In the latest armed confrontation between Israel and an assortment of Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza led by Hamas, largely failed patterns of behaviour, old and familiar, are reasserting themselves, while new actors and political forces take centre-stage in a fast-changing Middle East. The changes are happening because the Gaza conflict is the first instance in which four major regional dynamics converge into a single process: the Arab-Israeli conflict, the regional alliance of Arab and Iranian Islamist forces, the inevitable foreign policy impact of the nearly two-year-old Arab uprisings, and the reconfiguration of power politics as regional players assume a more prominent role to replace the fading impact of global powers.