“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote TS Eliot in 1925, probably responding to the profoundly unsatisfactory aftermath of the First World War (although with a poet, you never really know). At any rate, it’s happening again, this time in the Middle East.

There was another hiccup in the ceasefire in Gaza on October 28: an Israeli soldier was killed by rogue Hamas fighters, and the Israel Defence Forces replied with artillery and air strikes that killed 104 Palestinians. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu is still trying to restart the war, but he will soon figure out it may not be necessary.

US Vice-President JD Vance downplayed the panicky talk, insisting that “The ceasefire is holding. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be little skirmishes here and there.” Much more than skirmishes, really, but the man is basically right: the full-scale war that lasted exactly two years has stopped, at least for the moment.

Donald Trump made Netanyahu stop the war three weeks ago, but he could certainly restart it if he needs to. The Trump-Netanyahu relationship is like the Trump-Putin relationship: Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) in the long run. Bibi accepted a similar ceasefire in Gaza for Trump last January – and broke it without suffering any penalty last March.

Netanyahu still wants to get the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip, but this may no longer require a confrontation with Donald Trump and ugly scenes of forced mass expulsion. The whole Gaza Strip is in ruins and many if not most Palestinians are at the end of their tether. Literally one-tenth of the population has been killed or wounded: no family is unaffected.

At this point fat bribes to move somewhere else could set a lot of them moving, especially because it will soon be clear that no real help in rebuilding the old Gaza will be forthcoming from the Arab countries of the Middle East.

Nobody will say it aloud yet, but all the Muslim countries of the Middle East have given up on the Palestinians. There is still some sympathy for them in the ‘Arab street’, but after 80 years of on-and-off support for the Palestinian cause the regimes have finally written them off. There have been too many defeats, and they are moving on.

Indeed, the highest policy priority of Israel’s immediate neighbours, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, is not to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It is rather to ensure that the new wave of Palestinian ‘refugees’ does not end up on their territories (like the first one did). Let them go to Libya this time, or Eritrea, or Somaliland – anywhere but here.

The neighbours are being inhospitable, but they are right. A new generation of Palestinian terrorists is growing up in Gaza and the West Bank right now, most of them Islamist but some just nihilistic, and nobody in their right mind wants them on their territory. Just ask the Lebanese and Jordanians how that worked out for them last time

You are probably not seeing this analysis elsewhere, but that’s not because nobody else is thinking it. Most knowledgeable observers are well aware that this is probably where it will all end up, but they fear that saying it aloud will make it even likelier. I don’t believe that what I say will make the slightest difference, which makes me freer to say what I think.

We are at a point where Trump’s America and Netanyahu’s Israel – I use the possessive case because there have been better versions of both countries – have established complete domination over the Middle East. Nobody dares gainsay them: not Iran, not Egypt, not Saudi Arabia, not even Turkey.

This period cannot last long, because Netanyahu is running out of time on the home front and Trump is ignorant and greedy, but these new hegemons will impose decisions in the coming months that may blight the Middle East for another generation. Equally, their dominance is driving the local powers to counterbalance it with new alliances of their own.

Most alarming is Saudi Arabia’s new “strategic mutual defence agreement” with Pakistan, signed in September. Saudi Arabia used to base its security solely on its alliance with the United States, but the US-Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities this year may finally push that country into developing actual nuclear weapons.

Since Saudi Arabia no longer trusts a Trump-led America to protect it from Iranian nuclear weapons, it has found a nuclear-armed ally that could: Pakistan.  “Any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both,” says the Saudi-Pakistani alliance. Reassuring, isn’t it?

There is no plan, and the new hegemons have no idea what they are doing. Stand by for free-fall.

Gwynne Dyer’s latest book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers