The Interest in Fire

The Raw Material Problem

Conflicts do not persist because they are unsolvable. Most of the great protracted conflicts of modern history could have been resolved at certain moments — technically, diplomatically, territorially. They were not resolved. The question rarely asked is not: why not? But rather: for whom not?

Resolved conflicts produce nothing anymore. A pacified war requires no weapons, no intelligence operations, no emergency laws, no wartime leader, no apocalyptic mobilization. It becomes an ordinary political problem — negotiable, manageable, dull. For certain actors, this is not a relief. It is an existential threat.

This essay is concerned with a structural observation: conflicts are not merely waged — they are managed. This does not necessarily imply planning, nor coordination. It means: converging interests that independently ensure the fire keeps burning. Not too hot. Not too cold. Durably productive.

What Was Known Before October 7th

The following account draws on published investigation reports, parliamentary records, and official statements by Israeli authorities. It contains no conclusions — only facts that are publicly documented.

Israel had knowledge of Hamas's attack plan in two independent iterations: once in 2018, and again in 2022. Israel's domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, received information in July 2023 from an agent operating in Gaza about an impending large-scale attack in October. This information was not evaluated as a warning. The Military Intelligence Directorate sent at least four separate warnings to the political leadership between March and July 2023. The New York Times reported that Israeli intelligence had obtained, more than a year before the attack, a 40-page document describing the plan in near-exact detail. Israel gave the document an internal name: "Jericho Wall."

A signals intelligence analyst warned her superiors in the summer of 2023 that Hamas was rehearsing the maneuvers described in this document. Her assessment was dismissed as exaggerated by a superior officer. Egypt stated it warned Israel days before the attack that "an explosion of the situation is coming, very soon, and it will be large." Israel initially denied receiving this warning; the chairman of the US House Foreign Relations Committee, Michael McCaul, stated that the Egyptian warning was transmitted three days before the attack.

The head of government has to this day refused to allow an independent state commission of inquiry — despite such a commission being constitutionally expected following the 1973 precedent, and despite a majority of the Israeli public demanding one.

The Structural Question

When these facts are placed side by side — not as accusation, but as structural analysis — a question arises that the political public in Western countries does not ask, even though it imposes itself logically: which interests would have been better served by the occurrence of the event than by its prevention?

At the time of October 7, 2023, Israeli domestic politics was in the most severe constitutional crisis since the founding of the state. Months of mass protests against a planned judicial reform had fractured the country. The coalition government depended on parties openly demanding full annexation of the West Bank — a position internationally isolated and incompatible with normalization talks with Saudi Arabia. The head of government personally faced criminal charges for corruption, fraud, and breach of trust.

Within hours of the attack, the protests had ended. The constitutional debate was suspended. The indicted head of government was a wartime prime minister. The Saudi normalization talks — which would have required a Palestinian component — were off the table.

This is not a claim about cause and effect. It is an observation about benefit and beneficiary. Such observations are legitimate and necessary in political analysis. The question of who benefits from an event is not an insinuation — it is a standard instrument of historical explanation.

The Spectrum of Not-Knowing

In intelligence analysis there is a concept that rarely enters public debate: the distinction between failing to learn something — and failing to want to know it. Both can look, in retrospect, like an information deficit. Both produce the same gap in the documentation. But the causes are different, and so are the consequences.

Historical examples show that political leaderships sometimes do not ignore warnings because they disbelieve them — but because believing them would compel action they do not want to take. Stalin received dozens of precise warnings about the German invasion between 1940 and 1941. He had an agent arrested who warned particularly persistently. That was not an intelligence failure. It was information refusal for reasons of strategic convenience.

This pattern has a name in the literature: strategic ignorance. It protects against the duty to act. It produces plausible deniability. It is almost indistinguishable from genuine ignorance — unless documents surface later. In the case of October 7th, the documents have surfaced. Their interpretation remains open.

The Theology of War

While Israel wages its war against Gaza and participates in a broader regional conflict, a religious infrastructure has emerged on the other side of the Atlantic that understands war in the Middle East not as a political problem but as a theological necessity.

