Can anything stop a full-scale conflict in the Middle East?

The fact that the Middle East stands on the brink of a catastrophic war can be explained by a scene from The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s preposterous but entertaining series on Netflix about aristocrats and sarf London drug-dealers. The dim eldest son of a duke is in trouble with a vicious gangster, who makes him dress up as a chicken and cluck and dance while the whole excruciating spectacle is filmed. Eventually the humiliation is too much for the aristo: he gets the family Purdey and blasts the gangster in the face – even though he knows that there will be terrible consequences.

Iran, too, has been humiliated by Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, in a government guest house, and during a presidential inauguration to boot. As a columnist in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz argued this week, humiliation may be ‘the single most under-appreciated force in international relations’. So will Iran hit back hard, even if it means a wider war?

The Iranian leadership’s inflammatory rhetoric about Israel leads some to believe they would self-immolate in an act of holy martyrdom if it meant destroying the Zionist usurper and freeing Palestine. But the mullahs are rational and, so far, cautious. The priority has always been regime survival. Israel gambled on this when it reached into the heart of the enemy’s capital to kill Haniyeh. There will be some kind of military response. Iranian officials have said so to British, French and German diplomats in Tehran. They have closed some of their airspace, presumably to clear the path for long-range missiles. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that ‘the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime’ had invited a ‘harsh punishment’ for itself.