Israel’s Abraham Accords Gamble Has Unraveled in Three Years

A Pew Research Center survey conducted across 36 countries between February and May 2026 found that a median of 67% of adults hold an unfavorable view of Israel, the most negative reading in the survey’s history. In the United States, Israel’s indispensable patron, unfavorable views rose from 42% in 2022 to 60% by 2026. Confidence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fell to single digits or below in most of the European countries surveyed. The Abraham Accords framework, the most significant diplomatic realignment in the Middle East since Camp David, survives in name only. Its signatories have not withdrawn, but the public substance of normalization has drained away, replaced by quiet back-channel cooperation that the region’s publics no longer tolerate and Western publics no longer ignore.

What follows is a reckoning for a state that spent two decades building something recognizably new in Arab-Israeli relations, then watched its own response to the worst day in its history reduce that edifice to rubble. The damage is measurable, it is structural, and it will outlast both the war and the prime minister whose political survival prolonged it.

What Israel Built Between 2020 and 2023

The Abraham Accords were signed on the White House lawn in September 2020. Four Arab governments, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, chose to normalize relations with Israel, breaking a decades-old Arab consensus that had conditioned recognition on Palestinian statehood. The agreements were transactional from the start, anchored to American inducements, intelligence sharing, and arms sales, and struck over the heads of publics who were never consulted. In Morocco, the fourth signatory, normalization was tied directly to Washington’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Yet something real accumulated between 2020 and 2023. Bilateral agreements were signed across defense, agriculture, technology, and tourism. Israeli visitors discovered Marrakech and Dubai. The Negev Forum convened foreign ministers from six nations in a configuration that would have seemed impossible a generation earlier. For the first time in Israel’s history, its flag flew in Arab capitals as a diplomatic fact rather than a provocation. The arrangement was fragile, contested, and built on foundations that could not survive a serious shock, but it was also evolving, and the September 2020 White House ceremony marked the first credible pathway away from permanent regional belligerence.

Three years later, that pathway is impassable. The Negev Forum has not convened since the Gaza war began. Air links between Morocco and Israel have been severed. Bahrain recalled its ambassador. The people-to-people ties that were always the most vulnerable dimension of normalization have all but vanished. What remains is a framework sustained by discreet defense contracts, quiet intelligence cooperation, and trade flows conducted in whispers, the diplomatic equivalent of a relationship held together entirely behind closed doors.

The Response That Erased It

On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants launched a coordinated assault from Gaza into southern Israel that killed roughly 1,200 people and took more than 240 hostage, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and the worst single attack in Israel’s history. The atrocities, documented in real time on body cameras, security footage, and the phones of victims, gave Israel both the legal right and the international sympathy to respond with overwhelming force.

What followed was a campaign of an entirely different duration and scale from any previous Israeli military operation in Gaza. Instead of a time-limited, targeted response, the kind Israel had conducted against Hezbollah in 2006 or in shorter Gaza operations over the previous decade, the war stretched across years. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble. Hospitals, universities, and refugee camps were destroyed or rendered inoperable. International courts and institutions issued findings and provisional measures. Casualty figures mounted into the tens of thousands, with women and children forming the overwhelming majority.

A more disciplined campaign, surgical, brief, modeled on past targeted operations, would have been tolerated, even tacitly endorsed, by much of the international community. It would have preserved the diplomatic momentum of 2020, kept the door open for Saudi normalization, and maintained the image of a democracy acting in self-defense within the bounds of proportionality. Instead, Israel chose maximalism and, in doing so, confirmed in the eyes of billions of people watching on their phones every accusation its enemies had ever leveled against it.

A Collapse Measured in Numbers

The data from 2026 describe a public opinion environment without precedent in the bilateral relationship. Pew Research surveyed 44,657 adults across 36 countries and found unfavorable views of Israel at 67% median, against 25% favorable. In the United States, unfavorable views stood at 60%, up from 53% in 2025 and 42% in 2022. Among American liberals, 83% now hold an unfavorable view, against 37% of conservatives, an ideological gap larger than in any other country surveyed.

The shift is global and uniform in direction. Unfavorable views became more common in 13 of the 24 countries where Pew had comparable trend data. In Italy, the share expressing an unfavorable view rose from 66% to 75%. In Australia, from 74% to 79%. In Indonesia, from 80% to 86%. Only in Greece did views warm, and even there just 30% of respondents expressed a positive opinion of Israel.

The picture in the Arab world is starker still. Arab Barometer’s 2023 to 2024 wave found that in none of the seven countries surveyed did support for normalization with Israel exceed 13% after October 7. In Morocco, the most promising case study, public support for normalization fell from 31% in 2022 to 13% after the Hamas-led attack. The 2025 Arab Opinion Index, conducted across 15 Arab countries with more than 40,000 respondents, found that just 6% of citizens across the Arab world accepted the recognition of Israel, against 87% who opposed it, with the highest rates of opposition in Libya at 96%, Jordan at 95%, and Kuwait at 94%.