The American Secretary of Defense belongs to a theological movement — Christian Reconstructionism — that explicitly formulates the establishment of a Christian theocracy as a political goal. Since taking office, he has systematically restructured the military in this direction: prayer services at the Pentagon during working hours, the invitation of pastors who oppose women's voting rights, replacement of leadership personnel with ideologically aligned successors.

Since the beginning of US military operations against Iran, more than 200 soldiers from over 40 different units have filed complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The content of the complaints is consistent across all cases: commanding officers described the war as part of God's plan, with explicit reference to the Book of Revelation and an imminent Armageddon. One of the accounts, transmitted by an anonymous non-commissioned officer: a commanding officer told troops that the President had been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran that would usher in the Apocalypse.

It would be an error to treat these reports as a fringe phenomenon. Cornell University's analysis noted that tens of millions of American evangelicals hold some version of dispensationalism: the theological conviction that conflicts in the Middle East will trigger the return of Christ. This is not a sect. It is a mass belief — and it now occupies positions within the command structure of the world's largest military power.

Management Without Coordination

It would be a simplification to draw the picture that conspiracy theories always draw: back rooms, phone calls, a coordinated plan. That is not the argument of this essay — and it is not necessary.

The concept of management requires no coordination. It describes the convergence of interests that mutually stabilize each other without ever being openly coordinated. A real estate agent, a divorce lawyer, and a moving company all benefit from the same failing marriage — without having spoken to each other. Their shared interest in the dissolution of the marriage makes none of them a perpetrator. It makes them structural partners.

In the case of the conflicts in the Middle East, at least four such interests converge:

First: the interest of certain political leaderships in the permanence of the state of exception as an instrument of power preservation. A peace process deprives this instrument of its raw material.

Second: the interest of the arms industry in real war theaters as test tracks, markets, and budget justifications. The Iran war is the first large-scale deployment of AI-assisted kill chains. For certain companies, it is a proof of production.

Third: the interest of theological movements in escalation as fulfillment. For them, every de-escalation is a deferral, every escalation a step closer to the promise. They have no interest in resolution. Resolution would devalue their narrative.

Fourth: the institutional interest of an 800-billion-dollar military apparatus in the durability of threat narratives. An army of this size without a serious enemy loses its legitimacy. This is not malicious intent — it is institutional logic.

The Missing Brake

In Essay #86 — The Petrovian Failure and the Eichmanian Reliability — the question was raised of what saved the world in 1983: a man who hesitated. Stanislav Petrov had twenty minutes. He did not use them to act, but to doubt. The hesitation was the moral act.

In Essay #90 — 900 Attacks — it was described how Decision Compression systematically eliminates those twenty minutes as inefficiency. The machine has already decided. The human confirms formally.

What this essay adds: Petrov also hesitated because he knew what was at stake — for him, for his country, for his family. He was not outside the harm. He was inside it.

A theology that promises its believers they will be removed before the worst destruction — through the so-called Rapture — eliminates this brake in a different, more fundamental way. Those who believe they will watch the Apocalypse from above calculate risk differently. Not from malice. From theology.

This describes a combination that has never existed in this form before: a great power facing no existential threat from its enemy, with an arms industry profiting from the war, with political leaderships that need the state of exception, and with a significant part of their military command structure interpreting the war as God-ordained end times — and themselves as beyond its consequences.

The Question

This essay does not end with an answer. It ends with the question it has been circling all along — the one the Western public practically never asks:

What happens when a structure emerges in which all involved actors — each for their own, rationally comprehensible reasons — have no interest in the ending of a conflict? When the firefighter lives from the blaze, the physician from the illness, the prophet from the fulfillment? Not because they are evil. But because their institutions, their theologies, their political survival conditions have arranged things this way?

The question about who has an interest in the fire is not an insinuation. It is the most sober of all political questions. And perhaps the most urgent.

Those who extinguish the fire lose their profession.
Those who feed the fire lose their soul.
Those who know both and remain silent lose their name.