2024 Will Be Remembered as the Year Israel’s Global Legitimacy Fully Unraveled

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Since the state of Israel’s founding, its leaders and supporters have sought acceptance among other states as a peer, and legitimacy in the eyes of the global public. It has achieved mixed success on the former — and failed repeatedly on the latter.

The examples are numerous. The 2022 World Cup, for one, saw a flood of social media videos involving Israeli reporters pursuing interviews with soccer fans, only to be rebuffed or confronted for Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Fans refused to talk to Israeli journalists on camera. English fans shouted “Free Palestine!” during an interview. And in an especially telling scene, a group of Moroccan fans walked away from a reporter after he shared that he was working for Israeli television, prompting the journalist to yell as they left, “But we have peace! You signed the peace agreement!”

The Abraham Accords — which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, including Morocco — may have represented the governments that signed them, but not necessarily the people who they ruled. Indeed, with pro-Palestine scenes throughout the event and ubiquitous Palestinian flags, a joke circulated before the tournament’s conclusion: No need to watch the final, because we already know which country won the World Cup — Palestine.

The episode was a reminder of what international law scholar Richard Falk calls “the Legitimacy War,” in which large numbers of people around the world question Israel’s claims of self-defense to justify military violence, and many doubt its legitimacy as a state on Palestinian land. The U.S., however, has been an outlier: Washington leads the small minority of countries in the UN General Assembly that vote in opposition to resolutions condemning Israel’s actions. Those votes have been largely representative of an American public that either embraces or passively accepts Israeli violence and U.S. support for it.

That is, until this past year. The genocidal Israeli offensive that began in October 2023, following a breach of Israeli fences by Palestinians in Gaza and attack on nearby Israeli towns, is historic for a number of reasons. The first is the Israeli assault’s sheer brutality, which experts call “by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians” in this century. The year of catastrophic violence is also noteworthy for the outpouring of protest it sparked in the U.S.

While popular understanding of the Palestinian struggle in the U.S. is still far from that elsewhere in the world, there has nonetheless been an enormous shift. The yearslong, determined but marginalized movement for Palestinian rights in the U.S. both led and was eclipsed by a massive wave of dissent, which produced some 3,000 campus protests during the spring 2024 semester alone.

Whereas majorities of Americans sympathized with the argument that Israel had a right to self-defense in the days immediately following the October 7 attacks, the devastating Israeli offensive in its wake pushed many to support a ceasefire. When polls showed that a whopping 68 percent of people in the U.S. supported a ceasefire just over a month into Israel’s assault, it marked a breakthrough: For the first time ever, the majority of Americans aligned with the movement for Palestinian rights on a policy demand.

Israel’s horrific offensive has driven this conversation. The apocalyptic toll of its airstrikes, the impact of its forced displacement of Palestinians across Gaza into makeshift camps (which Israel has then attacked), and its systematic targeting of medical and aid infrastructure and personnel have all achieved coverage in mainstream U.S. media. While those news media largely accept Israel’s claims of “self-defense” uncritically, their reporting nonetheless constitutes the most extensive mainstream coverage of the plight of Palestinians in U.S. history.

Crucially though, it is Palestinians in Gaza themselves — as journalists and as ordinary people with phones — documenting their own genocide, narrating their own stories and rebutting Israeli framing, that have most deeply informed sympathies in the U.S. public.

For people in the U.S., this abundant — if devastating — access to the reality in Gaza has combined with mass protest to produce opposition to the U.S. arming of the genocide. From highly visible dissent by Jewish activists, to the largest march against Israeli aggression in U.S. history, to the spring’s student encampments, the movement demanding a ceasefire was a leading factor in convincing Americans to adopt that position.

Remarkably, the protest movement successfully pushed majorities of Americans to go beyond the call for a cessation of hostilities, with a CBS News poll revealing that 61 percent of Americans polled (and 77 percent of Democratic voters) said the U.S. “should not send weapons and supplies to Israel.”

Decisions by the International Court of Justice that Israel was plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, and by the International Criminal Court to charge the Israeli prime minister and defense minister with war crimes and crimes against humanity, only fueled this sentiment.

Rooted in the protest movement, opposition to U.S. support for the Israeli slaughter, calls for ceasefire and support for an arms embargo even found expression in Washington’s halls of power. This began with Biden administration staff confronting their high-ranking supervisors, and in some cases resigning from their positions. It culminated in November, with 19 senators voting in favor of joint resolutions of disapproval against shipments of certain U.S. weapons to Israel.

