War as Entangled Accumulation: The Case of Gaza

Legal scholars have offered key insights into the new patterns of war in contemporary society. Among them, in a chapter prepared for Masato Ninomiya’s Festschrift, Toshiki Mogami connects three dimensions: state revenge, genocide, and colonialism. These processes, however, can be reread under specific conditions of capitalist development, when, driven by claims on future revenue, overaccumulated wealth fuels pressure to open new markets in the context of financialization. Such a perspective draws on Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, later redefined in debates on Landnahme-Theorem. This view contends that capitalist growth, constrained by spatiotemporal limits, overcomes these barriers by occupation of non-capitalist territories through violence, colonial policy, and war. The question is how this is manifested in recent military conflicts; a problem that must be situated within the system of financial accumulation.

Interest-bearing capital, grounded in property rights over money and the obligation of repayment with interest, assumes the form of fictitious capital in secondary markets, instituting expectations of income streams that multiply with capitalization potential. In the form of investment contracts, this regime overaccumulates claims on future surplus value, whose realization depends on expropriations annexing territories and populations into a circuit of valorization. Such annexations channel surplus capital into infrastructure, housing, and resource extraction, while generating income streams via securities backed by land and real-estate assets.

The devastation of Palestine is, in this sense, an extreme case of entangled accumulation at war.

Israel has become a strategic node for global capital

As noted by William I. Robinson and Hoai-An Nguyen, the 2003 invasion of Iraq coincided with the Middle East’s accelerated integration into the global economy, following the creation of the Greater Arab Free Trade Area (GAFTA) and additional bilateral and multilateral agreements. It gave rise to a wave of corporate and financial investment across strategic sectors supported by Gulf capital – trillions in sovereign-wealth funds – alongside flows from Europe, the Americas, and China. Israel became a strategic node for global capital.

In this context, the enclosure of Gaza can be understood as a means through which transnational overaccumulation, already manifested through the Israeli corporate complex, seeks new frontiers of valorization. It represents a form of primitive accumulation: an expropriation of land, goods, and people aimed at transforming them into market-based social relations.

Fear of terrorism and a state of emergency pave the way for state revenge

This expropriation rests on suspending rights and guarantees, enabling the deployment of military apparatus without institutional checks or safeguards. This suspension relies on a legal device (state of emergency) to authorize it. The concept of state revenge, as outlined by Mogami, captures this shift: the state’s response to politically motivated violence against people or property is no longer governed by law but driven by retribution.

After the Hamas attacks, Benjamin Netanyahu promised “mighty vengeance” and invoked the verse “remember what Amalek did to you”, often read as an imperative to retaliate. This setting derives legitimacy from mobilizing fears through discursive appeal to “terror.” Thus, population insecurity is magnified by a dominant ideology that normalizes social panic and authorizes disproportionate practices of state revenge. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration of a “complete siege” of Gaza –“no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” – has become emblematic of collective punishment and starvation as a method of war.

Reproducing the logic of European colonialism

The ideology of state revenge rests on the stigma of the “terrorist.” It functions as a mechanism of othering that ascribes to certain groups traits of violence, barbarism, and irrationality, thereby rendering them legitimate targets of repression. This dispositive also sustains the moral self-image of superiority in societies that regard themselves as “civilized.” From this perspective, the war on terror reproduces the logic of European colonialism, where hierarchies of peoples and races justified civilizing missions and repressive rule over colonized populations. In this light, Yoav Gallant’s description of Palestinians as “human animals” echoes the language of dehumanization typical of colonial projects.

The colonial character of state revenge renders contemporary wars instruments for meeting valorization demands of financial overaccumulation. Stigmatizing discourses of othering authorize violence that facilitates the dispossession of territories and peoples, reaching its extreme form in the Israel–Palestine conflict, where Netanyahu’s far-right populism radicalizes what Eran Kaplan identifies as Jabotinsky’s Revisionist legacy of colonial militarism. It appropriates religious and natural-law arguments to construct Jewish superiority over Arabs, advancing a racist colonialism that forecloses the prospect of equal coexistence. This framing allows the Gaza war to enact state revenge under imperatives of ethnic cleansing, paving the way for genocidal acts against Palestinians. This violence serves the solutions to overaccumulation, drawing on doctrines such as terra nullius – the claim that land deemed “empty” or “unused” is open to colonization – to justify annihilation and reconstruction, enabling new investments and asset valorization.

Territorial colonization intertwined with militarized accumulation

According to Forbes, defense stocks hit record highs during the Middle East escalation, driven by contracts for major arms suppliers, which in turn reignited the military industry. This militarized accumulation is entangled with other forms of capital valorization. At the end of October 2024, amid bombardments, Israel granted licenses to transnational energy companies to explore for gas and oil in the Mediterranean, seeking to turn the country into a gas hub during the energy crisis aggravated by the war in Ukraine, as shown by Robinson and Nguyen.

The intertwining of territorial colonization, far-right ethnonationalism, and the channeling of financial overaccumulation has since become evident. Among the reconstruction plans for Gaza are Gaza 2035, issued by the Israeli government, and An Economic Plan for Rebuilding Gaza: A BOT Approach, by Joseph Pelzman, presented to Donald Trump’s team. Both advocate international governance and security arrangements that promote privatization of public assets by foreign investors.

As Nur Arafeh and Mandy Turner note, the US plan declares the territory “devoid of property laws” and, on that basis, leases it for fifty years, with investors acquiring “equity shares in Gaza” and assuming full control over economy, infrastructure, and administration. By contrast, Gaza 2035 ties reconstruction to exploiting Gaza’s energy reserves (about 122 trillion cubic feet of gas and 1.7 billion barrels of oil). Both plans presuppose Palestinian displacement: the BOT plan calls for Gaza to be “completely emptied”, while the Israeli project envisions “rebuilding it from nothing”. Both also provide continuous military force to ensure external political control and enable economic restructuring aligned with investor interests.

In Gaza, Palestinians trapped between violence and financial dependence

After the first phase of the ceasefire was agreed on October 9, 2025, debate over Gaza’s reconstruction will likely intensify. Trump’s 20-point peace plan proposes an administration with Palestinian participation, presented as technocratic but politically subordinated to a “Board of Peace” chaired by the US president and including historical actors of the neoliberal order, such as Tony Blair. The plan promises that surviving Palestinians will be “free to leave and return”, alongside an economic initiative to “energize Gaza”: a synthesis of earlier frameworks to attract investment, modeled on “the thriving modern miracle cities of the Middle East” (points 9 and 10). Celebrating the ceasefire, Trump declared, “Gaza is going to be slowly redone […] you have tremendous wealth in that part of the world”.

The Gaza war illustrates how the entangled accumulation of destruction and reconstruction produces a complex interplay between dispossession, financialization, and remaining peoples. According to Orwa Switat, resistance to genocidal violence reaffirms collective or communal ties to the land, driving struggles against expropriation, while “economic valorization” as a colonial technique encourages civic inclusion but within a stratified Israeli citizenship that grows even more discriminatory in the postwar context. Rising demolitions and deaths are accompanied by promises of financial prosperity in the restructured territories. As such, entangled accumulation traps Palestinians between violence and financial dependence on reconstruction itself.

Guilherme Leite Gonçalves, Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil <guilhermeleite@iesp.uerj.br>