invested heavily in its Western image and crafted it in a way that led Western public opinion to regard it as a Western island in the East, now faces a global public that sees it as a perpetrator of genocide.

What the recent CNN poll revealed has been viewed as a major shift—indeed, an unprecedented one—in American public opinion in favor of the Palestinians. One potential outcome of this shift is the pressure Donald Trump brought to bear on Benjamin Netanyahu to accept an agreement to end the war in Gaza; and a more certain result is the growing number of countries moving to recognize the State of Palestine.

More important than these practical results, however, is Israel’s transformation from a “state of survivors” into a state of perpetrators. This conclusion may seem hasty if measured against the many years Israel spent building its image in the West. Yet Netanyahu and the religious right have swiftly squandered the capital accrued by the founding fathers, capital that earned Israel massive Western support throughout the state-building years.

Netanyahu is the extension of a Zionist course that bears little relation to Western sensibilities, particularly those that David Ben-Gurion leveraged to construct the narrative of victimhood. The Israel that took shape in the aftermath of World War II, as a form of restitution for the genocide inflicted on Jews by Europeans, is today the author of a parallel genocide.

This shift lies outside the consciousness of the “new” Israel. It does nothing to restrain Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in their drive to swallow up more of the West Bank. Never before has Israel been so indifferent to Western signals as it is today.

Europe, from its south (Spain) to its north (Norway), and from its center to its west, insofar as we lack numbers for the east, has turned into societies aligned with the Palestinian victim. What is more, the “new Israel” remains unconcerned by this transformation. The margin within which its religious right operates expands by the day, heedless of the damage to Israel’s image.

It bears noting that Israel, in a sense, is its image more than its reality. This fact terrifies what remains of non-religious elites in Tel Aviv, yet it does not slow the projects of the religious right.

Yet the impasse the Palestinian victim now faces lies in the absence of forces capable of capitalizing on Israel’s collapsing image. The recent wave of international recognition of the State of Palestine came largely as a reaction to the scenes of genocide, a direct consequence of the horror in Gaza, and to the accompanying diplomatic efforts, particularly by Saudi Arabia and France. Without the momentum of that crime, those political initiatives would not have materialized.

It is true that the Abraham Accords have been shaken by the daily carnage in Gaza. However, this shake-up remains separate from the broader collapse of Israel’s moral standing. The bombing of Doha had a far greater impact on the Gulf regimes’ relationship with Israel than the killing of roughly 70,000 Palestinians.

Addressing the reality of Israel’s declining image in the West requires an approach that neither the so-called “resistance” regimes nor the “Abrahamic” ones can currently offer. Between the fantasy of “throwing Israel into the sea” and the folly of unconditional normalization lies a third path; one that treats the Palestinian cause as the natural continuation of the legacy of the victim, aspiring to nothing beyond what international recognition of a Palestinian state already implies.

The balance of power today does not allow for a rapid political capitalization on this global shift. Netanyahu remains at the height of his arrogance; Donald Trump, for his part, seeks not to respond to changing Western public opinion but to secure the Nobel Prize that has eluded him. Yet this state of affairs cannot last long. The crime is too glaring to be concealed, and while Israel is a fact and a reality, it is not beyond the reach of basic human conscience.

A truth has been established and documented: Israel committed genocide in Gaza. After the guns fall silent, Palestine will need actors capable of cementing that truth in the world’s conscience; a world that has, at long last, begun to side with the victim.

What is needed now is someone who can translate that truth into political action — something that neither the “resistance axis” nor the “Abrahamic” frameworks are capable of doing. Perhaps the return to the model of the First Intifada, as a civic and grassroots movement that once achieved an unfinished success, could offer a way forward.

The defeat has marked the culmination of the failure of the military option. Even before that, the “Abrahamic peace” initiatives had already bypassed the Palestinian right altogether. Both paths were divorced from genuine national considerations. Today, there is no viable horizon other than Palestinians reclaiming their own cause, a difficult and lengthy process, but the only path left.