And then, the third upheaval.

For an instant the world saw what it did not want to see.

And what it saw was a planet that froze briefly before beginning to turn again—but now turning on new bearings.

In 2018, I wrote a book entitled The Empire and the Five Kings. The title was an allusion to the Biblical story of the five kings whom Abraham fought to save his nephew, Lot.

In that book, I described an empire consisting of Europe, its American outgrowth, and others in the rest of the world that have faith in the Western Enlightenment.

I argued that this empire, which I called the “Global West,” is contracting nearly everywhere, both in people’s minds and geographically.

I showed how the space left vacant by the empire’s retreat was creating opportunities for five new kings, five potentates, who ruled over countries that had once been the centers for powerful empires and aspired to become so again.

My thesis was that these five kings—Russia, China, the Iran of the ayatollahs, neo-Ottoman Turkey, and the Arab countries prone to jihadism—were ready to forgo their ancient enmities if that were the price of reviving the glory of Peter the Great, the Qing and Ming dynasties, the Ottoman vizirs, the shahs of Persia, or the Umayyad and Abbasid sultans.

The book was written in the context of the war against the Islamic State, the role of the Kurds in that war, and then, at the moment of the battle of Kirkuk—which in my eyes was the equivalent of the ancient battles that put an end to the hegemony of Sparta, Athens, or Macedonia—how casually their western allies abandoned them once they had served their purpose.

The book’s thesis was confirmed by the subsequent war against Ukraine, where we saw the same five— joined by a North Korea drunk on its own power—in coalition against a Global West that sometimes seemed to be pulling itself together while, at other times, looking like a heavy-footed giant with a head full of clay, a disconcerting mix of authority and restraint, extreme power and inexplicable cowardice.

But now we were seeing the five picking up where they left off, consolidating their alliance, and submitting us all to a new test, this time on the Israeli front.

What was true in the Kurdish and Ukrainian cases is proving true in the case of Hamas—but in reverse, and from the dark side of the world.

And it is around this minuscule terror state, this barbarous Lilliput, about which the big five had previously cared so little, that the dark planets realign and the new world takes shape.

The big difference is that the United States does not seem to be the same stumbling, dazed, declining empire ready to abdicate its throne.

I say “seem” because America still shows a reluctance to fully flex its muscles, to assert its creed and values. It moves ahead and retracts, takes a step toward Israel and pulls back.

And nothing can be taken for granted as the vertiginous unknown looms with the upcoming presidential election.

But regardless of the current or future US position, what is sure is that the revisionist kingdoms were there for October 7 and that we found all five of them as fiery as ever and ready to get back in the game.

That appeared immediately among the Sunni powers who are the natural allies of Hamas.

There was dancing in Kabul; in Islamabad, cries that bin Laden had been avenged; in Qatar, it occurred to no one to disturb Ismail Haniyeh and his retinue who were still, at least until further notice, Hamas’s senior leaders; at most, they were asked—politely and after days of talks—to close their luxurious villas and leave for a well-deserved vacation in Algeria.

It was clear with respect to Turkish president Erdogan, the grand master of the confraternity of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the avant-garde.

He did not lose a minute before resolving the ambiguities that previous signs of rapprochement with Jerusalem, linked with his nation’s gas interests, might have generated.

On October 24, Erdogan declared that “Hamas [was] not a terrorist organization” but rather “a group of mujahideen who are defending their land.”

We saw him, his neck wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, at a huge rally at the old Atatürk Airport in Istanbul, where he informed the “whole world” that Israel is committing unpardonable “war crimes.”

Then, on December 27, this great humanist who has yet, a century after the fact, to acknowledge the Armenian genocide and is still fueling the same hatred today in Nagorno-Karabakh, compared Bibi Netanyahu to Hitler and the Palestinian refugee camps to the Nazi death camps.

Nor did Turkey’s membership in NATO or its economic reliance on the United States dissuade him from announcing on January 14, 2024 that his government possessed solid proof of Israel’s genocidal activities in Gaza and would furnish them forthwith to the International Court of Justice, which was then in the process of examining and ultimately dismissing the formal complaint to this effect that had been filed by South Africa.

Iran began with denial. And perhaps remembering the good old days of the “nuclear agreement” with Teheran worked out by President Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, the American administration went out on a limb to confirm, in the early hours, that there was no “proof” of Iran’s “direct” involvement in the attack.

But we learned quickly enough, through Iran’s official press agency, that a meeting had taken place in Doha on October 14 between Ismail Haniyeh, who had not yet departed for Algeria, and the Iranian minister of foreign affairs, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

This was followed on October 26 by a meeting in Moscow between Iranian vice president Ali Bagheri and another delegation of the terrorist organization, this one of lower rank.

And then another meeting in Tehran, probably on November 6, between Haniyeh and the Supreme Leader himself, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

We quickly learned that there had been others, in August and September, well before the attack.

We also learned that, according to what the Wall Street Journal described as “highly placed sources within Hezbollah and Hamas,” representatives of the Revolutionary Guard and, on least two occasions, Minister Abdollahian himself had reportedly helped during these meetings to “set up” the operation, “ironed out the details,” and, on October 2 in Beirut, given it the “green light.”

For those still in doubt, the regime’s minister of culture, Ezzatollah Zarghami, a retired general of the IRGC, gave the story the fillip it lacked.

In an interview released by the semi-official Mehr News Agency, Zarghami affirmed that he was “afraid of no one” and willingly admitted that his country had delivered to Hamas a quantity of Fajr-3 ballistic missiles of the type that had been used to strike Israel.

So, “Iran outside Iran” must be added to complete the picture.