What the Polling Shows by Country

Source: Pew Research Center, Spring 2026 Global Attitudes Survey.

The Damage Now Extends to Citizens, Not Just Governments

The reputational collapse has moved past government policy and into attitudes toward Israeli citizens themselves, a distinction that previous military operations, however severe, had preserved. In the 2025 Nation Brands Index, Israel ranked last among 50 countries for the second consecutive year, recording a 6.1% drop in its overall score, the sharpest annual decline since the index began nearly two decades ago.

The survey, conducted between August and September 2025 with roughly 40,000 respondents across 20 countries, found Israel last in three of the index’s six perception categories: tourism, exports, and a measure of human sentiment encompassing trust, empathy, and goodwill toward citizens. Researchers noted that distinctions between Israeli government policy and the diversity of views within Israeli society have largely disappeared in global perception, particularly among Generation Z respondents in Western countries, where Israel was widely viewed as a colonial or illegitimate state. The Jerusalem Post reported the index data on December 25, 2025, with findings that Israelis abroad had experienced a rise in hostile encounters, threats, and attacks, alongside severance of ties in academia and culture.

Confidence in Netanyahu has cratered alongside the country’s image. Pew found that in Italy, 88% of adults expressed little or no confidence in the prime minister to do the right thing in world affairs. In Sweden, the figure was 84%. In Germany, 83%. In France, 80%. In the United States, 59% had little or no confidence, with younger Americans and those on the ideological left registering the steepest distrust. The reputational damage to the country and to its leader now travels together.

Why Previous Wars Did Not Produce This

Israel has fought in Gaza before. Operation Cast Lead ran from December 2008 into January 2009. Operation Protective Edge ran through the summer of 2014. Operation Guardian of the Walls ran for eleven days in May 2021. Each provoked international criticism. Each generated temporary dips in Israel’s standing abroad. Each was absorbed into global memory within months, and diplomatic normalization efforts, where they existed, resumed.

The current campaign is of a different order of magnitude, in duration, in documented destruction, and in the sheer volume of visual evidence streamed in real time to billions of phone screens. That volume is itself a variable. Earlier operations produced thousands of hours of footage. This one produced millions, transmitted live, stripped of context, and algorithmically amplified across platforms whose business models reward emotional intensity over factual precision. The result is not a temporary dip in sympathy but a structural shift in consciousness that no rebranding campaign, trade delegation, or carefully staged cultural exchange will reverse within a generation.

The shift is also visible inside Western political coalitions where Israel had long assumed bipartisan reflex support. In the United States, the gap between liberal and conservative opinion on Israel is now 46 percentage points, larger than in any other country Pew surveyed. In Australia, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden, around nine-in-ten or more of those on the left hold a negative view. The constituencies Israel once took for granted have either moved or are moving.

Rebuilding From a Crater

Israel has rebuilt its international standing from low points before. The 1982 Lebanon War produced a comparable wave of opprobrium, recovered from within a decade. The first and second intifadas damaged the country’s image, then recovered it. Each cycle of violence in the past was followed by a diplomatic reset, sometimes quiet, sometimes public, that restored enough international legitimacy for Israel to function as a normal member of the global system.

This time, the arithmetic is harder. The Abraham Accords states have not withdrawn, but they have withdrawn from view. The Moroccan public, the most receptive in the Arab world at 31% support in 2022, has collapsed to 13%. The 2025 Arab Opinion Index found that the number of Arabs willing to recognize Israel fell by 2 percentage points from 2022, with half of the remaining supporters conditioning acceptance on the formation of an independent Palestinian state. The Pew data shows unfavorable views growing fastest among younger respondents, the cohorts who will shape their countries’ foreign policy for the next half-century. Arab Barometer analysts Michael Robbins and Amaney Jamal wrote in Foreign Affairs that Arab leaders “remain reluctant to challenge Israel directly, yet are also unwilling to confront public backlash by advancing closer cooperation.” That is a stable equilibrium for now, and a hostile one for anyone hoping to revive normalization.

The challenge for Israel is no longer to rebuild reputation from a low point. It is to rebuild from a crater, in a world that has seen too much to look away again. The hardest siege to lift is the one a state has imposed upon itself.

Methodology note: This article draws on the Pew Research Center Spring 2026 Global Attitudes Survey, the 2025 Nation Brands Index, Arab Barometer’s 2023 to 2024 wave, and the 2025 Arab Opinion Index. Figures are accurate as of publication.