In 1915, the Scottish historian John Buchan began The History of the Great War, his magisterial 24-volume narrative of the First World War, while serving on the Western Front. He began the first volume by noting that history as we know it was an invention of the prior century. Poring over documents and diaries was a novelty: ‘Historians almost exclusively chronicled events of which they had been spectators.’ In the last 365 days, at least two dozen books have been published in English and Hebrew about the massacres of 7 October, along with endless reams of commentary. Commentary cannot quite fulfill the task of history, in that proximity precludes objectivity. But a year later, in the aftermath of that slaughter, any observer of the Middle East can sense that the region is at the start of a reckoning that has been long in the making.

To state that 7 October manifested a hidden war is no mere cliché. Lebanon had been a failed state for three years. Violence in the West Bank had reached a level unseen for more than a decade, fueled by a sophisticated smuggling operation in southern Syria. Iran had not relinquished its commitment to annihilating the so-called ‘Zionist Entity’. Yemen, ravaged by civil war, was pacified by hush money. Israel was wracked by political crisis, and this is the fact that likely tempted its enemies to opportunism – a fact that made especially close observers of the region sense that a different kind of war was nearing.

Already last year, the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance began incrementally chipping away at the status quo, testing and probing for weakness against the backdrop of Israel’s unprecedented protests. Between January and March 2023, Hizbollah dramatically expanded its deployments in southern Lebanon. Towards the end of March, an infiltrator from Lebanon and attempted a car-bombing in the northern Israeli city of Megiddo. In early April, Hamas and Hizbollah fired a joint 34 rockets from southern Lebanon in the largest such barrage since 2006. Later that month, Hizbollah set up armed encampments several feet inside of Israeli territory. Shortly thereafter, the leading Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri hinted that a ‘sacred campaign’ was ‘imminent’. In July, Hizbollah fired its first anti-tank missile into Israeli territory for the first time in a decade. On 27 August, al-Arouri told Lebanese media that Hamas was ‘preparing for an all-out war’. His words, we now know, were more than mere bluster.

‘All-out war’ is an important semantic distinction from the passive, almost lazy state of war that had characterised the region for the five years prior to last year’s events. If war is often thought of as the breakdown of a political order, one wonders as to the nature of the order that broke down on 7 October. From early 2022 there existed only an informal status quo. Israel ‘mowed the grass’; the Gulf states adopted a policy of partial neutrality; and Iran expanded the boundaries of its forward defence in Iraq and Syria. All parties had latent long-term commitments. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE were all sympathetic to regime change in Iran, which maintained its ideological commitment to destroying the state of Israel. The players, however, seemed to have bet that the ‘internal contradictions’ of the other side would lead to long-term victory. One side bet on Iran’s endemic corruption and increasingly outmoded theocracy. The other bet on Israel’s internal political infighting and unresolved issues with the Palestinians. Both sides made small, incremental contributions to achieving that outcome. In that regard, the savagery of 7 October was less a spoiler than a demystifier, in that it made manifest a regional war that had already been underway.

Like all Islamist organisations and like the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas takes a teleological view of history. The outcome is not merely desirable but is a foregone conclusion, notwithstanding minor setbacks along the way. For the Axis, it is a pillar of faith that Israel will eventually cease to exist, the so-called American Empire will crumble, and the Islamic world will eventually be united: it is all a question of when. It is at least within the power of humans to bring about that preordained outcome. In some interpretations, it is an obligation: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said as much on Friday. Contrary to the view of Bernard Lewis and others – that Iran seeks to build a nuclear bomb, destroy Israel, and in so doing bring about a messianic era – Iran’s theocrats are much more clear-eyed. In 2011, Khamenei wrote – in English – that there is no point in pursuing ‘classic war’ against Israel. Instead, the solution was ‘non-classic warfare’ (jang-e-gheir-e-kelassik). The goal was to make Israel unlivable and bring about enough economic and political pressure that Israel would cease to exist. The genocidal aim is the same, although the means are somewhat more sophisticated.

Hamas, in its rampage, surely had no expectation of total military conquest. Rather, it sought recourse to institutions for which they have so much contempt that they hope to fulfill their ostensible obligation: international law can bring about sanctions, squeezing Israel’s economy and arsenal; international institutions can bring opprobrium, straining Israel’s main political lifeline to the United States; and international pressure can limit the extent of Israel’s ability to defend itself, acting as a ratchet that locks every detrimental change in the status quo. In the aftermath of 7 October, it is clear how a sustained war of attrition damages Israel at each of these levels. Since the start of the war, Israel has become a political lightning-rod in the Western world, manifested by vast demonstrations in major cities, and particularly on university campuses. Settlers in the West Bank have already been hit with US sanctions; an unprecedented step taken as Washington seeks to convey some image of even-handedness. France and the UK have implemented partial arms embargoes. Israel is on trial at the International Criminal Court, where its wartime leaders are accused of war crimes, and at the International Court of Justice, where Israel is accused of genocide. It is likely winning on the actual battlefield. In terms of ‘non-classic warfare’, however, that outcome is hardly clear.

