The Middle East has long been organised around two competing logics: pragmatic alignment and ideological alignment. Before the 7 October war, these logics produced two regional blocs that structured most political, diplomatic and security behaviour. The Palestinian attack and invasion that triggered the war ruptured both systems. Incentives shifted, alliances frayed, and assumptions collapsed. What followed has not been the emergence of a calmer order, but a reconfiguration in which ideology has returned in new forms and pragmatism has narrowed, and hardened, requiring deliberate encouragement and support to survive.

For more than a decade, regional politics moved along these two tracks. Pragmatic alliances rested on interests that could be negotiated, measured and enforced. Security cooperation, intelligence sharing, economic integration, technological exchange and opposition to common threats mattered more than symbolic solidarity. Stability carried value. Growth carried legitimacy. Ideological discomfort could be managed or deferred.

At the same time, ideological alliances operated on an entirely different plane, with the opposite allowances made in pursuit of their goals. They were anchored in political and religious worldviews, primarily Islamist, revolutionary and explicitly hostile to western influence. These groupings treated resistance as identity, struggle as virtue and confrontation as proof of moral standing. Economic damage, civilian suffering and regional destabilisation were accepted costs. Brutality was neither incidental nor regretted; it was constitutive.

For some time, the pragmatic alignment coalesced gradually and quietly. Mostly under the leadership and strategic discipline of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia informally found themselves cooperating on intelligence, counterterrorism, air defence, trade and technology. This convergence eventually surfaced publicly........

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