The Unending Crisis

Is the Israel-Palestine Conflict Too Valuable to Resolve?

As Gaza burns and Palestinian society faces systematic destruction from what most legal scholars are at last calling genocide, the question becomes whether this is the end game of a global managerial system that has spent decades normalizing escalating violence. A global management system refers to the way an organization manages its business internationally, including its sales, marketing, hiring, and finance practices. In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it describes the network of international actors, institutions, and processes that have ostensibly been created to manage and resolve the conflict. Netanyahu's vision of a "Greater Israel" threatens to expose contradictions that have allowed this arrangement to continue, but the horrors now unfolding strongly suggest we may be witnessing not gradual system breakdown but catastrophic system fulfillment.

The scale and methodical nature of current destruction—entire neighborhoods demolished, universities and hospitals targeted, civilian infrastructure deliberately destroyed, explicit dehumanizing rhetoric from officials—marks a fundamental transformation, moving beyond mere escalation to a qualitatively different level of systematic destruction. This is not another "round" of conflict to be condemned, managed and contained, but potentially the eliminationist logic toward which decades of "crisis management" have been building.

The Illusion Machine

The fiction of "two sides" has become the dominant algorithm of international relations—a Cartesian cognitive framework so deeply embedded within our collective psyche that we mistake it for reality. This binary reduces an asymmetric structure of domination to a symmetrical narrative of competing injustices, creating the perfect conditions for endless mediation rather than decisive action to stop mass slaughter.

Yet this reduction serves a profound systemic function. It allows a vast constellation of actors—from regional powers to transnational organizations, and from academic institutions to media empires—to position themselves as neutral arbitrators while the systematic destruction unfolds. The machinery of crisis management has become more sophisticated, more entrenched, and more economically vital than the crisis itself—and more capable of processing virtually any level of human suffering while preserving institutional legitimacy.

The Horror as System Output

What we are witnessing in Gaza is not a failure of the management system but potentially its predictable product. The mechanisms that have sustained "manageable" levels of violence, seemingly for decades, may be breaking down in ways that produce exponentially greater devastation, or revealing their long-concealed agenda.

The slaughter isn't incidental to this system—it's increasingly becoming what the system produces. When we describe current arrangements as "functional" for various actors, we must confront what functionality requires: the organized degradation of Palestinian life to levels that international actors can still cautiously process. Each previous threshold—2008-2009, 2014, 2021—was absorbed, normalized, and integrated into continuing institutional arrangements. The system's capacity to accommodate escalating horror may be its most sophisticated feature.

The international response reveals this most clearly. Continued arms transfers, vetoes by the US in the UN Security Council, diplomatic protection in international forums, humanitarian aid that rebuilds what will be destroyed again—these suggest institutional frameworks that can process even genocidal violence as long as certain protocols are preserved. This exposes something I find really offensive about international governance: its ability to function through virtually any level of human suffering while preserving its own legitimacy.

Consider the ecosystem that has evolved around this arrangement: UN agencies with permanent mandates that persist regardless of outcomes, NGOs with multi-billion dollar budgets dependent on crisis continuation, academic departments built on perpetual analysis of ongoing destruction, diplomatic careers spanning decades of practice without protection of human life. This is not merely incompetence; it is the result of institutional adaptation, where the system has evolved to process and even normalize mass killing. For example, humanitarian organizations may provide aid that, while alleviating immediate suffering, inadvertently enables further displacement and dependence on external assistance, thus perpetuating the cycle of crisis.

The Leadership Trap

Herein lies a critical misconception that becomes morally pressing when any form of systematic killing is underway. Netanyahu's coalition—an insecure alliance at best—no more represents the totality of Israeli society than those policies represent unchangeable Israeli commitments. Yet international discourse consistently conflates current ruling configurations with immutable societal characteristics, even as that "leadership" oversees mass destruction.

This deadly conflation dehumanizes both Palestinians and Israelis. It allows Netanyahu's government to present controversial policies as democratically supported, silencing dissent and exceeding its mandate. It also enables international actors to ignore the diversity of Israeli opinion, avoiding engagement with those who advocate for peace and justice. Ultimately, this simplification fuels a cycle of violence, trapping both societies in a destructive narrative of mutual annihilation.

Israeli society encompasses profound diversity—secular and religious communities, military veterans who understand occupation's realities, urban professionals witnessing their country's international isolation. The judicial reform crisis revealed fractures that belie any notion of unified support for current pathways. Many Israelis recognize that systematic destruction of Palestinian society represents moral catastrophe and strategic disaster, yet the management system provides no mechanisms for amplifying those voices during moments of crisis. Organizations like "Peace Now" and "Standing Together" mobilize Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel against the occupation and for peace, equality, and social justice, but their influence is often marginalized in international discourse.

Temporal Architectures of Control

The present moment reveals temporal contradictions that render abstract discussions of "political evolution" morally inadequate. When systematic slaughter is underway, timescales that might matter for structural analysis become inconsequential to populations facing immediate extinction. Yet understanding these temporal dynamics remains crucial for identifying ways to stop the violence.

