Israel’s “isolation” is mostly a Western mirage

The fashionable claim in Western commentary is that Israel is sliding into pariah status, scolded by international bodies, shunned in cultural spaces, and punished in reputational terms for the Gaza war. 

That narrative has a neat moral arc, which is exactly why it spreads so easily. But it also rests on a category error. It treats foreign policy like a popularity contest, when the Middle East runs on harder incentives: threat perception, regime survival, and access to the U.S. anchored security and technology ecosystem.

If you judge Israel by those metrics, the “isolated Israel” story looks less like analysis and more like projection.

Two realities moving in opposite directions

In much of the West, public sentiment, institutional signaling, and symbolic consequence are treated as the measure of geopolitical standing. In the Middle East, that is not how states make decisions. Regional governments watch capabilities. 

They ask who can produce actionable intelligence, who can degrade hostile networks, and who can help keep Iran’s reach contained. They care less about reputational storms and more about whether a partner can deliver outcomes.

That is why the same period that produced louder condemnation also produced a quieter, more consequential trend: continued or deepening practical engagement with Israel where interests overlap, including energy, security coordination, intelligence, technology, and trade corridors.

October 7 tried to sever integration, not just inflict pain

A useful lens is to treat October 7 as a strategic sabotage operation, not only a massacre. Hamas aimed to break the momentum of Israel’s regional integration and derail normalization dynamics that had been gathering around the Abraham Accords. 

The point was to make Israel too toxic to touch and to force Arab states back into old patterns of distance.

But war has a way of rewarding the actor that demonstrates leverage. However unpopular Israel became in certain global conversations, many regional decision makers watched a different signal: Israel’s ability to penetrate hostile networks, operate across borders, and hit high value targets. 

In a region where coercion is routine and threats are concrete, that kind of competence does not repel states. It attracts them, sometimes publicly, more often discreetly.

It is easy to look at public criticism from regional capitals and assume it cancels out strategic coordination. 

It does not. Middle Eastern states have long operated on two tracks: external partnerships shaped by interests, and public messaging shaped by domestic stability. That is not hypocrisy so much as governance.

A government can condemn Israel in speeches while still maintaining channels that protect its own security or economic priorities. 

In fact, the more tense the public atmosphere becomes, the more valuable quiet mechanisms are, because they allow regimes to manage pressure without cutting off tools they may need in a crisis.

The big driver Western analysis underweights: Iran

The deepest source of regional alignment logic is Iranian power, its missile ecosystem, its proxy network, its destabilizing reach. For states that view Iran as a strategic threat, Israel is not merely another actor. It is one of the few that has shown it can consistently disrupt Iranian linked networks and impose costs.

That reality does not require anyone to endorse every Israeli decision. It simply reflects how threat based diplomacy works. When governments believe their sovereignty is challenged, they gravitate toward whoever can help restore deterrence. In that context, Israel’s military and intelligence profile matters more than Western reputational narratives.

There is a global layer that makes “isolation” even harder to sustain as a serious description. The U.S. is trying to build alternative economic and infrastructure pathways that compete with China’s model of influence through financing, ports, rail, and digital networks. 

You do not have to accept every grand corridor plan to see the direction: Washington prefers interoperable networks anchored in security guarantees, technology standards, and trusted supply chains.

In that emerging architecture, Israel is awkward to quarantine because it sits at a strategic hinge and brings scarce assets, cyber capability, advanced tech, intelligence capacity, that are directly transferable to partners. Combine that with Gulf capital and logistics, and you get a framework that offers states a way to modernize without becoming structurally dependent on Beijing.

So the issue is not whether Israel is applauded. It is whether Israel is embedded in systems that matter, trade, energy, defense, data, and tech. And on that front, the trend lines do not look like expulsion. They look like selective integration.

Saudi Arabia’s posture captures the current reality in miniature. Riyadh can speak critically about Israel for domestic and regional reasons while still signaling that normalization remains on the table, because Saudi modernization requires Western investment, diversified supply chains, advanced manufacturing, and stable maritime routes. 

Those needs are difficult to satisfy inside a China only frame. They fit better inside a U.S. supported regional system where security and technology cooperation are baked in.

Israel’s role in that system is politically controversial and strategically useful, which is exactly why it persists.

What’s really happening

Israel is paying a reputational price in the West, especially in certain institutions and publics. That part is real. But the leap from condemned loudly to isolated strategically is not. 

The Middle East is not forming policy around Western campus sentiment or cultural boycotts. It is making cold judgments about capability, deterrence, and alignment.

Call it unpleasant, call it cynical, call it realist, but it is the operating logic of the region. Under that logic, Israel is not being pushed to the margins. It is being treated as a high value node that many states criticize in public while quietly keeping within reach.

The simplest way to say it is this: popularity is volatile. Utility is durable. Right now, Israel’s utility to regional and American strategy is the stronger force.