I don't think the idea of an "intellectual elite" in general is very useful, but assuming any reasonable definition of such an elite that would have to include people who influence real policy, the specific idea of one that's uniformly hostile to Israel's existence in the West runs strongly counter to the observable reality of consistent material and political support for Israel across the political spectrum.

Even among those who see its behavior as a driver of the conflicts it is embroiled in -- even among those who may see Israel as an oppressor -- there doesn't seem to be anything like a coalition around any specific plan for its outright elimination, let alone one that could get traction.

There are some substantial academic criticisms of Israel's behavior or even status as a colonizing oppressor and I think what happens is that when those enter the popular discourse, they get conscripted into simple sympathies and boiled down side-taking (which mostly feeds the conflict dynamic).

One thing I think systems thinkers (hackers, academics, intellectual elites, whatever) do tend to understand is this:

As long as Israel exists in a form where outgroup rights & dignity & lives are disposable, it will be contributing to the conflict.

That's a dynamic-descriptive statement, not a singular prescription. It implies several possible paths: Israel could be dissolved/replaced, Israel could grow into accepting the responsibility of materially valuing outgroup rights & dignity & lives itself even when it's inconveniently in tension with other immediate pressures, Israel could cede some control (and territory) to a larger system that will take on that responsibility for it, or we could accept the status quo.

It's a bit less common to hold that understanding at the same time as another systems reality:

As long as Israel and its ingroup are under existential threat, judging outgroup rights & dignity to be disposable will have broader internal appeal, consolidating the power of those who choose that as their pitch or hold it as part of a fundamental worldview.

This probably is the location of the mistake you have a feeling some in the West are making. When we use rhetoric or steer towards policy whose end seems like Israel's dissolution, we're not just dealing with a question about whether our sympathies are most appropriately placed with Israeli/Jewish people or dispossessed Palestinians, we are exerting force on a lever of the conflict system and the likely outcome is an equal and opposite reaction or a transfer of angular momentum into the circular conflict rotation. It encourages Israeli perspectives like "we're right to aggressively do whatever it takes to fend for ourselves because nobody else is really on our side." It might even tells actor like Hamas that their plan works, that they really can drive a wedge between Israel and the rest of the world by merely provoking Israel into treating tens of thousands Palestinian civilians as collateral damage (basically turning people Hamas hadn't converted into actual soldiers yet into a kind of conscript after the fact, to say nothing of the survivors that might be radicalized).

Why do we do it? I don't know. Maybe thinking in terms of sympathies instead of systems does require more effort. Maybe human nature to simplify. Maybe many of us have the luxury of little actual skin in the game, so we can choose sympathies and symbolic values over the substance and mechanics of the system (though on the other hand, skin in the game also often makes sympathy more immediate).

I kinda hope that in the software era / information age that modestly trains more people to think about some specific systems at least, maybe we can figure out how to do better, but OTOH all the decreased friction of discourse has had mixed results.