Analysts express concern over the rehabilitation of Israel, even as it says it has done no wrong.
In both Israel and among its Western allies, the Gaza ceasefire deal is seen as an opportunity – to move on from the accusations of genocide against it, and to restore close relations weakened as a result of public anger.
Over two years of its unrelenting war on Gaza, Israel has killed more than 67,900 Palestinians and injured more than 170,000. It has destroyed or damaged 92 percent of the enclave’s residential housing and its actions in blockading Gaza have led to a famine being declared.
Rights groups, international bodies, and organisations from within Israel, such as B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), have concluded that the country’s actions amount to genocide: a view confirmed by a UN commission of inquiry in September.
By that month, criticism of Israel’s war had reached near consensus across Europe, and millions attended protests against Israel’s actions in world capitals every weekend.
However, marking the ceasefire in the Israeli Knesset on Tuesday, opposition leader Yair Lapid told lawmakers, including United States President Donald Trump: “Those who demonstrated against Israel in London, Rome, Paris … were deceived by propaganda … The truth is, there was no genocide, no intentional starvation.”
Some in Israel are hoping for just that.
Reacting to news of the impending ceasefire over the weekend, Israel’s hardline National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir branded the agreement a “national defeat” and “eternal disgrace”. Others, such as Amit Halevi, a member of the Israeli parliament representing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, went further, saying Israel should have declared “to Hamas and to the whole world that the Jewish people will not forget or forgive until the complete annihilation of the neo-Nazis in Gaza and the restoration of Israeli control over this strip of our homeland”.
International amnesia
Many in the West already appear to be rushing to accept the ceasefire and US assurances of “everlasting peace” at face value.
Earlier this month, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he saw no reason for Germans to continue protesting against Israel now that the ceasefire had been reached. On Wednesday, some of the country’s most senior politicians called upon him to resume arms exports to the country, despite the continued death toll in Gaza, and Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.
On Monday, Israel’s new ambassador to the EU, Avi Nir-Feldklein, suggested that the US might allow the EU to participate in Gaza’s reconstruction if the EU would just “clear the table of what is hanging above our relationship”, he said of the potential sanctions the bloc is considering against Israel.
Toleration of violence
With no drastic reappraisal of Israel’s internal policies towards Palestinians or the occupied West Bank likely, analysts such as Royal United Services Institute’s HA Hellyer suggested that lawmakers in the West and beyond may be preparing for a return to relations similar to the period following the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
The accords were supposed to eventually bring about a Palestinian state, but as Israeli intransigence made that increasingly unlikely in the years that followed, Western rhetoric shifted from claiming outright support for the two-state solution to supporting the process towards it.
“I think we can see a similar phase ahead,” Hellyer said, “as long as the violence is below a certain level, it will be acceptable.”
“For now, the focus will be moving rubble and rebuilding; not on the fact that half of Gaza remains off-limits to all Palestinians apart from collaborators and the other half remains under occupation,” he told Al Jazeera from Washington.
However, while lawmakers – wary of US pressure and, for some, their own country’s potential complicity in Israel’s genocide – may be eager for a return to pre-war detente, among the public, especially the young, two years of carnage in Gaza have produced a seismic shift.