Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is an event of historic proportions in the Middle East. As can be seen from Iran’s response to Israel’s attacks on its Lebanese-based proxy, the shockwaves are spreading throughout the region and are likely to reverberate around the world.

Nasrallah was on a mission to destroy Israel. It was a mantle he had taken up from countless other Arab leaders, from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who met with Adolf Hitler in 1941 to discuss the destruction of the Jews, to Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League who described the Arab invasion of the then-nascent Israel in 1948 as a ‘war of annihilation’. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser—an icon of pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s—pledged more than once to ‘destroy Israel’. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who founded Fatah, nurtured their own dreams of liquidating the Jewish state.

There was always a touch of hubris in such dreams. Hussein harkened back to the Iraqi caliph al-Mansur—meaning ‘the victorious’—who founded the kingdom of Iraq in the eighth century, even naming his superyacht after him. Nasser and Arafat competed to be the modern reincarnation of Saladin, the ‘redeeming ruler’ who defeated the Crusaders and liberated Jerusalem in the twelfth century.

All four leaders—Al-Husseini, Nasser, Hussein, Arafat—failed to achieve their grand pan-Arab dream. But Arab intellectuals—many seemingly blighted by a perverse attraction to failure—sustained their delusions. As the late Lebanese-born scholar Fouad Ajami lamented in his 1999 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A generation’s odyssey, this cohort largely put hollow pan-Arab nationalism above modernity, secularism and socioeconomic renewal.

Israel was the measure of the Arabs’ failure, pointed out the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said. To many intellectuals, its survival was unbearable. Ajami described the case of Khalil Hawi, a Lebanese poet and academic who supported Anton Saadah’s fascistic Greater Syria movement and subsequently imbibed the elixir of Nasser’s pan-Arabism. But there would eventually be no Greater Syria, no Arabdom, and not even a Lebanon Hawi could be proud of. Embittered and humiliated, he killed himself on the day of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Arab intellectuals created a moral universe in which any attempt by rulers to change lacked legitimacy. I recall being astonished when Arafat, who negotiated the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, believed Said to be his main opposition, though of course I understood why: Said was one of the many Arab intellectuals who rejected the Oslo Accords as an attempt by Israel to assert economic and cultural supremacy. As the Egyptian scholar Mohamed Sid-Ahmed—author of the visionary 1976 book After the Guns Fall Silent: Peace or Armageddon in the Middle-East—cynically put it, the accords amounted to ‘an exchange of land for a Middle East market’.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution was supposed to be the Shia answer to the failure of Sunni-Arab nationalism. Whereas pan-Arabism was often associated with the propertied Sunni classes, Iran’s revolution was portrayed as an uprising of the Shia underclasses. But Shia messianism found its own way to fail, proving unable to liberate the Arab masses abroad, despite massive support for proxy militias, while producing an oppressive, unpopular regime that offered no antidote to inequality.

Shi‘ism soon fell into the same trap that had doomed Sunni pan-Arabism: in an attempt to divert attention from its failures, Iran’s leaders poured all available energy and resources into a war of annihilation against Israel. Nasrallah became the embodiment of a new Arab ‘dream palace’, in which the Shia underclasses would reign supreme in Lebanon and beyond, and the regional designs of ‘Little Satan’ and ‘Great Satan’—that is, Israel and its American patron—are permanently thwarted.

If Nasser was a new Saladin, and Hussein was ‘the victorious’, then Nasrallah was the lord of the resistance (muqawama). He was the pan-Arab hero who fought in Syria’s civil war for more than a decade to save Bashar al-Assad’s tyrannical regime and haughtily declared war on Israel immediately after Hamas carried out its massacre last October. And his legend survived even the devastating blows of recent weeks, not least the Israeli military’s ‘device attack’, in which it targeted Hezbollah members by detonating explosives that it had concealed inside pagers and walkie-talkies.

The assumption was that Nasrallah still had surprises in the pipeline. But he turned out to be just another delusional Arab ruler who was destroyed by the violence that he had so eagerly courted in the service of a fantasy.

Until his last moments, Nasrallah did not understand the extent to which the Israeli military had penetrated Hezbollah’s capabilities. Perhaps he was intoxicated by all the resources and power that his Iranian patrons had lavished upon him for so many years; perhaps he had lost touch with reality entirely. In any case, Iran’s dream palace is now in tatters. In fact, this new showdown between Israel and Iran has exposed what should have been obvious long ago: the vision of an Iran-led Shia empire is hollow.

Alas, Israelis have built their own dangerous dream palace of ‘total victory’, erected on a foundation of nationalist fervour, religious messianism, and political intransigence. There is a scenario in which Israel’s military exploits change the region for the better. Unfortunately, far from being the standard-bearer for some enlightened political vision, Israel’s current government is committed to fighting a war on all fronts, with no view toward any political future that Israel’s neighbours could possibly accept.

Following Nasrallah’s killing and Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon, one Lebanese professor warned that an ‘entire generation’ of Lebanese is ‘waking up to politics’ and that ‘Israel is planting the seeds of future wars’. And so the cycle of violence continues.