Israel Has Never Been This Popular

Western media insist on Israel’s isolation, yet the region is closing in around it.

Originally published in Mosaic Magazine.

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“From diplomacy to soccer, Israel is becoming a pariah on the global stage.” Thus a September headline from an article on the CNN website, which went on to detail how Israel is “increasingly isolated” due to the war in Gaza, and faces “backlash seeping into economic, cultural, and sporting arenas.” The article had much to say about condemnations from European governments and human-rights organizations, votes in the UN General Assembly, and a possible boycott from the Eurovision song contest. Such analyses have become something like conventional wisdom throughout the West. Typically, they have little to say about strategy or security.

Arthur Herman, in his masterful analysis of Israel’s war and its diplomatic consequences, takes a different approach, arguing that military success has left the Jewish state anything but isolated. While this approach may seem counterintuitive to those who get their news from English-language sources, it’s very much in keeping with the perception of the war in the Middle East. In the West, analysts tend to focus on symbolism, reputational harm, and shifting public moods, none of which informs how governments in the region make decisions. The calculations of Middle Eastern regimes turn on more concrete questions: who commands intelligence superiority, who can blunt Iranian power, and who remains anchored in the American security system. By those measures, Israel has become indispensable. Its performance on the battlefield and its record in covert operations have only reinforced its value to governments that prioritize their own survival and long-term modernization.

In what follows, I’d like to expand on this point, paying special attention to how recent diplomatic developments connect to global competition between America and China. It’s necessary to begin, however, with the motivations behind Hamas’s attack on October 7. Documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal show that Yahya Sinwar and the Hamas leadership sought to halt the momentum of Israel–Saudi normalization and derail the wider regional realignment taking shape around the Abraham Accords. Their fear was not simply Israeli weakness but Israeli integration. Their objective was to break it. But the plan has backfired spectacularly. Israel’s military successes against Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran have accelerated the alignment Sinwar hoped to destroy. Rather than isolating Israel, the past year has made it a more valuable strategic partner.

Azerbaijan makes this point impossible to ignore. While Westerners declared Israel untouchable, Azerbaijan’s state-run oil company was finalizing the purchase of a 10-percent stake in Israel’s offshore Tamar gas field through Union Energy—its first such venture in the Mediterranean. This wasn’t just a business decision, but a strategic move by a state that sees Israel as central to its energy security, defense modernization, and geopolitical influence. The deal expands Azerbaijan’s leverage in the European energy market while deepening its alignment with the region’s most capable military and intelligence power.

A broader regional pattern is now unmistakable. States that face Iranian pressure or seek technological and security upgrades are not distancing themselves from Israel, but moving closer. Emirati trade with Israel continues to grow. Over the summer, Egypt and Israel signed a record $35 billion gas deal. CENTCOM, which coordinates U.S. military activity in the Middle East, is deepening operational coordination between the IDF and Arab armies—including those of countries that don’t have formal relations with Israel. This isn’t happening despite Israel’s two-year-long war against Iran and its proxies, but because of it. Regional leaders saw tunnels collapse, missiles strike nuclear facilities, commanders get eliminated inside their own homes, and the disruption of Iranian assets in five countries, and concluded that Israeli hard power mattered much more than the opinions of Islamist preachers or Western university students.

The same logic is drawing Central Asia into Israel’s orbit. Kazakhstan’s decision to join the Abraham Accords isn’t, as some have suggested, an empty gesture by a county that already has relations with Israel. Like some of its neighbors, the former Soviet republic wants access to Israeli technology, Emirati capital, American security guarantees, and something more important still: a way out of China’s tightening grip over Central Asia.

At present, Beijing dominates the region’s infrastructure, transit routes, digital networks, and industrial corridors through its Belt and Road Initiative, a vast network of infrastructure projects and investments stretching from one end of Asia to the other. The Belt and Road Initiative has deliberately left Central Asian economies dependent on Chinese financing and vulnerable to Chinese political leverage. A corridor that links the Mediterranean, the Gulf, and Eurasia via Israel could offer these states a rare alternative. It could provide strategic advantages in energy, artificial intelligence, cyber defense, and supply-chain diversification that China cannot—and, crucially, offer a connection to Western markets that doesn’t pass through Chinese-controlled systems.

Such a corridor already exists. Known as the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC), it spans India, the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, and Israel before reaching Europe, and illustrates Washington’s emerging strategy for countering Beijing in Eurasia. IMEC provides alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which binds states to Beijing through debt, infrastructure capture, and preferential contracting.

The Abraham Accords now provide a second component to this strategy, one that directly complements IMEC. It exists because Israel proved that it can dismantle Iran-backed military and terror networks through superior intelligence combined with military effectiveness, and because Israeli civilian technological innovation is without peer in the region. These achievements make partnership with Jerusalem valuable in practical terms, and it is on this strategic reality that the Abraham Accords rest. The Gulf states add capital, logistics, and energy infrastructure, while the United States supplies security guarantees and industrial strength. When combined, these elements create a coherent system that offers cooperation and prosperity without the dependency that comes with Chinese investment. The more that states like Kazakhstan can become part of the U.S.-backed system, the looser Beijing’s grip becomes.

All this matters a great deal to the U.S., which has an opportunity to push back against China’s expanding influence and stop it from drawing traditional American allies into its orbit. With IMEC and an augmented Abraham Accords, Washington can instead start pulling countries like Kazakhstan away from China. The United States cannot match the volume of China’s lending or its funding for ports and railways, but it does not need to. Instead, it can offer a combination of security guarantees, intelligence cooperation, defense technology, and alliances that is without rival.

Israel stands at the geographic hinge of IMEC, and of course is the anchor of the Abraham Accords. More importantly, it has shown itself to be the one power both capable of rolling back Iran and willing to do so. Even the American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in Operation Midnight Hammer were made possible by Israeli intelligence and by attacks that neutralized Iran’s air defenses and decapitated its military. For states in the Middle East and Central Asia that view Iran—a Chinese ally—as the main threat to their sovereignty, these actions matter far more than public diplomacy. And they matter for America too, which needs Israel more than ever to help it keep Iran in check and to anchor its efforts to counter China.

This new system also corrects the structural imbalance built into the Belt and Road. China centralizes influence within its own economic orbit. By contrast, the Abraham Accords distribute power across participating states and create a flexible network capable of innovation and resilience. Thanks to these treaties, Israeli cyber and artificial-intelligence capabilities reach Gulf and Central Asian states, while Gulf investment funds support Israeli research and supply chains that run through both Africa and India. American companies provide cloud infrastructure, semiconductor production, and industrial development across regions that China once assumed it would dominate.

Saudi Arabia’s behavior confirms the direction of this shift. Although the kingdom continues to express public criticism of Israel for domestic and regional reasons, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has publicly stated that he remains interested in normalization. Saudi plans for economic modernization require Western investment, diversified supply chains, and advanced manufacturing capacity. These goals cannot be met through an exclusive partnership with China. They require a regional system in which maritime routes, energy corridors, and digital networks function within a stable U.S.-supported framework. Integration with Israel is becoming a central element of that system.

What emerges is not a story about isolation but about strategic usefulness. Israel overcame boycotts and condemnation and still produced the outcome that matters most for American strategy. It plays a pivotal role in a new regional architecture that gives Washington a real platform to compete with China in energy, trade, and technology. In this sense, Israel didn’t just beat its enemies on the ground, it thwarted Sinwar’s strategy and fast-tracked the very normalization and regional integration he was trying to stop.