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’.