In a series of successful wars and attacks on Palestinians, Iran and five Arab states, Israel, acting with full and essential backing from the US, has established US-Israeli hegemony over the Middle East. The process culminated in 2025 with Israel launching a 12-day war on Iran in June and the US imposing a ceasefire in Gaza in October, a temporary settlement that left surviving Palestinians penned into a tiny ruined enclave.
Israel is today striking at will anywhere from Tehran to Tunisia and from Damascus to Yemen, while in December the US launched heavy air attacks on Syria and Somalia. Israel has long possessed technical military superiority over rival powers in the region, but what makes the Gaza war different from past conflicts is that for the first time, Israel has had near unconditional US military and diplomatic support.
Israel’s raw power is greater than ever in the Middle East, but it is shaky because it relies almost solely on military force and a continuing close alliance with the US. Nothing could be more contrary to the truth than President Donald Trump’s boast at the time of the Gaza ceasefire on 10 October that he had brought peace to the region for the first time in 3,000 years.
It is untrue in the short term, because 411 Palestinians have been killed and 1,112 wounded by Israel in Gaza since the ceasefire, bringing the total to 70,700 dead and 171,000 wounded since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
In the longer term, the Middle East has seen the most radical rupture in its political landscape since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the emergence of independent Arab states post-1945 as European powers reluctantly ceded imperial control.
The Hamas raid on Israel on 7 October 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis, sparked a conflict that has affected the entire world. Who could have predicted two years ago that the question of whether or not Israel had committed a genocide in Gaza would become a central issue in the New York City mayoral election?
Zohran Mamdani, now the Mayor of New York (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)Though much changed in US policy when Donald Trump replaced President Joe Biden in the White House in January 2025, total US support for Israel remained the same. Biden publicly called for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to show restraint, but he still gave Israel unstinting support when these calls were routinely ignored. Trump suggested at one stage the relocation of the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza to another country, while Gaza itself was to be turned into a Mediterranean holiday resort. This final calamity for the Palestinians may not have happened, but the ceasefire left them inhabiting a sea of ruins.
Winners and losers in the transformational wars of the last two years have become fairly clear now. Winners so far in terms of realpolitik are Israel, US and the oil rich Arab monarchies of the Gulf – notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE. Losers internationally include Russia and the most powerful west European states, all of whom had until recently exercised great power in the region.
Russia lost its most important traditional ally in the Arab world when regime change in Syria in November 2024 saw President Bashar al-Assad flee to Moscow. Absorbed in the Ukraine war, President Vladimir Putin stopped being a key player in the region and remained a bystander when Israel attacked Iran on 13 June 2025. Russia – and earlier the Soviet Union – had abdicated its position as the crucial backstop for the Syrian and Iranian governments.
Israel’s victorious 12-day war against Iran in mid-summer was the most important development in the Middle East in 2025. Israeli forces immediately established complete air superiority, killing about 30 Iranian security chiefs and at least 10 of its top nuclear scientists. Relying on precise intelligence, much of it provided by local agents, Israel repeatedly caught the Iranian authorities by surprise though the attacks were predictable.
Netanyahu sought for decades to get the US to join Israel in making war on Iran and he finally achieved this objective when Trump ordered US bombers to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities buried deep underground on 22 June. Subsequent US and Israeli press investigations revealed that Israel and the US had acted more or less in tandem.
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in October (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)Despite planned US-Iran negotiations, the Israeli news website Ynet says that “Israel had already decided to strike, with full US awareness. The diplomatic moves were a ruse. Officials in both countries pushed media narratives suggesting a rift between Washington and Jerusalem.” It quotes a source with direct knowledge of events as saying that “all the reports that were written about Bibi [Netanyahu] not being on the same page with [US envoy Steve] Witkoff or Trump were not true”.
The US-Israeli assault on Iran and its regional allies faced less effective resistance than many expected. Acting more or less jointly, Israel and the US enjoyed overwhelming military superiority. They demonised Iran and its “Axis of Resistance” – Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iranian allies in Syria, Yemen and Iraq – as the great destabilisers of the region. But though Iran publicly played up its role as the leader of resistance to Israel and the US, it was aware of its weakness and avoided confrontation. Its resistance had been largely rhetorical ever since Hezbollah fought its short war with Israel in 2006, and, above all, after Iran’s most powerful ally Syria disintegrated into a ferocious civil war in 2011.
Iran and its coalition may have proved weaker in battle than many expected, yet they have an inbuilt resilience as Iran’s power rests partly on its status, since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, as the leader of the Shia brand of Islam in the region. Aside from Hamas, the Axis of Resistance, often denounced by hostile critics as a collection of “Iranian proxies”, is in fact made up of the Shia communities wherever they are present in strength.
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Fifty years ago, Palestine was at the centre of Arab nationalism and the Palestinian cause was one which Arab rulers betrayed or ignored at their peril. But by 2025, five Arab nation states – Syria, Libya, Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq – had been torn apart by civil war. Egypt, once described as the beating heart of Arab nationalism, is ruled today by a highly repressive military regime dependent on subsidies from the US and the Gulf oil states.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar are now the most influential Arab states, taken seriously by Trump because of their vast wealth. But the oil states of the Gulf have always had a problem translating this wealth into successful political projects. The UAE, for example, funds warlords in Sudan and Libya who have divided and wrecked their countries, but their role is purely destructive.
Israel, America and a few Arab autocracies have established themselves as the masters of the Middle East, but their dominance is much hated by most people in the region. Trump claims to have brought peace to the region after 3,000 years of conflict, but in reality he is helping turn it into a crucible for future wars.
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