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To speak of “Israelis and Palestinians” as the two sides of a conflict is to participate in a global fiction. This framing (two peoples, two histories, two claims to the same land) has become the foundational myth of international discourse: tidy enough to moralize, complex enough to debate, and vague enough to sustain entire industries of diplomacy, media, scholarship, and activism. Generations of earnest Arabs, Jews, others, scholars, amateur sleuths, and truth-seekers have devoted their lives to excavating the archives of British Mandate Palestine, as if somewhere, buried in the paperwork, lies the missing document that will finally resolve the dispute. Each believes that one more land deed, one overlooked census, one untranslated memo, one lost document, will tip the scales, vindicate a narrative, settle the score. It is a seductive fantasy, a kind of historical messianism, animated by the illusion that this is a case to be solved rather than a structure to be understood. It is a seductive lure that makes us feel like Solomonic judges, weighing rival maternal claims to a child called “history,” unaware that the courtroom itself is a stage, and the child, already long divided.

But the conflict is no longer, if it ever was, a dispute amenable to resolution through negotiation, international pressure, or diplomatic shrewdness. It is a permanent structural feature of the regional and global systems, enduring not because it is unsolvable in theory, but because its persistence reflects the actual distribution of power, interest, and incentive across the actors involved. It persists because it serves functions.

In other words, the persistence of the conflict is not an accident. It endures because it is embedded within multiple overlapping systems of power, geopolitical, economic, and symbolic, whose reproduction depends in part on the maintenance of the status quo. Across successive decades, many have treated the conflict as a policy challenge to be managed or resolved. This managerial lens, most evident in the cyclical revival of the “peace process,” obscures the reality. Neither side currently possesses the combination of capacity, leadership, and incentive required to alter the balance. More crucially, no external force, whether American, Arab, European, or multilateral, has the strategic alignment or political will to adjust its own strategic political complex in a way that actually produces an outcome. It is not simply a site of unresolved grievance; it is a strategic terrain, through which broader regional and global actors pursue divergent, often contradictory, goals. A field in which regional powers compete to extract resources and concessions from the global system.

The Israeli and Palestinian actors remain crucial, of course, but they no longer exhaust the field. They are not the whole. In many ways, they are no longer even the main event. The conflict today exists not as a limited dispute between two sides, but as a structural feature of a much larger system. Its persistence is not a mystery or a historical riddle. It persists because it serves major functions. It has become a site through which larger powers maneuver, posture, extract, legitimize, delay, and dominate. It is a feature of constant system reproduction.

Iran’s posture toward the conflict, for instance, is not reducible to ideological hostility toward Israel or support for Palestinian nationalism, no matter how much Iranian propaganda one listens to. Iran does not fund Hamas or Islamic Jihad out of charity, solidarity, or because Allah will pay them back in Paradise with fine concubines and gallons of halal wine. It does so because the Palestinian front offers Tehran a low-cost way to bleed Israel, destabilize the region, and harass the U.S. out of its dominant position; it uses the conflict as a mechanism to mobilize proxies, claim ideological legitimacy, etc. Qatar’s expansive media and soft power apparatus, likewise, uses the Palestinian cause to amplify its global posture, expand global media footprint, shape narratives, and leverage its role as a regional broker. Egypt treats Gaza as a pressure valve to be regulated, monetized, and instrumentalized in its relationship with Washington. Jordan and Lebanon, meanwhile, remain structurally dependent states, each fragile in its own ways, absorbing the conflict's demographic and political overflow while depending on it for foreign aid, regime legitimacy, and international attention.

None of this touches yet on the international sector: the array of UN bodies, Western NGOs, donor conferences, and legal forums that orbit the conflict like satellites. These institutions do not operate from outside the system; they are the system. Their liberal logic is not resolution but management, not because of bad faith, but because the perpetuation of crisis sustains their budgets, their roles, their raison d’être. It is one of the most morally and professionally prestigious, well-endowed white collar economic activities for First and Third-world natives. Palestine functions here as a site of moral legitimacy and bureaucratic permanence, offering endless ground for reports, mandates, workshops, and concern and access to an inexhaustible pool of resources.

Nowhere is this structural depth more visible than in the domestic politics of the United States. Here, the conflict is not merely a foreign policy interest but has become a proxy for deeper ideological, identity, and factional struggles within both political parties. The Democratic Party is divided between institutional centrists and an increasingly vocal activist Left that uses Palestine as a symbolic theater for broader critiques of American power, race, and capitalism, and as a means to grab power from the traditional Democratic institution. The Republican Party, practically the MAGA movement, meanwhile, incorporates support for Israel as part of a broader civilizational narrative involving Western identity, national security, and anti-Woke ideology, yet they themselves are increasingly polarized against rising tides of isolationists, the anti-Israel right, and increasing antisemitism. The result is that U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine is no longer even primarily about the region; it is increasingly about America.

This is what sustains the conflict: not simply the impasse between two tribal peoples, but the convergence of regional ambition, institutional interest, ideological theatre, and domestic maneuvering. To continue describing it as a bilateral dispute is to mistake the stage for the play. The question is not why the conflict remains unresolved but why we continue to pretend that resolution is its horizon when irresolution is the function.

Indeed, not all actors benefit equally from the status quo, and some (Mainly Palestinian and Israeli civilians) pay disproportionate costs. But also to say that the bilateral framing of the conflict is a mystification is not to deny that, under certain conditions, it has also functioned as a successful political strategy; one that has at times produced real outcomes. The first Trump administration’s regional realignment efforts, culminating in the Abraham Accords, were built precisely on this premise: that the conflict should be strategically disaggregated from wider regional politics, and that the Palestinian question, rightfully, should be set aside, if not resolved, long enough to allow Arab states to pursue their own interests in normalizing ties with Israel. It was, in many respects, a bold and coherent approach. It treated the conflict not as an international liberal theater but as a geopolitical constraint to be bypassed. And for a brief period, the conditions were unusually favorable: Gulf states with converging security fears of Iran, a mostly calm Palestinian society, an American administration willing to abandon the ridiculous pretense of evenhandedness, and a regional order desperate for economic integration and political stability. The strategy worked, until it didn’t. The moment passed, and the constraints returned. That does not mean the logic has disappeared or won’t reassert itself under different circumstances. But it is not the logic of the present.