The Business of Division: From War Zones to Wardrobes By Isabella Cammarata
Israel, Palestine, and the Price of Division: Who Really Profits?
Scroll TikTok for five minutes and it’s there: endless debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Everyone has a take, the algorithm rewards outrage, and the cycle of division keeps spinning. But behind the shouting, a quieter question lingers: who profits when conflict drags on?
For people in Israel and Palestine, this isn’t discourse—it’s lived reality. Airstrikes, checkpoints, and daily survival. Online, though, the conflict is flattened into content: arguments, headlines, hot takes. And while attention locks onto who’s right and who’s wrong, another dynamic runs in the background: war is also an economy.
War as an Economy
Conflict is not only about borders and politics—it’s also about markets.
● Weapons: Arms manufacturers see demand surge with every escalation, their stock prices rising alongside violence.
● Reconstruction: Cities reduced to rubble become billion-dollar opportunities for rebuilding contracts.
● Energy: Instability across the Middle East ripples into oil markets, creating volatility that fuels profits for global energy players.
For ordinary families, war is devastation. For corporations, it’s a balance sheet.
Fashion’s Parallel Universe
If that feels grim, consider the echo closer to home: fast fashion.
● Overproduction floods markets.
● Cheap labor is exploited.
● Ecosystems are damaged.
● Shoppers are sold the illusion of “new” each season.
The cycle looks familiar: destruction → profit → repeat. The hidden costs show up later—in rivers polluted, workers underpaid, and landfills overflowing.
Division as Distraction
Wars fracture people along lines of identity, religion, and nationality. Meanwhile, the machinery of profit keeps running smoothly.
Fashion does something similar: trends pit people against each other in debates about labels and aesthetics, while the deeper story—the human and environmental cost—slides out of sight.
Enter the Circular Economy
If war is about repeating destruction, circular systems are about breaking cycles.
● Repair, don’t replace.
● Share, don’t hoard.
● Create value locally,
instead of fueling global waste. Just as peace movements ask us to imagine a future beyond endless conflict, circular fashion asks us to picture a closet beyond endless consumption. Every choice—mending, swapping, rewearing—becomes a small act of refusal.
The Bottom Line
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows how division can trap people in pain while profit flows elsewhere. Fast fashion operates on a similar pattern: distraction for us, growth for them.
But cycles can be interrupted. Supporting circular fashion is one way to push against destruction-as-business—keeping resources in use, investing in community, and choosing sustainability over disposability.
Because whether we’re talking about missiles or miniskirts, the deeper question remains: who really benefits?
