The Political Economy of Palestine (with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour)

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Thank you, Russ.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Well, first of all, thank you very much, Russ. I’m extremely glad that my essay resonated with you. As you said, people can disagree about a lot of the claims, but they have to engage, and at least attempt to find a way to really understand the conflict, outside of all the morality plays that have dominated. And the morality plays, as I explain in the essay–and that’s kind of actually what you lay down right now–are actually part of the problem. Whether you care deeply about Israel or care deeply about the Palestinian people, you have to take these claims seriously because, ultimately, if this is any truth to the claims of the essay, helping these people ultimately means dealing with this very difficult problem.

Ultimately, what I’m trying to explain here, that Palestine, as it exists today as a global phenomenon, as you said, a globally salient issue–and you have a list of the leftists, and liberal, and the Arab nationalists, and Islamists, and so on–so it’s extremely globally–it’s probably the most globally salient issue today–is not really primarily a place, or a people, or a cause. It’s really a self-reproducing system of political economic extraction.

I call it an autopoietic symbolic convertibility machine that converts victimhood, in that particular site of conflict, into mutually reinforcing forms of value across all of these different stalls at the ideological market at once. That is, it became central to our own ideological meaning-making and the politics that come around this.

This has not been always the case. This is why I insist people to understand that I’m talking about as it is today. There’s a background of how this came to be–there’s a history–but this is how it became to be today.

It has been like this in the Middle East for quite some time. As a matter of fact, one could make the argument, and I would make the argument, that it originated like this, this system of symbolic convertibility, or a mining site of value out of a certain story of victimhood. It started like that in the Middle East since 1948 already, perhaps even before. But, with the great ideological systems of the Middle East, primarily Arab nationalism and revolutionary Third-Worldism–and both of them were closely linked–and later Islamism. What we have seen in the last 10 years or so is the complete success, or the catastrophic success, of the globalization of that system, of that political economic extractive system, really on a global scale, that operates even in domestic Western and American politics today.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Well, it’s quite pervasive, that is Palestine/anti-Zionism. There’s a question here if there is actually any distinction–how much distinction actually is between both? There is some distinction, but a lot of the content of Palestine as a word symbol, is that negationist impulse that is entirely directed and concretized in Israel and Zionism.

It’s central to Egyptian identity, sadly. The entire Middle East is an extremely complex place. Everywhere on the planet is a complex place. But the Middle East, as every learned man knows, has been a very dysfunctional region for quite some time. This functionality goes on many levels that has been confounding experts, scholars. You have religious problems, political problems. You have constant state collapse, inability to produce stable structures–with notable exceptions: Israel, the Arab Gulf. You have revolutionary regime, seemingly endemic radicalism, antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and so on and so forth. All the phenomena of dysfunction that everyone knows.

And Egypt is one of the better cases. I mean, it went through waves of instability, it suffers from extremely persistent authoritarianism, and lack of democracy, and civic liberties, but at least it’s one of the more stable states. Even its stability–it hides a lot of confusion. What is really the main protagonist of history in Egypt? Is it Egypt itself? Is it Arabs? Is it Islam? It’s the questions of identity that, again, started really explosively in the Middle East. They are being also globalized.

So, I grew up in this confusion in Egypt in the 1990s, which also in the 1990s in Egypt witnessed a wave of Islamic violence before it kind of subsided by the late 1990s. But, central to all of this confusion always, and what brought it all back together to some sort of a cohesive idea of the self, was the hatred towards Israel, the hatred towards Zionism that we–whether you think you’re a Muslim, whether you think you’re primarily Arab, whether you think you’re primarily Egyptian–ultimately the rock, the solid rock, is the fact that we are at war with Israel. And this manifested itself pretty much in all forms of cultural production, from music to film, to literature.

And I write about this extensively in my Substack. As a child, I was fascinated by this. It’s a really large myth that organizes life. The government invests in it, the opposition movements invest in it, the Islamist movement invests in it.

So, it has also central political salience within the Egyptian political system itself. And, growing up, I was just fascinated by this clear centrality. I started to become gradually obsessed with it, and, of course, with all the antisemitic atmosphere–very thick atmosphere–around this. I basically dedicated my life to try to understand the evils of Zionism and the evils of Israel.

