On his way to attend the UN General Assembly meeting in New York two weeks ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s jet had to avoid the majority of European airspace.
The plane briefly flew over Greece and Italy but then turned south towards Gibraltar before heading across the Atlantic, adding more than two hours to the flight.
Wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) since November 2024 along with his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu avoided flying over France, his previous choice, or Spain, both of which are members of the ICC.
Once Netanyahu took to the podium on the morning of 26 September to address the General Assembly, he was faced with mass walk outs by UN delegations, leaving the Israeli premier with only a handful of listeners.
Israel later tallied 77 countries, among them Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, that were absent from Netanyahu’s speech after the walk out.
As Israel’s war on Gaza enters its third year, the cumulative effects of the live-streamed genocide on the world stage have both entrenched the centrality of the Palestinian question and effectively turned public opinion against Israel.
Even Netanyahu acknowledged his country’s “type of isolation” on 15 September, which he proposed to embrace by adjusting to it, including by producing weapons to lessen its dependence on foreign nations. He blamed Israel’s isolation on Muslim emigration to Europe in addition to Qatari and Chinese social media influences.
But polls, anti-Israel boycott campaigns, and the shifting discourse among officials and reputable institutions present a different story and provide undeniable evidence of Israel’s pariah status and its patent isolation.
In the US, Israel’s unwavering ally since its creation in 1948, polls show growing hostility towards Israel and an increasingly favourable view of the Palestinians. While the US and the vast majority of Western governments still maintain their support for Israel, many European countries, including the UK, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, Slovenia, and Canada and Australia recently recognised Palestinian statehood despite opposition and threats by the Israeli and US governments.
In traditionally supportive countries, protests, political debates, and legal challenges including arms-export cases in the UK and the Netherlands have added to Israel’s sense of being singled out. Mainstream political parties in Europe such as Labour in the UK, the SPD and Greens in Germany, and the Social Democrats in Scandinavia have faced internal rebellions and youth pressure to curb arms sales to Israel or recognise Palestine.
“The world will not soon forget the genocide,” wrote Gideon Levy in the left-leaning Israeli Haaretz newspaper on 5 October. “Generations will go by before Gaza forgets. Stopping the war now is the lesser evil for Israel, which has lost its way. In recent months, it has been on the verge of moral and strategic collapse,” he said.
Campaigns to boycott Israel have reached the film and music industries, professional football, academia, and literary circles.
Addam Yekutieli, an Israeli artist and anti-war activist, posted recently about silent or blatant boycotts of Israel across all fields on his Instagram account. “From just being a pariah state, we ourselves, as individuals, are now pariahs,” he said.
“At this point, the international community has lost patience waiting for us to mosey towards acknowledging the reality we’ve created in Gaza and the West Bank,” he wrote. “It’s becoming harder not only for Israeli soldiers but also for Israelis at large to roam freely in the world.”
Last week, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs Eurovision, announced that it will hold an extraordinary general meeting in November 2025 where member broadcasters can vote on whether Israel’s broadcaster KAN can participate in Eurovision 2026.
Several European public broadcasters from countries like Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Slovenia have threatened to boycott Eurovision 2026 if Israel is allowed to compete.
Calls to exclude Israel from football and other sports have increased in recent weeks amid an outcry over the humanitarian toll of its military campaign in Gaza. Last month, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Israel should be banned from international sports events like Russia, which was sidelined after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
European soccer body UEFA is moving towards a vote to suspend the member federation of Israel over the war in Gaza. A majority of UEFA’s 20-member executive committee is expected to support any vote in favour of suspending Israeli teams from international play. This would prevent Israeli national and club teams from playing in international competitions including next year’s World Cup.
Academic boycott initiatives against Israel have grown in momentum in recent months. Leading universities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy have frozen research cooperation with Israeli institutions after campus protests.
Last month, nearly one thousand scientists signed a petition calling on the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s leading particle physics laboratory, to reconsider its cooperation with Israel.
“We all are very clear that Israeli academia is very tightly connected to the Israeli defence forces. And that they are carrying out a genocide in Gaza. The fact that the International Court of Justice found plausible grounds for a genocide [by Israel] triggers, in our opinion, a set of obligations of CERN in regard to this conflict,” said Italian physicist Giacomo Ortona, one of the petition’s initiators.
Invitations for Israeli researchers have been cancelled, conference talks postponed, and professional associations have debated excluding colleagues from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Many joint projects are on hold, and about 30 universities across Europe, especially in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, have cut ties with Israeli partners.
Emmanuel Nahshon, a French diplomat tasked with assisting Israeli universities in their international relations, told the Israeli Knesset on 10 September that condemnations of academic partnerships are growing exponentially. It’s a “strategic threat” for Israel, he said.
In the Vatican, the late Roman Catholic Pope Francis, who advocated for the Palestinians in Gaza, called for an investigation into Israel’s genocide. His American successor, Pope Leo, described it as an “ongoing massacre” on Monday.
Israel’s growing international isolation is often compared to that of Apartheid-era South Africa because of several structural and symbolic parallels. In both cases, the younger generations, trade unions, student movements, and churches in Europe and North America have led the moral pressure ahead of their governments.
Over time, these grassroots campaigns reshaped official Western policy on South Africa with sanctions on Pretoria in the 1980s. Today, there is mounting pressure on Western governments to restrict arms sales to Israel or recognise Palestinian statehood.
Apartheid South Africa was expelled or suspended from many international bodies. Today, Israel faces repeated UN censures, International Court of Justice (ICJ) proceedings, the recognition of Palestine by more states, and the downgrading of relations by Latin-American and African countries, all signalling a shrinking circle of allies.
Both governments framed the isolation as unfair singling-out. Pretoria portrayed the sanctions as a communist-driven conspiracy. Israeli leaders often describe boycotts as anti-Semitic or politically biased, insisting that they are being judged by a double standard.
The difference between Apartheid South Africa and Israel is that the latter faces accusations of genocide, which in international law is considered the crime of all crimes. Israel has also launched wars against Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, and bombed both Yemen and the Qatari capital Doha.
South Africa’s 2024 case against Israel before the ICJ, the judicial arm of the United Nations, is significant because it comes from a former pariah state whose abhorred apartheid system was dismantled in 1994.
Today, an increasing number of high-profile historians, academics, politicians, rights groups and public figures have come out to acknowledge that what Israel is doing in Gaza is indeed genocide. Most significantly, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the world’s main academic association of genocide scholars, passed a resolution on 1 September saying that the legal criteria have been met to establish that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The three-page resolution calls on Israel to “immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza, including deliberate attacks against and killing of civilians including children, starvation, the deprivation of humanitarian aid, water, fuel, and other items essential to the survival of the population, sexual and reproductive violence, and the forced displacement of the population.”
International rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the Israeli B’Tselem have also concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Holocaust and genocide scholar Omer Bartov, Israeli holocaust historians Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman, and Illan Pape, and writers Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, and Russell T Davies, among 380 others, and celebrities Dua Lipa and Javier Bardem, among others, have also publicly called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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