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Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.Wishes for a new Middle East seem cursed to come true in the worst possible way. On Sept. 22, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the U.N. General Assembly with a map of “The New Middle East,” extolling the blessings it would bring. Reread a month later, however, his words are suffused with a particularly tragic irony.Israel – Prime Minister Addresses U.N. General Debate, 78th SessionWhere the Abraham Accords had already “heralded the dawn of a new age of peace,” Netanyahu announced that normalization with Saudi Arabia would further “tear down the walls of enmity.” This, he explained, was a rebuke to the “false idea, that unless we first concluded a peace agreement with the Palestinians, no other Arab state would normalize its relations with Israel.” “For years,” he went on, “my approach to peace was rejected by the so-called experts. Well, they were wrong.”To illustrate his vision, Netanyahu held up a map of Israel and its Arab neighbors at peace. Gaza and the West Bank were gone, leaving the Jewish state stretching Palestine-free from the river to the sea. Meanwhile, Jerusalem’s new Arab partners were a friendly, rather than fully Islamic, shade of green. And finally, for good measure, Netanyahu took out a pen to draw a new trade corridor connecting India and Europe across the region.Now, in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, the new Middle East looks uglier than ever. Key elements of the Abraham Accords will likely survive, with both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia expressing