A ceasefire must not stall Israel’s growing isolation
A Palestine solidarity protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Montreal, Canada on 4 October 2025
Ahmed Moor writes in +972 on 15 October 2025:
In early September, near-simultaneous Israeli attacks across the Middle East — a flotilla bombed off the coast of Tunisia and then attacked 75 miles from Gaza, an airstrike on Doha, warplanes bombarding Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, let alone the continuation of the genocide in Gaza — barely marked an escalation. Rather, these events signified the entrenchment of a status quo in which Israel is a rogue state, thanks to the impunity afforded by its patrons.
But status quos change. In May, Knesset member Zvi Sukkot boasted, “Tonight, we killed nearly 100 people from Gaza, and no one cares.” He was wrong: hundreds of millions of people around the world have been laying awake at night for the past two years viewing images of dismembered children on their phones. They’ve learned about the Nakba, heard Israeli leaders speak of Amalek and no innocents in Gaza, and seen TikToks of gleeful Israeli soldiers blowing up and bulldozing Palestinians’ homes. They cannot unsee what they’ve seen.
The overwhelming majority of Israelis who support the actions of their army and government seem unaware of the depth of people’s outrage and grief in response to the genocide. They do not yet understand the scale of the inevitable reckoning that awaits, or the meaning of the word “indelible,” and that memory is long and generational.
But if Israelis do not grasp the extent of their isolation, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to. His administration’s success in securing a ceasefire in Gaza, and his insistence that “the war is over,” is a clear effort to prevent any further erosion to Israel’s legitimacy — to restore the world to what it was, and unwind memories by two years.
“Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back,” Trump told reporters before the ceasefire, a point he repeated during his speech on Monday at Israel’s Knesset. “[The Gaza war] was getting bad. Bibi, you will be remembered for this more than if you’d kept it going, kill, kill, kill.”
Yet, after two years of genocide, and with awareness of Israel’s apartheid reality at unprecedented levels, global momentum for an arms embargo, sanctions, and cultural boycott has approached a tipping point.