One obvious result of Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians in reprisal for Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack is that it has put the Palestinian struggle back at the forefront of global politics. The question now is whether Israel’s assault on Gaza will foster a big enough international backlash to meaningfully affect the status quo ante. Can renewed international focus on the plight of Palestinians generate more robust pressure for a political solution? Or will Israel once again plough through this crisis undeterred?

By any measure, the last few years had seen a waning of many states’ solidarity with the Palestinian cause — this in spite of unchecked encroachment on Palestinian land in the West Bank under Israel’s recent spate of far-right governments. In Gaza, the social, economic, and humanitarian costs of a ferocious blockade have also been rising. Yet a kind of international political fatigue, in the context of a low-intensity conflict and a slow-burning humanitarian crisis, often displaced by the urgency of other global disasters, had drained the Palestinian cause of much of its previous international attention.

In recent years, moreover, Israel has invested much effort in improving its bilateral relations with several formerly hostile states, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2020, the Abraham Accords normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain. More recently, Israel and Saudi Arabia, egged on by the United States, have been in the process of fine-tuning a much talked-about “deal of the century,” now either completely off the table, or contingent on some kind of solution for Palestinian statehood. Of the signatories of the Abraham Accords, only Bahrain, following Jordan’s lead, has pulled its ambassador from Israel as a result of the Gaza crisis.