Someone is being paid for the right to own assets whose value rises not because they produce anything, but because others are forced to pay more to hold them. What service, precisely, does this payment purchase for the society that provides it?

The recent missile exchange near Tel Aviv - three waves intercepted, several light injuries - has been framed as a security event, a test of deterrence, a geopolitical flashpoint. But beneath the surface of national defence lies a deeper, older conflict: the war between function and acquisition. The very systems deployed to intercept those missiles - patriot batteries, arrow systems, data fusion centres - are not merely tools of protection; they are also assets whose ownership and operation generate returns unrelated to their social purpose. The profit motive in defence is not neutral. It turns the question of survival into a market transaction: how much will we pay to avoid dying today, and who profits when the bill comes due?

The acquisitive society does not distinguish between the soldier who stands watch and the shareholder who collects dividends on the weapons he uses. It treats the right to exclude others from a resource - here, the resource is safety - as equivalent to the right to provide that resource in the first place. But ownership is not service. Ownership without function is extraction, and extraction without consent is violence - only in this case, the consent is manufactured by the very scarcity the system produces. The more the state is expected to secure order, the more valuable the tools of security become - and the more those tools are priced beyond their functional worth, into the realm of rent.

This is not a new development. It is the logical culmination of a century in which the state has been increasingly forced to outsource its coercive and protective functions to private actors whose accountability is measured not in public good, but in quarterly returns. The missile defence system does not exist first to protect Tel Aviv; it exists first to be owned, maintained, upgraded - its value sustained by the expectation of future conflict, not by its absence. The more stable the region, the less need for such systems - and the less profitable they become. Thus, the acquisitive logic has an interest in instability, not as a side effect, but as a condition of its reproduction.

The injuries in the Tel Aviv area are not merely casualties of war; they are evidence of a deeper failure: a society that has forgotten that security, like education or healthcare, is not a commodity to be priced according to willingness to pay, but a function to be performed for all. When the question becomes not “how do we keep people safe?” but “who gets to profit from keeping them safe?”, the very means of civilisation begin to eclipse its ends. And the civilisation that cannot tell the difference is not merely unjust - it is already, in its bones, a little dead.