Not long ago a picture circulated from inside Gaza showing smoke billowing from the explosion of a US-supplied bomb, and discernible in the background was the outline of eight black parachutes dropping US aid in precisely the same neighbourhood. It was suggested that the picture would make an ideal cover for any book about the confused world disorder that the six-month war in Gaza has spawned – a disorder that as yet has no dominant player, value system or functioning institutions.
The great powers compete, coexist or confront one another across the region but none, least of all at the UN, is able to impose its version of order any longer. “Forget talk of unipolarity or multipolarity,” the journalist Gregg Carlstrom recently wrote in Foreign Affairs. “The Middle East is nonpolar. No one is in charge.”
Wars are supposed to be the father of all things, according to Heraclitus, and many still predict that this war will define everything in the future and prove a turning point to their advantage. Iran believes the US is closer to being forced out of Iraq than at any point in the last two decades and its president, Ebrahim Raisi, has said the war in Gaza will lead to a “transformation in the unjust order that rules the world”.
Iran’s ally, the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whose group has traded fire with Israel across the Lebanese border, has claimed “the onset of a new historical phase” for the entire Middle East and that Israel will be unable to withstand the “al-Aqsa flood”.
By contrast, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, vowed on 9 October,