Hezbollah’s launches over the northern border of the Jewish state.

The Shiite militias in Iraq ramping up attacks on American positions in Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan and threatening Israel.

And last but not least, the Houthis in Yemen—equipped with an arsenal of drones, medium-range ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles unparalleled in the region, and supported by a Revolutionary Guard spy vessel that makes little secret of guiding the attacks—who were harassing ships in the Red Sea they deemed to have any link with the “Zionist entity.”

Was China testing, as in Ukraine, the adversary’s capacity for resistance in the great confrontation to come?

Was it pondering “Thucydides’ Trap,” that fateful moment when, according to the ancient Greek historian (as recounted by American professor Graham Allison), a waning power (yesterday, Athens, today, the United States) commits the fatal error of responding with force against the rising power (then, Sparta, now, China)?

Or, conversely, was it running the risk of falling into what I dubbed Herodotus’ Trap in The Empire and the Five Kings, in homage to the great historian of the Greco-Persian wars and his account of the ultimate victory of democracy over tyranny?

Was China thinking of moving into Taiwan, and did it want to see whether America’s wound might be widening, hastening the decline of its influence?

Whatever the reason, Chinese premier Xi Jinping abandoned his customary restraint, as he had with Ukraine.

While stifling Tibet and annihilating the Muslim Uyghurs, he refrained from condemning Hamas, refused to label it a terrorist organization, let flourish on Chinese television and Weibo fake news of the type, “Jews represent just 3% of the American population but control 70% of its wealth,” and took the lead in the anti-Israel crusade that was gathering force among the BRIC nations.

But the icing on the cake was Putin. Over the years, he found useful idiots to serve up the edifying story of little Vladimir, poor and lost, raised by a Jewish family to which he remained attached and owed the remnants of his philo-Semitism.

But the admirer of Czar Nicholas I in him remembered that Russia, at the height of its power, massacred tens of millions of Russians, persecuted hundreds of thousands of Jews, and planned, during the waning days of Stalinism, to do their fair share in bringing about the “final solution of the Jewish problem.”

And above all, the KGB man of a thousand ruses, the crowned seditionist who has thrived only through plots, assassinations, pawns advanced, pawns sacrificed, and power gained with guns and bribes, the postmodern Mad Max who has replaced the motorcycles of the apocalypse with tanks and hypersonic missiles and likes being blessed by Rolex popes who wear their cowls the way Attila wore his caps—that Putin was aware of the benefits he stood to gain from this new Middle Eastern war, which was drawing the world’s attention away from the heinous crimes he was committing in Ukraine.

So, he unleashed his pack, allowed his henchmen to revive the old national anti-Semitism and to warn Israelis of Russian origin that they would not be welcome when they flee their beloved “refuge” just ahead of the bombs.

He did not deny that the Hamas leaders had two sessions with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (in September 2022 and March 2023), whose announced purpose was to “weaken the West,” or that said leaders later returned to Moscow to meet with Iranian officials.

He could not hide the fact that the red carpet was rolled out for them in the days following October 7, or that the Kremlin had still not condemned the massacre.

The circle is nearly complete.

It is almost the same picture, but worse, that we watched take shape at the time of the war against the Kurds and again with the war against Ukraine—which, incidentally, continued unabated in a world where everything was suddenly splitting in two: the media’s focus, the attention of foreign ministries, and even military aid, which some political leaders, expecting Trump to return to power and taking advantage of the general confusion, would like to let fall by the wayside.

Could it be said that this upheaval is not really an upheaval this time around since it is just the same old song?

Is it the fortress Europe (and America) emitting its endless but familiar supply of collaborators and appeasers?

Yes and no.

It is as if tectonic plates had been rubbing together, sliding, overlapping, and separating before suddenly interlocking in a new pattern.

And for today’s observers, the current scene is a panorama where everything seems perfectly in place.

Hamas is no longer Hamas but, instead, the sword and toy of a counter-empire wherein the protagonists of the preceding wars have come together permanently.

And Israel, reciprocally, is a little more than just Israel.

It carries the message, even if unknowingly, of the Uyghurs of China, the intrepid bloggers of the Arab autocracies, the proponents of the Armenian cause in Istanbul who detest Erdogan and his fables of the Grand Turk, the strong souls of Kurdistan, the Iranian insurgents who continue to cry “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the opponents whom Putin deports, sends into internal exile, and assassinates—and also, perhaps in spite of themselves, the Palestinians in silent revolt against the Hamas dictatorship.

This has nothing to do with a war between West and East.

Nor with the “war of civilizations” that some, already lining up their legions, are hoping for.

Or maybe it does.

But in that case, one of the civilizations is the fine Internationale of the friends of liberty, law, and the spirit of resistance, drawing its members from within the new and ancient empires alike.

And the other is the civilization of tyrants and demagogues whose followers are recruited in the West no less than in the East or South.

The Maharal of Prague wrote in Netzach Yisrael that, in contrast to kingdoms and empires, which are extensive, Israel is a point, a single point, but what a point!

The central and hidden point, secret and essential, upon which rests, in the terrible dramaturgy of history, a piece of human survival.

So there we have it. Israel is not a pawn, but a point.

It is the hearth that radiates a light and a language without which a part of humanity would be lost.

Israel exists in a kind of solitude, no doubt.

A terrible solitude.

But to paraphrase Albert Camus, there are women and men, many women and many men, who would be very alone indeed without this solitary presence and who pray each morning and each evening, more or less secretly and silently, summoning whatever boldness their status as hostages of the five kings allows, for Israel to win its war against the empire of Hamas.

Excerpted from Israel Alone by Bernard-Henri Levy – Out in the UK October 24^th