The System Working as Built

My training in systems thinking began in my twenties, with Buckminster Fuller. His core maxim was the Generalised Principle, something true in all cases, a working law of Universe. The Principle of Principles is synergy: the behaviour of a whole cannot be determined by examining its parts separately. Start with Universe first, Bucky would say. Aspirational. Rarely achievable. Always the right instruction.

Since October 2023 I have been trying to understand one thing. In September 2025 the United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, a finding already reached by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Public support for Israel has fallen sharply across the West. Pew finds majority unfavourable views in most surveyed countries, and Americans’ sympathies have shifted for the first time in decades. Government policy has not moved with any of it. Parliaments have not followed their publics.

I have read widely, and deliberately sought out Jewish scholars: Omer Bartov, Ilan Pappé, Shaul Magid, Zachary Foster, Naomi Klein, Antony Loewenstein, Norman Finkelstein, Gideon Levy, Ori Goldberg, Gabor and Aaron Maté, Molly Crabapple. And John Mearsheimer, who is not Jewish, but who named the lobby first and paid for it.

The money is real. AIPAC’s contributions to US legislators are tracked and public, and that is how it should be. Every donation, every vested interest, named. But money alone is too small an explanation. It does not account for ministers who take none of it, or for how quickly criticism becomes a career risk in countries where no such cheques are written. Australia, for instance: leaked documents revealed the export of F-35 components to Israel while ministers denied it was happening.

Examine the parts and you get lobbying. Start with the whole and you get something else.

Privately owned technology embeds in a region as an innocuous public-private partnership. The company keeps the data. Regional hubs, universities, fabrication plants and data centres follow, and the region becomes dependent. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos writes, private interests are transformed into public interests, so that citizens’ taxes are put to work in the service of investors.

This is the privatisation of the state, precisely what anti-regulation capital wants. These same corporations now sit inside defence and intelligence procurement and shape national security policy. Israeli firms, Cellebrite among them, are embedded in that layer. Antony Loewenstein’s work traces where much of it was first proven: the Palestinian laboratory. Tested on a captive population, then sold to police forces, councils and supermarkets worldwide.

So the question is not only who funds whom. It is why a government would move against a system its own security apparatus now depends on.

That gap between what citizens want and what governments do is not a failure of democracy. It is the system working as built.