The transition from the Holocaust that took place during the Second World War to the current conflict in Gaza is the result of a historical chain where memory, security strategy, and geopolitical power interact and gradually consolidate an asymmetric regional system.
After 1945, the Holocaust is integrated into the core of the post-war international order not only as a historical event, but as an absolute moral standard.
The founding of Israel in 1948 does not occur in a vacuum, but within an environment where the West simultaneously seeks the management of the Jewish refugee crisis, the stabilization of the Middle East, and the rearrangement of its colonial presence.
The result is the birth of a state whose legitimacy is doubly founded: on one hand on international recognition, and on the other hand on the existential memory of persecution.
This starting point is of critical importance, because it establishes from the very beginning a security structure that is not situational, but constitutive.
Security is not treated as a political parameter, but in existential terms.
In geopolitical terms, this produces a state with high strategic sensitivity to geopolitical shifts and an orientation toward deterrence, where every regional threat is interpreted through the prism of historical repetition.
The critical turning point on the ground comes in 1948 with the Nakba, namely the displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of settlements.
From a geostrategic perspective, this creates a fundamental asymmetry: an internationally recognized and territorially consolidated state against a population without sovereignty, which is transformed into a long-term refugee issue.
This initial condition is never lifted, but is transformed and reappears at different levels of intensity.
The next critical phase is 1967.
With the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, Israel ceases to be merely a state within internationally recognized borders and becomes simultaneously an occupying power.
From this point onward, the conflict acquires a structural character: it does not concern only interstate confrontation, but the management of populations under different regimes of rights within the same geographical space.
The Jewish apartheid and the security doctrine
In this context, a multi-layered system of control develops: military administration, settlement expansion, institutional differentiation of rights, and the gradual consolidation of a reality where sovereignty is not symmetrically distributed.
International security analyses often describe this condition as a high-friction structural asymmetry, meaning a system that does not tend toward equilibrium but toward repeated destabilization.
Gaza, especially after 2007, constitutes the most condensed example of this dynamic.
The blockade of land, air, and sea, combined with repeated military operations, creates an environment where economic development, mobility, and state normalcy function under permanent restriction.
From a strategic perspective, this is an environment of "controlled pressure", which nevertheless periodically produces high-intensity crises.
On the international level, Israel is fully integrated into the Western power architecture, with the United States constituting the core pillar of military and technological support.
This relationship is not merely a bilateral alliance, but a strategic integration into a broader system of regional deterrence in the Middle East.
Annual military aid, joint defense infrastructures, and interoperability in intelligence systems create a level of cooperation that exceeds typical alliance formats.
At the same time, maintaining strategic ambiguity around the nuclear arsenal reinforces the deterrence posture, while high technological and military superiority functions as a power multiplier in an environment of polycentric threats.
The eternal regional crisis
The overall result of this historical trajectory is the formation of a system where the memory of existential trauma, the state security architecture, and geopolitical support are linked into a single mechanism.
Security is no longer simply a policy goal, but the organizational logic of the state itself, which is reproduced through regional conflict.
Thus, the transition from the Holocaust to Gaza cannot be understood as a linear historical evolution, but as a process of gradual institutionalization of security under conditions of permanent power asymmetry.
The result is a regional system that does not stabilize, but reproduces crises as its structural feature, and at the center lies the state of Israel.
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