And as I grew up, and I started to develop my understanding, I understood that I was inside a myth that is extremely dysfunctional and disastrous. And, trying to deal with it with Egypt was extremely difficult. I had clashes with the government, had to flee in 2012. Since then, I’ve been in the United States. And since then, given that this is now, truly is the formative story of my life, I’ve been investing many years in trying to understand why, and how come the society that I came from chose to organize itself, or the way it thinks morally and politically, around this issue, specifically.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Well, it definitely was like that till I was grown up. I hope it’s a little better. I haven’t been to Egypt since 2012, and the country has been through a lot. You had a Muslim Brotherhood presidency. You had a coup: Sisi. My feeling that there were some progress, given the fact that there were other real issues in terms of stability, economy, and so on. But my feeling is that there has been a major regression since October 7th, for various reasons.

But yes: so, growing up, you’ll find specifically–of course, I deal many times with intellectuals and elite culture. So, Arab intellectuals, who are overwhelming–you have two options, either Leftist Arab intellectual or an Islamist Arab intellectual. For a long time, it was this strict dichotomy. The secular Arab intellectual was some variation of the Left: either has loyalties to some form of the Old Left–Arab nationalism, Nasser, and so on and so forth–or the Arab New Left, which is much more centered around Palestine as the single mobilizing issue, but without necessarily any grand vision of political transformation of the region.

But, all these types of intellectual, whether the Leftists or the Islamists, had an extremely uncanny way of discussing issues and ultimately finding, at the root, Israel at the bottom.

For example, I do remember specifically when the wave[?] of global anti-globalization, which was a major wave of protests and activism in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East in the 1990s and the early 2000s. It kind of merged into the anti-war movement, as the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq started. Obviously, it was a moment of much ideological ferment in Arab societies, especially a place like Egypt. That was also the moment of the rise of global Jihadism and Al-Qaeda, as we know it. And even that moment of ferment in Arab society itself, you can draw a direct line to the events of the Arab Spring.

But I remember–I was young, but I was very interested in these issues, and I would watch intellectuals, let’s say, on TV, discussing stagnation of Egyptian agriculture and just the fact that Egypt has become the number one wheat importer globally; we can’t even feed ourselves; and so on and so forth. And then they discuss IMF [International Monetary Fund] austerity programs, changes of government policy that led to this.

And then they go into a chain of causality into why this happened. Well, we’re in debt; we need to restructure our economy. Part of the restructuring is these kind of tropical cash crops, but ultimately they think it’s bad: we’re shipping all of these strawberries in Europe, but our people are hungry, and we have to buy wheat from Russia.

Well, why did it have to end up this way? Well, our political or our economic project failed because of what Sadat did, let’s say, at the late 1970s in terms of liberalization. Well, why did he do that? Well, he did that because of Camp David. What was Camp David? It was a peace agreement that guarantees the security of Israel. So, ultimately, it will come down why these intellectuals think that the Egyptian economy is suboptimally organized, it’ll be actually because of Zionism.

You can do this pretty much into others. The absence of democracy is a big one. I mean, you find intellectuals doing that in the United States. Shadi Hamid, for instance, who writes a lot on Arab and Muslim issues at The Washington Post, keeps making this point many times, which is that Israel is central to the absence of democracy and human rights in Arab societies, because the number one objective of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is protecting the security of Israel. Well, if you get democracy in a neighboring country–say, Jordan and Egypt–in all likelihood, you’re going to get someone anti-Zionist in power, because that’s the popular sentiment.

So, they have to suppress democracy and human rights, support all of these decrepit autocrats, in order to maintain the security of Israel.

So, if there is an Arab somewhere in Yemen or Algeria who is being tortured in the prisons of the police state in which they live, ultimately, through that chain of causality, it’s because of Israel and because of Zionism.

And that’s quite convincing. I mean, you have large intellectual structures that are built in order to make these large structural analyses that then center on Israel.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: It’s more than ideological. I think it’s directly political. That is–I think ultimately these ideas succeed, aside from they have their own compelling aesthetic power. I mean, they are aesthetically total, final. They are quite comprehensive in what they can include.

But I don’t think that this is the reason that they are persistent. I think the reason that they are persistent is actually interest. This serves interest. As you said, it serves the interest of a lot of–almost everyone involved in the process of ideological production, including the regimes that tacitly either allow this or promote it themselves.

I mean, the Egyptian regime is a big example that its own media constantly promote this point of view. Specifically–well, what does the ideology itself achieves? You are right: it blames–things are not good for you, not because of me, not because of what we’re doing, it’s because of someone else.