Earlier last year, Israel sought to pre-empt some of these problems in the diplomatic arena through an agreement with Saudi Arabia, one that many observers thought could happen as soon as this March. That agreement would have changed meaningfully the strategic landscape of the region. A formal defence pact between Riyadh and Washington, one in which normalisation would be contingent, would enable the sale of potentially game-changing arms to the Kingdom, also bestowing upon it a privileged security status shared by just two other countries in the region: Turkey, a member of NATO, and Israel. It would also open the avenue to a more formalised strategic construct. Such a construct would institutionalise the informal and well-known coordination that already exists between Israel and those Arab states that can be considered conservative in the literal sense, in that they share with Israel a desire to preserve the status quo. But it was no panacea. In fact, it may well have inculcated delusions that caused Israel to so badly misread the situation.

Some more effusive Israeli commentators speculated that a pact with Riyadh would ‘end the Israeli-Arab Conflict’. This was, of course, a terrible delusion on their part: an exemplary conflation of the symbolic with the strategic. Such an agreement would have not undone, and likely cannot undo, the dystopian landscape of militia rule across large parts of Iraq and Syria. It would not solve the seemingly intractable problems of Yemen. It would not breathe life into the torpified Lebanese state, which flatlined in March 2020, or somehow marginalise Hizbollah. It would not dispel the Islamic Republic, a country 12 times larger than Israel, of its desire to destroy it. This is all without mentioning the Palestinian question, which has only grown more pressing in recent years. A deal with Riyadh might have allowed Israel more support across these arenas. They would, however, remain unresolved for many years. One of the reasons for that is because the obstacles to a real resolution are so fundamental.

Perhaps the greatest barrier to the emergence of a real Middle Eastern order is the weakness of its key states. To some extent, all political life is built on webs of factional and sectarian interests. In coherent states, those interests are mediated through relatively sturdy institutions. A logical system can be constructed where each player has its interests. Many of the would-be players are entirely fragmented and weak, making them susceptible to corruption and foreign influence. Of the bedrocks of Middle Eastern order in the 20^th Century – Syria, Iraq, and Egypt – the first two are barely identifiable as units, ravaged by corruption, trafficking, and militias. The state totally lacks any monopoly of violence and is effectively a proxy for distributing patronage. Yemen has been shattered and now operates along tribal and ethnic cleavages. The Palestinian Authority has been all but hollowed out: individual towns and cities across the West Bank are effectively run by families or individual militias. Iran thrives in this chaos and has little interest in its reversal. Its opponents in the Gulf and the West have grown disinterested in fixing it, jaded by years of failure.

In this respect, the ‘decline’ of the Middle East has been a slow-motion wreck 20 years in the making. It cannot be reversed, which is why no party of reaction has emerged in the region. On the side of the Axis there are only radicals, who seek complete change, and pragmatists, who seek to lock in the gains they have already achieved. And for Israel, there is a tough paradox. Its tactical victories seemingly come at a strategic cost: indefinite conflict in Lebanon and Gaza, a substantial economic cost, and growing estrangement from the West. Strategic victory means the completion of regime change in Gaza, the neutering of Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, and the end of Iran’s nuclear programme. This can only come at the price of many more years of war and all the costs that entails, political and economic. Beyond strategic considerations, there is also the direction of the war to consider.

On the one hand, there is no question that in the last month the momentum of the war is in Israel’s favour. It has effectively completed its ‘regime change’ operation in the Gaza Strip, using military force to end nearly two decades of Hamas rule. It is spent, albeit not entirely, as a military force. Hizbollah has suffered completely unexpected blows, which have damaged its ability to threaten northern Israel. Iran’s credibility has sunk. On the other hand, the war is far from over. Hamas remains in charge of the distribution of aid and still runs a patronage network in the Strip which could, by all accounts, restore control of Gaza in the event of an Israeli withdrawal. There is no obvious alternative that withdraws power from Hamas. Hizbollah still maintains its array of precision-guided missiles, as well as thousands of fighters. It is a political and social as well as a military force, and has not at all been marginalised in Lebanese political life. Israel cannot feasibly pursue a long-range shooting war with Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who fire at Tel Aviv on an almost-daily basis. Any major attack in Iraq could put an unbearable strain on Jordan, already politically inflamed by the events of the last year. Syria not only offers strategic depth to Hizbollah and Iran, but is also home to thousands of militia fighters from across the Middle East, hundreds of ballistic missiles, and still-functional elements of the Syrian Arab Army. Iran still has an arsenal of thousands of ballistic missiles, and is too far and too big for Israel to fight alone.

If one were to guess, the war will end in the same way as the 2006 Lebanon War: with a deadline set by the United Nations Security Council. Israel is already in a race against time to accomplish all the changes on the ground that it can, lest the war lock in an unfavourable status quo. What it will do in the ‘sprint’ of the next few months is anyone’s guess. What is clear is that it will decisively shape the future of the region.

Buchan’s most beautiful prose emerges at the end of his final volume: ‘Peace does not follow naturally upon victory. It is itself a construction, a slow and difficult effort to bridge the chasm between two worlds and is inevitably a time of discouragement.’ Now is such a discouraging time, not least because it seems that 7 October did indeed expedite the outcomes anticipated by pessimists and fanatics. It generated a war between Hizbollah and Israel that had been a decade in the making. It triggered a reckoning between Israel and Iran after almost 20 years of tough talk. If there is any silver lining to the last year, it has forced the conversation about the future of the region into the hands of pragmatists who had long ago been dispelled of any delusions of perpetual peace.