The mournful isolation of Israel six months after terrorists attacked

By Ruth Marcus

RE’IM, Israel — To visit this traumatized country as an American Jew is to begin — just begin — to grasp what one U.S.-born Israel Defense Forces soldier described to me as the “existential loneliness of Israel.”

​Israelis, of all political persuasions and degrees of observance, feel besieged and misunderstood. Six months after a day on which more Jews were murdered than since the Holocaust, Israel finds itself nearing the status of international pariah. How could this have happened?

Is this the predictable denouement of a struggle for survival that was inevitably going to involve heartbreaking numbers of civilian casualties and suffering, and the resulting criticism? Or is it the product of a war waged with such heedlessness toward humanitarian concerns that Israel has squandered whatever public sympathy was initially inclined in its direction?

Is this the bitter fruit of years of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians and mistaken policies in the disputed territories? Or does it reflect the ugly reality that much of the world has never accepted the existence of Israel as a Jewish state?

https://wapo.st/43JEm8A

This is a gifted article. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.