Israel is in the grip of an internal and external crisis that could shape the country for a generation.

It has become increasingly isolated internationally, with 150 countries now recognising a Palestinian state, and economic, cultural and sporting boycotts are mounting.

Domestically, while the sense of national cohesion following the trauma of the 7 October attacks is holding up, there are deepening cracks in the consensus thanks to the increasingly divisive policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his handling of the Gaza war and the hostage situation.

In July, the Israeli Democracy Institute (IDI) found that only 40% of the public had trust in Mr Netanyahu, despite the 12-day Israel-Iran war, which commanded broad public support.

While the poll suggested Mr Netanyahu’s base was intact, he was losing support among moderates, most likely because of the failure to bring home the hostages.

Last month, the IDI found that two-thirds of the public would support a deal involving the release of all hostages in exchange for an end to the war and the withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza.

Yet, around half of all Jewish Israelis (49%) supported the security cabinet’s decision in August to expand the military operation in Gaza “including taking and holding territory”.

Israelis appear to be retrenching into competing blocs, with the left ever more hostile to the war and Mr Netanyahu, while the right embraces increasingly hardline attitudes to Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank.

Despite that, the number of Jewish Israelis who believe society can sustain the burden of fighting the Gaza war has fallen from 40% in March 2024, to 28% today.

“There has been a consensus around [prioritising] the hostages of between 70% to 75% for the past year,” says Tal Schneider, political correspondent at the Times of Israel.

“At the beginning [of the war], people believed you needed to finish the job inside Gaza. But now, for at least a year, or year and a half, all polls suggest you need to get the hostages out first.

“People are willing to see the war end, even if Hamas is not completely done. As long as you have living Israeli people inside Gaza, you cannot conduct a war like that, because you’re going to hurt them.”

War fatigue is not the same as a shift in attitudes towards the Palestinians, and poll after poll shows that trust between both sides has evaporated.

In June, the Pew Research survey found that only 21% of Israelis agreed that “peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state is possible,” the lowest level since 2013.

In September last year, a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) and Tel Aviv University found that most Israelis believed terror attacks on Israel would persist or increase if a Palestinian state were established.

A survey of Palestinians in Gaza in May by the PCPSR found that although support for 7 October had declined from 64% last September, some 59% still believed Hamas was correct to launch the attack, with almost two-thirds believing it had “revived international attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that it may lead to increased recognition of the Palestinian state”.

That said, 87% of Palestinians in Gaza surveyed did not believe Hamas had carried out the atrocities captured on video on 7 October.

Hamas’s own pronouncements have been highlighted by Israelis who say they are horrified by the international clamour for a Palestinian state.

Read more: West Bank – Tales of the dispossessed

On 2 August, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, told Al Jazeera that “the initiative by several countries to recognize a Palestinian state is one of the fruits of October 7. We proved that victory over Israel is not impossible, and our weapons are a symbol of Palestinian dignity”.

Benjamin Netanyahu clearly aims to play up these fears as he navigates increasingly narrow political terrain.

His rhetoric at the UN General Assembly on Friday suggests he is tacking hard to the right, describing acceptance of a Palestinian state as “national suicide” and declaring, to a largely empty chamber, that “Israel will not allow you to shove a terror state down our throats”.

Mr Netanyahu has even suggested Israelis should tough it out and weather the storm, depicting the country as a “Super Sparta”, an austere, militarised, self-isolated and self-sufficient society.

On 17 September, he launched a programme to make Israel less reliant on the United States for weapons, declaring that it would “build an arms industry that will match the best arms industries in the world with one proviso”, that they want to produce first for themselves “on a much larger scale and with unimaginable innovation”.

While senior military figures have publicly expressed alarm at Mr Netanyahu’s expansion of the ground offensive into Gaza City, other leading voices from the security establishment have spoken of a paradigm shift.

In the past Israel used its overwhelming superiority to deter its enemies; now it must use that force to defeat them.

Across the region, this is reflected in Israel’s withering assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the 12-day war against Iran, in which it is thought to have seriously degraded its nuclear programme.

