The tune circulated like a heady chant in Western diplomatic circles. It predicted, implicitly, the advent of a "new Middle East." It heralded a reordering of the regional landscape, with the Palestinians relegated to the sidelines. Their cause, it was claimed, had lost its centrality. Hadn't the Egyptians, Syrians, Tunisians and Libyans stolen the spotlight during the 2010s, with their revolutions and counter-revolutions? Didn't the following decade open with the Abraham Accords, a spectacular rupture in the Arab consensus on Palestine?

By recognizing Israel in the summer of 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, followed by Morocco, had effectively buried the "Abdullah Plan," forged 18 years earlier by the eponymous Saudi crown prince, which made the opening of diplomatic relations with the Jewish state conditional on Israel's withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 (West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights). The long-standing Palestine Liberation Organization was deprived of its right of veto on Israeli-Arab rapprochement, one of its few assets at the negotiating table.

A new, post-Palestinian era seemed to be dawning in the Middle East. We even had its date of birth: March 27, 2022. On that day, Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Yair Lapid gathered in Sde Boker (50 kilometers south of Beersheba) his American counterpart, Antony Blinken, and the heads of diplomacy of four Arab countries (Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco). They discussed Iran, the regional bogeyman; the war in Ukraine; and a tiny bit the Palestinians.

With the grandiose scenery of the Negev canyons in the background and the highly symbolic proximity of the tomb of David Ben Gurion, founding father of the Jewish state, the summit had the air of a pivotal event, a tipping point between two worlds. The Saudi-American conciliatory talks of recent months, aimed at normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, further reinforced this impression. Palestine was a thing of the past, it was said. Its inhabitants seemed doomed to go by the wayside, to become irrelevant.

It was this pipe dream that shattered on Saturday, October 7, when Hamas commandos raided southern Israel, machine-gunning, bombing and kidnapping. The "new Middle East" looks an awful lot like the old one. The scale of the attack took all observers by surprise, as did the cruelty displayed by the Hamas henchmen. But that an attack should occur at all is hardly surprising.

Since 2007, when the 2 million inhabitants of Gaza were double-locked into this slender territory following the Hamas coup against Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah, field diplomats, researchers, analysts and journalists have warned countless times that the status quo was untenable. The red-hot socio-economic indicators all pointed to an imminent explosion.

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