No one could have predicted the savagery of the terrorist attack perpetuated against Israel on October 7, 2023. What will next year hold?

The October 7 terrorist attack against Israel was a chilling reminder of the volatile reality that defines life for a nation beset on all sides by Iran’s ruthless terror proxies. The surprise nature of this assault, which claimed innocent lives and rattled the region, underscored the unpredictability of security dynamics, even for a nation as militarily sophisticated as Israel.

October 6, 2023, was a kinder and gentler time. It was a different world in which normalizing diplomatic ties with Israel was becoming the new normal. Israel’s destruction and the subjugation of its population was little more than a fever dream of Hamas terrorists.

“On October 6, 2023, Brett McGurk believed that a Middle East peace deal was within reach — that the Biden administration just might succeed where every administration before it had failed,” as Franklin Foer sighed wistfully for The Atlantic on September 30, 2024.

“McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, was meeting in his office with a group of Saudi diplomats, drawing up a blueprint for a Palestinian state,” Foer recalled fondly. “It was the centerpiece of a grand bargain: In exchange for a Palestinian state, Saudi Arabia would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel.”

“At a moment when Israel was growing internationally isolated, the nation that styled itself the leader of the Muslim world would embrace it,” Foer wrote —somewhat incorrectly, as some might note.

Far from “growing internationally isolated,” in 2023, Israel was reveling in some of the first peace deals with its Muslim-majority neighbors in decades — and planning more.

The Abraham Accords, struck during the Donald Trump administration, saw normalized ties between Israel and several of its nearest neighbors.

Signed in September 2020, the Abraham Accords represent a historic diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East, normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab nations, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Sudan and Morocco joined a few months later.

Brokered by the U.S. under the Trump administration, the accords marked a major departure from decades of Arab-Israeli tensions, sidelining the Palestinian issue in favor of economic and security cooperation. By fostering trade, investment, and tourism, the agreements aimed to reshape regional dynamics.

In December of 2022 — curiously far away from the media attention — envoys from the UAE celebrated the New Year with their Israeli brothers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Then, of course, the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel happened, and that fragile and emergent peace was shattered — as Iran intended.

In a landscape where peace talks stall and regional alliances shift like desert sands, the question of what comes next looms large — not just for Israel, but for the broader Middle East.

Israel’s position as the world’s only Jewish-majority nation and the Middle East’s only democracy makes it uniquely vulnerable and resilient. With regional threats ranging from militant groups to state actors like Iran, Israel must navigate an increasingly complex geopolitical web.

While Israel has claimed some tremendous successes on the battlefield — daring hostage rescue operations, high-profile target eliminations, and an Israeli Intelligence derring-do involving some highly volatile Hezbollah pagers — diplomatic success on the wider world stage has been elusive.

But while plenty of mainstream media outlets are intent on blaming Israel for the October 7 terrorist attack against Israel and holding the Israeli military to an entirely different standard than the rest of the world, not everyone is following the company line.

Conservative media outlets blame a different set of causes for Israel’s current plight.

“How To Blow up the Middle East War in Five Easy Steps,” conservative political analyst Victor Davis Hanson fumed for Real Clear Politics on October 4, 2024. “When Joe Biden became president, the Middle East was calm. Now it is in the midst of a multifront war.”

“So quiet was the inheritance from the prior Trump administration that nearly three years later, on September 29, 2023 — and just eight days before the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis — Biden’s national security advisor Jack Sullivan could still brag that ‘The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,’” noted Hanson.

“So, what exactly happened to the inherited calm that led to the current nonstop chaos of the present?” he asked. “In a word, theocratic Iran — the nexus of almost all current Middle East terrorism and conflict — was unleashed by Team Biden after having been neutered by the Trump administration.”

“Their malignant legacy is the current Middle East disaster,” he concluded.

(contributing writer, Brooke Bell)