While recent years have seen isolated but bold critique of U.S. arming of Israeli violence by some members, Congress has institutionally remained adamant in its support for continuing the decadeslong policy of arming Israel without reservation.

In 2024, the number of members challenging that support grew. Not long ago, it was hard to imagine that nearly a fifth of members of one of the most elite political institutions at the core of U.S. power — the Senate — would challenge U.S. pro-Israel orthodoxy. By virtue of a movement that has shaken the country, it happened.

That vote only shows part of the story, of course. The core leadership of the U.S. political class has taken many opportunities to remind members of Congress who question unconditional aid to Israel of their minority status in that body. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress in July was a dramatic illustration. Invited by congressional leadership — including Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — Netanyahu repeated the narrative that it is Palestinians who are genocidal, and that Israel was acting in self-defense. The prime minister spoke to thunderous, standing ovations by members of Congress.

But ironically, the event illustrated the growing cleavage between the U.S.’s political class and its population. Indeed, the heavily policed, thousands-strong protest outside of the Capitol during Netanyahu’s speech was more representative of U.S. popular sentiment than the applause of Congress members inside.

Dozens of members — and then-presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris — skipped the prime minister’s speech. Most did so quietly, and if they were not necessarily acting out of respect for Palestinian rights, they had at least concluded that being seen at the speech and associated with Netanyahu may be a liability, rather than a boon, to their political fortunes.

When the White House hinted in May at the possibility of consequences for Israel’s conduct in Gaza, Netanyahu responded with bravado: “If we have to stand alone, we will stand alone.”

“But it is an empty promise,” said David E. Rosenberg, economics editor for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “As large and technologically sophisticated as Israel’s arms industry is, it could never fulfill the country’s needs for basics such as fighter jets, submarines, and bombs.”

The fact is that Israel’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world — especially among the public of its primary patron, the U.S. — is critical for the state to carry out its plans in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and beyond.

That legitimacy is fragile, relative to other states. A combination of the recency of its founding, the colonial violence central to its establishment (and every day of its operation since) and the Palestinian refusal to dissolve as a nation, puts the unquestioned assumption of legitimacy that other states enjoy into the spotlight when it comes to Israel. This is why it is so common for conversations about Israel’s egregious acts to quickly escalate to the question: “Do you think that Israel has the right to exist?” States everywhere do horrendous things, but Israel’s fundamental illegitimacy requires constant justification of its actions and its existence by its supporters.

And while Israel’s legitimacy is more secure among older Americans, and hegemonic among senior U.S. officials, “the longer-term outlook for Israel is less certain,” writes Rosenberg. Americans under 29, he notes, “hold a more favorable view of Palestinians as a people than they do of Israelis. If these opinions stay with the young as they grow older and advance to positions of power and influence (and assuming that the Israel-Palestine dynamic remains unchanged), Israel could be in for tough times.”

Indeed, the triumph of referendums supporting divestment among college students, including on elite campuses like Yale and Princeton, suggests a rising generation with an outlook on Israel that diverges from current U.S. policy.

A state’s legitimacy does not need to be vanquished for it to go into crisis. When it is simply seriously contested, that undermines a state’s ability to act. Hence Israel’s enormous investment in shoring up support and normalization of its membership in a global society, including a multimillion-dollar budget for its Ministry for Strategic Affairs, tasked with buttressing Israel’s image. And Israel’s government just proposed the largest public relations budget ever for the Foreign Ministry.

Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs Sima Vaknin-Gil said in 2016, “Today, among the countries of the world, Israel is a pariah state. Our objective is that in 2025 nobody in the world will raise the question ‘does Israel have the right to exist?’”

As we enter 2025, majorities of Americans support cutting military support for Israel. Witnessing the annihilation of sections of Palestinian society in Gaza in an assault that Israeli officials describe as “existential,” more Americans than ever are questioning the legitimacy of Israel.

The movement for Palestinian rights must grapple with the new political possibilities and responsibilities to advance support for Palestinian rights that come with irreversible damage to Israel’s credibility.

In 2016, Vaknin-Gil said that “success will be a change in the narrative about Israel in the world. That the narrative in the world won’t be that Israel equals apartheid.”

As we enter 2025, the Strategic Affairs Ministry is even further from its goal than when its director general articulated it. Because actually, the growing understanding around the world — and in the United States — is that Israel equals genocide.