How complexity science sheds light on self-sustaining conflict in Gaza

It's not for nothing that the Bible tells us that we will be wiser if we go to the ant and consider its ways

If there’s one unifying factor about the unending Gaza war, it’s that it has left us all frustrated. We all want the pain and suffering to end as quickly as possible, no matter what “side” we are on or how we think it should or could end. To me, the most useful way to understand why it doesn’t end is to view it through the lens of complexity theory.

This theory derived from the observation that complex systems self-organize in self-sustaining but unpredictable ways. Individual interactions give way to emergent structures that create a new iteration of the system. Indeed, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an emergent structure generated by the international political system, which has generated even newer structures. The Zionist movement, Fatah and Hamas – none of these groups’ emergence were obvious before they arose, but they’ve all altered the system.  So, bear with me to explain the theory before circling back to the conflict. FYI, I borrow liberally from Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise, the groundbreaking pathologist and scholar who pioneered adult stem cell plasticity and has researched complexity for over two decades.

The first rule of complexity theory is that the more individuals there are in the system, the more complex it becomes. These complex systems produce emergent behavior that couldn’t exist below a certain threshold.  Consider an ant colony (Proverbs 6:6 suggests to go to the ant, “study its ways and learn”). A healthy, sizeable colony produces ants who form food lines to bring back nourishment, care for larvae, excavate tunnels, go to war or carry away the dead for burial outside the colony. If it falls below a certain threshold, all this activity stops: no new tunnels, no food lines and ants lie where they die.

The second rule is that interactions are local, not global. In the ant colony, it may look organized, and someone might even assume that the Queen is calling the shots, but actually everything happens at the local level. A food line forms because one ant that finds a piece of food lays down a pheromone trail, which fades over time, on the way back to the colony, and other ants follow that trail in the direction of the fading pheromone. But they also lay down their own trail, reinforcing it and inducing more ants to follow it. Hence, the food line self-organizes without any individual ant ordering its formation.

Third, negative feedback loops prevail. Negative feedback loops are checks on a system to prevent it from turning chaotic, as complex systems exist on the edge of chaos. Think of an air conditioner. When the room gets too hot, it turns on; when it cools enough, it cuts off, keeping a homeostatic situation, by which the room remains in a comfortable range. If it a hot room triggered the heater, it would create a positive feedback loop making the room unbearable. Another example of an unsustainable positive feedback loop is cancer, which kills people because cells won’t cease to reproduce. To return to the ant colony example, if the pheromone trail didn’t fade, all the ants would form a food line even after the food supply ran out, and the colony would starve to death.

Fourth and finally, the degree of randomness is key. Too much randomness prevents the system from self-organizing; ants would never be able to form food lines. Too little randomness causes the system to behave like a machine that is too inflexible to find new modes of adaptive behaviors. In the ant colony, some ants randomly don’t join the food line, which is essential because they are then free to discover new food resources, or to do other tasks necessary to the colony’s well-being. The right amount of low-level randomness, also known as a quenched disorder, creates what the scientist Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible” – the array of outcomes that can emerge from these random interactions. We can’t predict which possibility will emerge, but once it does it creates a new set of adjacent possibles. Think of inventions. Moveable type was invented in China in the 10^th century, making the invention of the printing press possible, but it didn’t emerge until Johannes Gutenberg jury-rigged a winepress in combination with the moveable type. And that led to an information revolution. Another phenomenon with the adjacent possible is that once the possibility opens up, new inventions can arise in different places simultaneously without coordination, like cars and electric devices in the late 19^th century.

What makes the adjacent possible so hard to predict is that complex systems are fractcal, meaning they are infinitely complex yet similar across different scales. Think of a tree with branches, with each branch then branching out into leaves. Fractals are the norm in nature, and once you see them, you can’t not see them anymore. In a complex, human system, conflicts are fractal, behaving similarly (though not at the same intensity) across different scales between nations, political groups, societies and even individuals.

So, how does all this connect to Israel’s war with Hamas? Having taken a deep dive into this theory, I now ask myself, where doesn’t it connect? I’ll paint the picture with broad strokes for now but aspire to apply it to more specific issues down the line.

When we look at the Israel-Hamas war, we have to account for the complex international system that emerged in the 20^th century in response to other destructive global conflicts. If the two were fighting in a vacuum, Israel could use its full might to wipe out Hamas and not worry about civilians as collateral damage. But that’s not Israel’s reality. The international community is watching. It has rules of war (as absurd as that may sound), human rights conventions, laws regarding crimes against humanity and genocide, and the International Criminal Court to enforce them; starvation as a weapon of war was outlawed in 2018.

All these emergent phenomena are essentially negative feedback loops that keep parts of the system from spinning out of control. The system is far from perfect but is remarkable in two ways – the overall estimated death rate from conflicts globally is lower than it has been for almost all of the last 600 years of human history, and no internationally recognized country has been wiped off the face of the earth since the end of World War II. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself is an emergent phenomenon from this complex system. This system made Israel possible and sustains its existence, but also made possible the emergence of the Palestinian national movement and sustains its existence. It’s a package deal.

I will try to unpack these complexities in coming posts to offer more clarity. But one caveat: due to the nature of complexity, I cannot alone offer a solution that will end our suffering. That can only emerge through an intentional cooperative effort by all sides to address the causes that have led to the conflict’s emergence and sustenance.

Cover photo: “Marching” by Jake Brown