Now the year is ending with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu well-placed to fulfil his pledge to create a “New Middle East” — that is, a Middle East in which Israel holds absolute dominance. The US will lend further impetus to this project when Donald Trump returns to the presidency on 20 January.

The post-7 October 2023 fallout continues to wreak havoc. December 2024 saw the sudden and dramatic fall of the Bashar Al-Assad regime, delivering Syria into the hands of Turkish-backed militias led by radical Salafi jihadists who have been hostile to the region’s regimes for decades. This change, engineered by Turkish intelligence in collaboration with the US and Gulf capitals, is fraught with danger.

After the 11 September attacks, Washington think tanks and policy-makers came up with the absurdly naïve idea that Islamists could be contained — i.e. kept from threatening US interests — by giving them a chance to rule in their own countries. This belief, subsequently embraced by US administrations, has proven as short-sighted and misinformed as other Western approaches towards Arab societies. Reviving the idea today will only wreak more disastrous results.

  The cynicism behind this position is remarkable. The US initially trained and armed these groups to serve Western aims during the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Today, as the new cold war between superpowers heats up, Washington is using the very same terrorist organisations it had been fighting in the region until recently to fight the West’s adversaries in the Middle East. These organisations are filling the void left by the withdrawal of Hizbullah and Iran-affiliated forces from Syria. And now they are poised to take control of a large country at the heart of the Fertile Crescent rather than serving as proxies for international and regional powers.

After two decades of expansion, the last year has seen Iranian influence in the Levant wither. Israel has dealt successive blows to Iranian targets in Syria, bringing the region to the brink of a full-blown war. It has also struck Hizbullah sites in Beirut and Damascus. The next target will be the Houthis in Yemen, a country that is already facing a protracted, and completely manmade, humanitarian crisis.

With hundreds of deadly strikes delivered throughout the year, Israel has dealt a severe blow to the Iranian regional project, which has long served as a justification for arming and funding militant Sunni groups.

A quick look at the balance sheet in the 15 months since 7 October 2023 makes it clear that the Palestinian cause, led by Hamas in Gaza, has reached its lowest point since the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1960s. Israel has destroyed the Palestinian resistance’s military capacities by levelling everything above and below ground in Gaza, using US-made bunker-buster bombs across the densely populated Strip. Their ostensible targets were the underground tunnels where Hamas rocket launchers were kept. Instead, they indiscriminately killed tens of thousands of civilians, and wounded hundreds of thousands.

The Israeli military machine, together with extremist Jewish settlers, then turned their sights on the West Bank. The aim there is either mass expulsion or annexation, to reduce Palestinians to second-class citizens. Meanwhile, intensive Israeli aerial bombardment of Dahiya in Beirut killed Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah and other senior leaders, destroying the Lebanese resistance’s headquarters alongside apartment blocks and civilian structures across the Lebanese capital. Before this, Israel had already eliminated Hamas leaders in Gaza, including Yahya Al-Sinwar.

Israeli strikes in Syria paved the road for the sudden advance of “rebel forces” led by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS). After sweeping into Aleppo, Homs, and Hama, they entered Damascus, opening up a new chapter in the rise of the jihadists whose demise had been prematurely celebrated just a few years ago.

The return of the jihadists, with control over a major Arab country bordering Israel, opens the doors to any number of disastrous scenarios. Israel and Turkey now control Syrian airspace and, hence, territorial sovereignty. Israel has not only occupied the demilitarised zone but Syrian territory further north. Turkey plans to expand its control in the Syrian northeast to create a buffer zone and drive out Kurdish forces.   

It is unlikely that Iran will take the setbacks it has sustained during the past year lying down. Tehran will be weighing its options following the destruction of its allies’ capacities in the Levant and, given Trump’s return to the Oval Office, the probable revival of his “maximum pressure” policy against Iran, whether because of its nuclear programme or on some other pretext. And if HTS leader Abu Mohamed Al-Jolani monopolises power, excluding other jihadist factions looking for a share in Syria’s spoils, Al-Qaeda, which is on good terms with Tehran, could well be used to sabotage any process of transformation.

Little wonder that moderate forces in the Arab region view these developments with great — and growing — concern. They suspect that the US-led West is bent on facilitating a resurgence of Islamist forces who will align with the interests of Western powers in exchange for deals that place them in power, whatever the cost to civil and secular forces.

Since the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation of 7 October 2023 the region has seen nothing but violence and cruelty. The period has brought major changes, allowing Netanyahu and his cohort of extremists in the Israeli government to set the regional agenda. Their aims have long been obvious: to perpetuate themselves in power, annex as much Palestinian land as possible, and bury the two-state solution.

Yet Netanyahu continues to reap the benefits of Western political and military backing, despite the International Court of Justice’s rulings and the International Criminal Court’s warrants. While we wait for the dust to settle and see what will come next, 2024 has made at least one thing clear — international law and international humanitarian law mean nothing to Western powers when it comes to Israel’s interests and its leaders’ designs.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly