The preliminary remark on method from the Ukraine paper applies here even more urgently. The Middle East conflict is so ideologically charged that almost any formulation can be read as taking sides. The Megamachine perspective asks about structures — not in order to relativise victims, not in order to exonerate perpetrators, not in order to use complexity as an alibi for indifference. The Hamas terror attack of 7 October 2023 was a massacre. Israel's military response has — according to estimates by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research — cost more than 100,000 people their lives by October 2025. Both facts are true. Both must be stated.
I. The long roots — 1948 to Oslo
1948: the Nakba. The founding of the State of Israel and the simultaneous flight and expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians. For Israel: the fulfilment of a century-old dream and a project of survival after the Holocaust. For the Palestinians: a catastrophe without return. Both experiences are real. Both shape every negotiation, every position, every calculation to this day.
1967: the Six-Day War. Israel occupies the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights. The beginning of an occupation that continues to this day — with growing settlements in the West Bank, with a blockade of Gaza that encloses 2.3 million people. UN Resolution 242 calls for withdrawal in exchange for peace. It was never implemented.
1987: the First Intifada. In this climate Hamas emerges — as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Sheikh Yassin in December 1987. From the outset it sees itself as an Islamist alternative to the secular PLO. And here lies one of the bitterest ironies of history: in the 1970s and 1980s Israel not only tolerated the forerunner organisation of Hamas — it indirectly promoted it. Not out of sympathy with Islamism, but out of tactical calculation: a religious counterpart was meant to weaken the secular PLO and split the Palestinian leadership. Israeli military governors later confirmed this themselves. Hamas is in part the product of Israeli strategy — a spirit that was summoned.
1993: Oslo. The PLO recognises Israel. Israel recognises the PLO. Worldwide hope for a two-state solution. What followed: no founding of a Palestinian state, but growing settlements in the West Bank — more land every year, less room every year for the promised state. Hamas torpedoes Oslo through terror attacks. The Israeli settler movement torpedoes Oslo through faits accomplis. Both sides have de facto buried the two-state solution — from opposite motives, with the same result.
II. Gaza as an open-air prison — 2007 to October 2023
2006: Hamas wins democratic elections in the Palestinian territories — recognised as a fair election by EU observers and Jimmy Carter. The West refuses recognition. 2007: Hamas takes power in Gaza, Israel imposes a complete blockade. 2.3 million people on 365 square kilometres — one of the most densely populated areas in the world — with strict control of all entries and exits, all imports, all exports. At times calorie quantities were literally calculated: just enough not to trigger a humanitarian catastrophe, too little for economic development.
In this context Hamas develops a Megamachine of its own: it governs Gaza with religious authority and violence. It builds up military capacities — tunnel networks, rockets, drones. It uses the population as a shield and at the same time as a source of legitimacy: the more Israel attacks, the more support Hamas gains. Every Israeli operation — 2008/09, 2012, 2014, 2021 — weakens Hamas militarily and strengthens it politically. That is the mowing logic: the grass is mown, it grows back. Nobody has tackled the roots.
And Netanyahu? For years he pursues a strategy that is known in Israel as "mowing the lawn" and that is documented in media reports: tolerating Hamas as Gaza's governing party — because a strong Hamas prevents Palestinian unity, weakens Mahmoud Abbas's position and makes the two-state solution impossible. In 2018 Netanyahu approves massive money transfers from Qatar to Gaza — 30 million dollars a month. Hamas stays alive. The Palestinian state stays prevented. The calculation works out — until it fails catastrophically.
III. 7 October — and what led to it
On 7 October 2023 Hamas fighters break out of Gaza and murder 1,139 people — children, the elderly, people celebrating at a music festival. 251 people are abducted as hostages. It is the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The brutality is so extreme that even long-standing critics of Israel fall silent.
What triggered it? Several factors at once. First: Netanyahu's coalition with the extreme settler parties — Ben-Gvir and Smotrich — had in 2023 pushed through a judicial reform intended to strip the Supreme Court of its power. Months of mass protests in Israel. The army divided. The security apparatus distracted. Hamas saw Israel's domestic crisis and exploited it. Second: escalations in the West Bank in 2023 — Israeli settler violence, Israeli military operations, rising numbers of Palestinian victims — had further inflamed the mood. Third: the Abraham Accords of 2020 and the emerging Saudi–Israeli agreement threatened to take the Palestinian question off the table for good — without a Palestinian state, without Palestinian participation. Hamas acted in order to make itself a relevant actor.
This explains — it does not justify. No political analysis can justify a massacre of civilians. But whoever does not understand why 7 October was possible does not understand how to prevent it from happening again either.
IV. The Megamachine actors
Israel as Megamachine: a democracy with a strong military and security apparatus, a settler movement that has determined the political agenda for decades, and a prime minister who is personally under indictment and whose political survival depends on the state of war continuing. This is not a conspiracy theory — it is political reality that is openly discussed in Israel itself. Netanyahu's coalition partners Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have publicly declared what they want: permanent Israeli control over Gaza, resettlement of the Gaza Strip by Jewish settlers. Israel's Megamachine has very different interests in this war — some want to destroy Hamas, some want to bring the hostages home, some want to annex Gaza permanently. These interests are not compatible and block any peace process.
Hamas as Megamachine: an organisation that places the continuity of its own power above the well-being of the population — structurally, not necessarily as the conscious decision of individuals. Hamas needs the conflict in order to exist. In peace, Hamas is a corrupt Islamist administration in an impoverished territory. In war, Hamas is resistance, martyrs, legitimation. Every dead civilian is ambiguous for Hamas: tragedy and propaganda resource. This is no defence of Israeli warfare — it is a description of how Hamas logic works.
Iran as regional Megamachine: Hamas is financed and armed by Iran — not out of solidarity with the Palestinians, but out of strategic interest. For Iran, Gaza is a means of pressure against Israel and the USA. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the same. The Houthis in Yemen, the same. Iran is building an "axis of resistance" that protects Iran itself while others fight and die.
Qatar as a paradoxical actor: it finances Hamas, houses the Hamas leadership in luxury hotels in Doha — and at the same time hosts the largest US military base in the Middle East. It mediates ceasefire negotiations. This is not hypocrisy in the moral sense — it is the Megamachine of the small Gulf state that buys influence through maximum ambivalence. Do hamer all jet von, as they say in Cologne — everyone gets something out of it.
The USA as Megamachine: 3.8 billion dollars in annual military aid to Israel — fixed by agreements, by AIPAC's lobbying power, by strategic interests. And at the same time: the only actor that could actually stop Israel. The USA has not used this lever since October 2023 — under Biden out of conviction and domestic political calculation, under Trump out of conviction without calculation.
V. Who profits — who pays
Gaza pays. More than 100,000 dead according to estimates by the Max Planck Institute up to October 2025 — with demographic patterns resembling those observed in genocides, though the study does not apply the term genocide in the legal sense. Life expectancy in Gaza fell in 2024 by 47 per cent compared with the pre-war level. 90 per cent of buildings damaged or destroyed. A generation growing up in rubble.
Israel pays — in the long term. Internationally isolated as rarely before. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. The International Court of Justice is examining the accusation of genocide. The Abraham Accords are on ice. Under these conditions Saudi Arabia cannot normalise relations. And in security terms: Hamas is weakened but not destroyed. Whoever treats the population of a territory like this breeds the next generation of fighters.
Netanyahu personally profits. That is the bitterest point. He is on trial in Israel for corruption. Wars do not end criminal proceedings — but they postpone them, distract from them, create new coalition necessities. A ceasefire means a return to domestic political normality — and to the indictment. That is no proof that Netanyahu is waging the war for this reason. It is a conflict of interest that in any normal state under the rule of law would force resignation.
The arms industry profits — American, European, Israeli. Elbit Systems, Rafael, Israel Aerospace Industries: Israeli arms exports have set records since October 2023. The Gaza battlefield is showroom and testing ground at the same time.
VI. Why peace is hardest here
In the Ukraine war there is an identifiable aggressor and an identifiable victim — even if the prehistory is complex. In Gaza there are two peoples claiming the same space, 75 years of layered injustice on both sides, and Megamachines on all sides that structurally obstruct peace.
The two-state solution — officially the position of almost every government in the world — barely exists in the West Bank any more even as a geographical possibility. 700,000 Israeli settlers in more than 150 settlements have changed the topography so much that a contiguous Palestinian state is impossible without the mass evacuation of settlements. And evacuating settlements is politically life-threatening for any Israeli government.
The one-state solution — one state for everyone between the Jordan and the Mediterranean — founders on demographic reality: with equal rights for all, Israel would within a generation no longer be a Jewish-majority democracy. Without equal rights, it is apartheid.
What remains? A frozen conflict that periodically explodes — as in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023. Each explosion deadlier than the last. No side ready to pay the price that peace costs. And an international community that for decades has been passing resolutions that nobody implements.
Gaza is the result of 75 years in which all those involved — Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab states, the USA, the international community — put short-term interest above a long-term solution. The Megamachine produces war because war is more functional than peace for too many actors. This does not relativise the suffering. It describes why the suffering finds no end.
VII. The global rift
Gaza has exposed something that had been there for a long time: the deep rift between the Global North and the Global South on the question of which human lives count. Western governments — Germany, the USA, the UK — showed solidarity with Israel and at the same time watched for months as Gaza was bombed. For the Global South, which knows colonial history, this was no surprise — but a confirmation: there are no universal human rights. There are hierarchies of suffering.
South Africa has filed a case for genocide before the International Court of Justice. Nicaragua is suing Germany. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. These institutions, which the West built after 1945 as the foundation of the rules-based world order, are now being used against the West itself. This is not anti-Western propaganda. It is the consequence of rules that are meant to apply without exception.
Gaza has shown the Megamachine of Western foreign policy in its purest form: values as language, interests as practice. That has destroyed trust that will not be quickly rebuilt — regardless of how the war ends.