Netanyahu's increasingly explicit maximalism, verging on genocidal practice, creates pressures that reverberate through multiple levels while people die. Some Israeli constituencies might embrace explicit elimination of the Palestinian people as an honest acknowledgment of existing trajectories. Others might mobilize toward confrontational positions with their own government's actions. Still others might seek alternative political configurations. But the urgency lies in whether such possibilities can emerge quickly enough to halt methodical obliteration.

The economic burden of permanent conflict, social costs of international isolation, and mounting tensions within Israel generate potential pressure points for political evolution. Yet how these translate into actual policy change matters most for whether they can interrupt the killing rather than just reshaping future arrangements.

The Regional Chess Game

Regional actors have constructed elaborate strategies around maintaining productive ambiguity while systematic destruction unfolds. Iran deploys Palestinian suffering as low-cost mechanism to challenge American hegemony, but frankly shows little interest in actually protecting Palestinian life. Gulf states instrumentalize Palestinian elimination to extract concessions while pursuing normalization with those conducting it. Egypt treats Gaza as a pressure valve to be regulated and monetized, even as Gaza's population faces potential elimination.

These strategic calculations are being made over the bodies of dead civilians. The Abraham Accords of 2020 supposedly represented the acceptance of a shared heritage; present events may represent the acceptance of Palestinian elimination. Regional powers have consistently demonstrated that Palestinian lives appear to hold primarily instrumental value, lacking intrinsic worth within their strategic frameworks. While some initially presented the Abraham Accords as a path to regional peace and stability, critics argue that they have normalized the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and sidelined the Palestinian issue. Some reports indicate that even Palestinians are split with some seeing the Accords as having a positive impact.

The Institutional Complex

Perhaps nowhere is the system's moral bankruptcy more visible than in international institutional responses to the systematic killing. Humanitarian organizations provide aid that makes elimination more efficient by concentrating populations. Diplomatic processes create illusions of restraint while providing cover for continued destruction. Legal frameworks that condemn genocide prove systematically unable to prevent or halt it.

This is not conspiracy but a form of institutional evolution that has learned to accommodate mass killing. The machinery operates according to its own logic, creating careers, budgets, and professional identities that depend on managing rather than preventing systematic violence. UN officials issue statements while maintaining relationships with those conducting the eradication. Human rights organizations document atrocities while the documentation becomes a substitute for prevention. For instance, the UN's ongoing provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza, while essential for survival, can also be interpreted as tacitly accepting the continued blockade and control by Israel.

Beyond Conventional Solutions

Traditional frameworks for "resolution" become obscene when systematic killing is underway. Discussing "two-state solutions" while one population faces potential elimination reflects the analytical distance that enables continued violence. Yet understanding why conventional approaches fail remains crucial for identifying what might actually bring the slaughter to a halt.

The management system's sophistication lies partly in its ability to maintain future-oriented discussions while present-oriented elimination unfolds. "Peace processes" and "diplomatic initiatives" provide cover for systematic destruction by suggesting that current violence serves some larger negotiated outcome rather than representing eliminationist logic.

Halting the current violence requires a multifaceted transformation, potentially driven by international pressure creating economic unsustainability for the eliminationist policies, internal Israeli political shifts replacing extremist elements, regional realignments prioritizing stability, or external shocks altering the calculations of all involved actors.

The Architecture of Uncertainty

There can be no doubt that we're operating at the intersection of structural constraints and immediate moral imperatives. The management system that has contained contradictions for decades while enabling escalating violence might be reaching its own limits through genocidal outcomes that exceed even its processing capacity. Whether this produces transformation toward justice or completion of eliminationist logic depends on choices being made now by actors who may not recognize the stakes.

While complex systems evolve unpredictably, moral responsibility compels us to recognize and act when that evolution entails the systematic destruction of human populations. While different individuals and approaches might find viable pathways through existing constraints, the critical question is whether these alternatives can emerge quickly enough to avert irreversible annhilation.

The Meta-Question

The most profound insight emerging from this analysis may be that focusing on "solutions" while systematic killing unfolds represents a category error. If current arrangements function to enable rather than constrain eliminationist violence, then meaningful intervention requires immediate disruption of those arrangements rather than their long-term transformation.

The persistence of international support for systematic destruction reveals not just an appalling policy failure, but willing institutional complicity. The architecture of permanent crisis may have evolved into an architecture of permanent elimination, requiring not gradual reform but immediate intervention to preserve human life.

Navigating the Labyrinth

What becomes clear is that analysis divorced from immediate moral imperatives serves to intellectualize rather than interrupt systematic violence. Understanding structural dynamics matters most for identifying pressure points that might actually halt the killing rather than reshape post-genocidal arrangements.

This requires working simultaneously to stop immediate violence and transform structures that enable it, but with the recognition that analytical frameworks normalizing mass killing are themselves part of the problem. The most honest assessment acknowledges both systemic complexity and moral clarity about what is at stake: not just political arrangements but human survival.

Whether current systematic destruction represents the endpoint toward which the management system was always building, or a breakdown that creates space for fundamental metamorphosis, depends on the choices we make now. The structure of permanent crisis has produced its logical outcome in systematic elimination, but whether that outcome becomes irreversible depends on actions taken while the killing continues.

The future, as always, remains unwritten—but for many Palestinians, it is being violently foreclosed in the present.