On Thursday, Israeli and Lebanese diplomats will walk into a room in Washington, DC, meet face-to-face for the second time in as many weeks, and talk about forging an agreement.

Two days earlier, a group of European nations again called on the EU to suspend its entire association agreement with Israel.

These events, on different continents, illustrate opposite trends. But they’re alike in one way: Israelis aren’t treating either as a sea change.

Israelis are paying close attention to whether the current ceasefire with Hezbollah will be extended past its Sunday deadline, a question that will take center stage at the talks.  But just a few years ago, sustained direct peace talks between Israel and Lebanon — two neighbors that have been mired in bloodshed for decades — would have driven entire news cycles. Now, the story is almost a footnote in the larger saga of Iran, the US and the broader Middle East.

The same goes for the EU debate. Israel has spent years building increasingly close ties with Europe, and as recently as 2023, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was standing alongside his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, on an official visit to Jerusalem. Now, Spain is leading the charge for the continent to freeze out Israel, joined by several other nations. But for most Israelis, that news wouldn’t even register — just another Tuesday in Madrid.

Will Israel make peace with Lebanon and break ties with Europe? In both cases, the answer is most likely no, at least not in the near future. But a dual process has been set in motion: We’re coming to a point where some Middle Eastern states are drawing closer to Israel, and the West is pulling further away.

For Israelis, the end result could be a bitter irony: The country has long seen itself as a Western democracy that has craved normalization with the Middle East. Now, at the very moment when Israelis could be normalizing ties with their neighbors, they’re facing an ever-colder shoulder from the West.

Facing a shared enemy

Part of why the Lebanon peace talks seem unsurprising is that Beirut isn’t even the first hostile neighbor to meet with Israel over the past year. The talks with Lebanon came after several rounds of negotiations with Syria — and President Ahmed al-Sharaa recently indicated that the door to those discussions remains open. And there’s a growing conventional wisdom in the........

© The Times of Israel