In Gaza, according to Meir Ben-Shabat, a former national security advisor, and Asher Fredman, former Israeli chief of staff, Israel should apply this doctrine to the hilt without fear of international outrage, or even criticism from the United States.

“In the current moment,” they wrote this month in Foreign Affairs, “Israel must prioritize its war aims even at the cost of external criticism. Allowing Hamas to remain the dominant military and governmental power in Gaza, either de jure or de facto, is unacceptable. The full demilitarization of Gaza, which requires military force, is the only way to keep Israel truly safe.”

That national obsession with “safety” is key to understanding the current Israeli mindset. Israel has long felt surrounded by enemies bent on her destruction, and 7 October intensified that view; Israelis will frequently tell you that Hamas will do the same again, given half a chance.

So, while a growing number of Israelis oppose the war, and are mindful of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, many remain sceptical about the death toll, or see the endgame through the prism of their own suffering.

“They think it’s gone too far,” says Tal Schneider, of the Times of Israel.

“It’s hurting Israel on so many levels, and we cannot go on like this, both on the humanitarian side, but also for Israeli people [themselves]. They look at their own, they look at the soldiers, the families of the reservists, and obviously the hostages.

“Even economically, we cannot go on like this, with the international isolation, the rise of anti-Semitism around the world. It’s all part of the same problem. We need to end it.”

Israel’s growing isolation is understood to be one of the motivating factors in Donald Trump’s 21-point peace plan, in reality a concoction of pre-existing drafts, which he circulated to Arab and Muslim leaders at the UN on Wednesday.

The plan involves the release of all remaining hostages, a permanent ceasefire, the gradual withdrawal of the IDF from all of the Gaza Strip, a post-war plan that includes a governing mechanism in Gaza without Hamas and a security force that would include Palestinians but also soldiers from Arab and Muslim countries.

Gulf states would fund the new administration and help with reconstruction; there would be some involvement for the Palestinian Authority.

Those in attendance on the Arab and Muslim side are said to have responded positively, on the condition that Israel would not annex parts of the West Bank or Gaza and that humanitarian aid to the enclave immediately increase.

While Mr Netanyahu’s far-right allies Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir continue to clamour for annexation and settlement expansion in the West Bank, he cannot afford to ignore the hardening position of Gulf Arab states.

President Trump regards the Abraham Accords, which restored diplomatic and economic ties between Israel and a number of Arab states, as a signature success of his first term; those accords will be in jeopardy if annexation goes ahead.

“There was a plan for a reduced cabinet meeting – without Smotrich and Ben Gvir – to discuss potentially annexing certain parts of the West Bank,” says one Western diplomat.

“The meeting was cancelled because the [United Arab] Emirates said, for us, this is a red line, and if you do it we may have to reconsider our Abraham accord and go back to square one.”

Israel is also feeling European pressure, despite the narrative that the EU has not been tough enough.

Even if Germany and Italy have blocked a move to suspend Israel’s participation in the Horizon Europe programme, from which Israeli companies and research facilities have benefitted to the tune of €1.1 billion, a number of partner companies, particular from Belgium and the Netherlands, have suspended cooperation out of fear that dual-use goods are involved.

As more countries recognise Palestine, they will be under pressure to recalibrate their willingness to take action against Israel, given the new reality that when one state takes allegedly offensive action against another it may require a stricter legal response.

For the families of the remaining hostages in Gaza, only around 20 who are assumed to be alive out of the 51 remaining, Mr Netanyahu’s uncompromising pitch to the far-right, and his lack of a game plan to end the war, is prolonging their sense of trauma.

“There is one and only one option for a ceasefire and a deal that would bring back all the hostages,” says Udi Geron, whose cousin Tal Haimi was shot dead by Hamas on 7 October and whose body was then abducted into Gaza.

“I will know that this will be in place when I hear Prime Minister Netanyahu saying: we are done, we are going to end this war in order to return all the hostages,” he tells RTÉ News.

“Or until I hear Donald Trump saying: this war is over, I have brokered the deal that brings back all the hostages, and this is what’s right for the region, right for the US, right for the stability of the Middle East – until one or the other says this, then the rest is just dust in the wind.”