This week, the Israel Air Force (IAF) continued to hunt, bomb, and rocket the Hamas terrorist squads hiding among Gaza’s civilians, killing more women and children in the process—so far, according to Hamas figures, some 30,000 Palestinian women and children have died since October 2023. Meanwhile, Israel’s international position dramatically worsened. EU member states and Canada have imposed minor sanctions against the Jewish state and threaten worse. Observers in Jerusalem have warned that Israel faces an international relations “tsunami.” In Washington, Israel’s staunchest ally, President Donald Trump’s aides, speaking anonymously, told The Washington Post that a break with Israel is likely if it does not end its war-making in the Gaza Strip. But Trump himself has remained mum—though he previously voiced his agreement with Benjamin Netanyahu that the war must end with Hamas’s destruction. According to recent reports, Trump’s new Arabian Gulf allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—are pressing Washington to end the Gaza War.

Palestinian suffering—and Muslim pressures within Western societies and from the Arab capitals—are now beginning to have an impact beyond America’s Ivy League campuses. Western public opinion and European governments are driven by daily TV clips from Gaza showing dead and dying women and children—though never dead and dying combat-age males. They are also influenced by worsening humanitarian conditions on the ground—Trump has even spoken hyperbolically of “a lot of people starving.” And finally they are alarmed at the prospect of a massive new push against Hamas by Israeli ground forces, designed, Netanyahu announced on 21 May, to end in open-ended Israeli rule over the whole Strip, together with the “voluntary” transfer of at least some of its population out of Gaza, as Trump proposed a few weeks ago. Israeli officials argue that European threats and sanctions against Israel only harden Hamas’s positions and demands and encourage pro-Palestinian terrorists like Elias Rodriguez, who shot and killed two Israeli Embassy employees in downtown Washington DC, also on 21 May.

So far, like the Biden Administration, some European states have imposed individual sanctions against extreme right-wing Israeli politicians and settlers, while Britain, which suspended its (albeit insignificant) deliveries of military equipment to Israel months ago, has announced a suspension of its preferential trade talks with the Jewish state. More importantly, seventeen EU states, led by the Netherlands—traditionally a firm ally of Israel’s—are pushing for a review of the EU’s political and trade ties with the country. Nothing may come of any of this, since all EU policy decisions require unanimity and countries like Hungary, Germany, and the Czech Republic are unlikely to agree, at least for the moment, to sanctions against Israel. But there has clearly been a shift in attitudes and individual European states, such as the anti-Israeli regimes in Ireland, Belgium, and Spain, as well as commercial companies, may simply impose economic sanctions on their own. Many of Europe’s universities are, in effect, already doing so vis-à-vis Israeli academics and academia.  

Meanwhile, the prospective Israeli push into Gaza—reportedly designed, at least in its first stage, to result in the permanent occupation and “cleansing” of 75 percent of the Strip—is hanging in the balance. Netanyahu hopes that Hamas’s leaders, fearing the impending blow and under growing pressure from suffering civilians—hundreds of whom have recently demonstrated against Hamas and called for an end to the war—will agree to Israel’s demand for a partial hostage–prisoner release and ceasefire agreement. Israel has proposed a 60–70-day ceasefire and the release of a thousand or more Palestinian prisoners in exchange for ten or eleven of the twenty living Israeli hostages and the bodies of some of the 38 dead hostages in Hamas hands.