TEL AVIV, Israel >> A year has passed in Israel and the Gaza Strip like some nightmare from which there is no awakening. Hatred is the only winner. It towers over the corpse of a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace and threatens to spread across the Middle East.

“Bring them home now” say ubiquitous posters in Israel, alluding to the roughly 100 hostages, many dead, still held by Hamas. Gaza lies in ruins as Israel exacts a terrible price in Palestinian life for the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack that killed more than 1,200 Israelis, and summoned in Jews every devouring specter of the Holocaust. War spreads to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to Lebanon and to Iran, defying the futile peacemaking efforts of a rudderless world.

Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport stands almost empty, symbol of a lonelier Jewish state that is excoriated in many places amid calls to “globalize the intifada.” Protesters in New York chant “the state of Israel has to go.” Health authorities in Gaza announce that Israel has killed 41,788 Palestinians in the past year. Numbers tend to numb, but they promise another cycle of retribution in due course.

As after the Sept. 11 attacks two decades ago, the world has changed, people have changed, language itself has changed, becoming more treacherous. The tribal has triumphed over reason in a sea of mutual incomprehension and recrimination. Once the David of Middle Eastern conflict, Israel is now the increasingly vilified Goliath, even as it sees itself in a struggle for survival that it did not initiate.

“We are a different society, a different country. Just look at the traumatized faces of people,” said Nirit Lavie Alon, an Israeli teacher at the Technion university in Haifa. “I gave up on peace, completely. Really, we are very desperate.”

Doaa Kaware, a mother of four in the Gaza city of Khan Younis, said: “This was a year that has killed our hearts and souls before it destroyed the buildings, hospitals, schools and streets. In this war we feel someone pushed us down into a deep, dark and awful well.”

Israeli and Palestinian narratives have always seemed irreconcilable, but over the past year they have diverged with a new intensity. For Israel, the Oct. 7 Hamas attack was its 9/11, with the enemy not across the world in Afghanistan but right next door. The country, shaken and disoriented by the catastrophe, shamed by its failure to foresee it, was near unanimous in the conviction that it must extirpate Hamas from Gaza, at any price.

Much of the world understood Israel’s reaction, at least for a moment. But quickly a Palestinian narrative of Israeli “genocide” in Gaza gained traction, backed by wholesale destruction and killing in the rubble of collapsed buildings. The catastrophe, then, was not Israel’s, but that of the Palestinian people, systematically oppressed, in this telling, by a ruthless Israel intent for decades on dispossessing them.

The issue, in a striking transference, was no longer Oct. 7; it was the Israeli retaliation.

Now, with the widening of the war to Lebanon and even Iran, the catastrophe is broader and murkier, the narrative even more confused, as the suffering spreads. Iran and its Shiite proxy forces are no longer facing off with Israel; they are at war with it. Hamas is only part of the story now. But by no means does all of Lebanon or Iran want to die for the Palestinian cause.

Much has changed and much has not. The war, detonated a year ago by Hamas rockets in the dawn fired from Gaza, is new in its frenzied intensity, its yearlong duration and its expansion to include Iran directly, but not in its essential nature.

The current round of fighting has been different in some ways, and not only in its feverish register. It has demonstrated the limited reach of American diplomacy, once decisive but now ineffective and increasingly attacked for its ironclad military support of Israel, even as thousands of Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza.

The war has seen another significant shift: the broad embrace of the Palestinian cause as an extension of movements for racial and social justice in the United States. It has also been adopted by the Global Majority, sometimes known as the Global South, as an expression of the battle of Indigenous peoples — read Palestinians — against white colonial oppressors and interlopers.

Across the world, from the Americas to Africa, the quest to create a state of Palestine supplanting Israel has become the North Star of many young people.

“I’d been hearing warnings of antisemitism on the left, but the militancy of the antisemitism of student groups has been shocking,” said Ruth Franklin, an adjunct associate professor of writing at Columbia University. “When you hear, ‘burn Tel Aviv to the ground,’ as I have with my own ears, the intent is pretty clear.”

Today, Israel is poised to strike back against Iran in response to Iran’s firing of nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel last Tuesday, which in turn was a retaliation for Israel’s assassination in Lebanon of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.

There were other courses for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including a cease-fire, but he has felt free to ignore American pressure without cost or consequence. His need to satisfy his far-right partners in government and his interest in prolonging the war to postpone a possible formal reprimand for the military and intelligence failures that allowed the Oct. 7 attack will almost certainly complicate any diplomatic efforts.