The Greatest threat to Israel is not Hamas, says Jonathan Saxty

The greatest threat to Israel is not Hamas but instead the reaction to unfolding events in the Middle East.

The protests against Israel across Western Europe seem all too familiar, and to be honest, students and young people have long gravitated to the defence at what they see as the underdog - in this case the Palestinians.

But the scale of protests now feels different, and increasingly it seems that a sea change is coming if not one has already arrived. Although social media is no substitute for opinion polling, the sentiment online now seems dramatically skewed towards the Palestinians and against Israel.

These are the future electorates across Western Europe. True, Muslims are a huge proportion of those protesting (interestingly comparatively silent on the plight of the Muslim Uyghurs in China).

But Muslims are also driving population growth across Western Europe, and will be a growing share of the general population of countries like France, Germany and the UK in the years ahead.

Even among the wider population of younger people, there seems now a new mood which feels increasingly fixed.

Perhaps even more striking though has been the break-out of hostility towards Israel in the US.

For years, Israel has been able to count on the near total support of its superpower friend.

Yet, even before the atrocities of October 7, pollsters Gallup found - for the first time - that Democrat sympathies for Palestinians outstripped those towards Israelis, 49 to 38 per cent.

By contrast, independents showed support towards Israelis by 49 to 32 per cent, while Republicans showed a whopping gap towards Israelis by 78 to 11 per cent.

It seems that - as in many other areas - Israel represents a major fault-line in the growing US political divide, feeding into wider culture wars which are increasingly dividing America and the West.

Democrats tend to be represented more among younger Americans as well, the most diverse generation in US history. Again, Gallup found that while older generations favoured Israelis, millennials now favoured the Palestinians.

A post-October 7 poll by Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs found nearly half of all Democrats disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the war, with a majority among that group believing the US is now too supportive of Israel.

If the reaction to events in Gaza is anything to go by, and given the trendlines among future voters in the US and Western Europe, this does not bode well for Israel.

Should public opinion stiffen further against the country, what then for America's ongoing military and diplomatic support for the Jewish state?

In the immediate term, Hamas is the great existential threat to its survival. But, longer term, the bigger threat could be a dramatic and perhaps irreversible shift of public opinion among major allies.

Since day one, Israel has lived in an unforgiving and hostile neighbourhood. How would the country cope however in an almost totally unforgiving and hostile world?