It does more than that. It forecloses–it occupies–any place in which real political analysis can emerge. That is, once it becomes established, it becomes total. It becomes so intuitive that even the chain of causality is not really on a–when you go down from the intellectual level to just kind of a mass layman level, they don’t even need these chains of causality established. It’s just–it’s direct. A lot of our problems are because of Israel, and so on.

Whether on the intellectual level or the mass level, what you have is: you have this cognitive trap in which now you’re trapped into this self-reinforcing idea that can reproduce itself, and revalidate itself, and rejustify itself, that then occupies the cognitive space through which you should have started to look at your problems objectively. You should have started to produce an actual analysis of why the economy is not functioning well. There is no economic mobility, stagnation, and so on and so forth.

And obviously, an autocratic regime has a deep interest in promoting this because, once it’s there, they actually have to do much less in terms of speech control, in terms of censorship, in terms of speech policing. This is actually true for a lot of these Arab regimes that–by the way, they are no near the levels of autocracy, let’s say, China or North Korea. And they don’t need to be, because ultimately this kind of ideological method of control is completely self-enforcing, self-producing. You don’t need to police the people’s speech themselves.

But, the same regime–now here’s the problem of Palestine. You must control the flame. That is, because of the revolutionary potency of this very word symbol itself, you can’t let it get out of control. Because, then that can be weaponized and mobilized against you. And that’s what the oppositions movements try to do.

Again, Egypt is the example I know best, because I grew up there. So, the regime would be holding the flame of liberation of Palestine and the hatred for Israel, and then the Islamic movements primarily will try to even raise the flame up even further as to consume the regime by pointing out, ‘Oh, you’re right, but you are the one who are guaranteeing the peace of Israel.’–

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: You’re too soft. Yes. You’re too soft on Israel. Not just you’re too soft: you’re a collaborator. You have security arrangements with them, you have security collaboration.

So, then the opposition tries to raise the flame even further in order for it to start burning the regime itself. These Arab regimes then have these multiple thermostats that they have to all the time adjust the heat of this anti-Israel sentiment. It has to be just enough to keep people from thinking about their political problems and the real nature of the political system in which they’re living, but not too high as to start hurting the regime itself.

Now, this gets more complex when you know the fact that this same issue is also a regional game. It’s not just that you’re playing this game domestically–in your domestic politics–you’re playing it against other regimes.

So, for example, you have a rival state. Qatar is a chief example. Qatar was the main instigator of a lot of instability during the Arab Spring. Everybody remembers the 2017 blockade by a lot of Arab countries against Qatar, specifically because of sponsorship of Muslim Brotherhood movements, which are the main threat to a lot of these Arab regimes, and Al Jazeera, which is the main ideological media instrument, the largest media instrument in the Middle East. And people know what Al Jazeera does. So, you’re playing another game against Qatar.

Now, Qatar then can–and often does, and that’s the way they do–inflame Palestine among your own population in order to make you unstable. Of course, Iran is another big example. I mean, Iran ultimately is trying to outmaneuver all the Arab states by making them the custodian of the word symbol of Palestine.

So, you’re playing this game domestically. You need Palestine, but at the same time, you don’t need it too much. You need to block the opposition from capitalizing on it. This is how you see the accusation and counter-accusation of, in Arab politics, ‘Oh, you’re the one who is a product of Israel.’ ‘Oh no, you are the one who is a product of Israel.’ But at the same time, you’re not the only one. This game is actually part of a bigger board in which a lot of other regimes are playing against each other as well.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Well,let me put another layer of analysis so we can have even a bigger picture. You’re playing the domestic game: so a regime is trying to extract consent and acquiescence from its population through the Palestine word symbol. Regionally, regimes try to extract influence from each other through the same word symbol. But then there’s also an international layer, which is: a lot of these Arab states extract massive concessions and privileges from Washington through playing the game itself.

There are a lot of examples, but let’s take Jordan and Egypt. Both of them are largely dependent on U.S. support and U.S. aid. And, the U.S. support and the U.S. aid is intrinsically linked, inherently linked, to their relationship with Israel.

So, all of the Arab economies, almost all, are various forms of rentier economies. They live by extracting rent from natural resources and so on.

Egypt really has two forms of rent extraction. The first one is the Suez Canal, and the second one is their border with Israel and Gaza. It’s a major piece of leverage from which they can extract from Washington a lot of concessions and a lot of aid. As a matter of fact, even in DC, here in Washington, when you hear people talking about cutting U.S. aid globally, one of the few exceptions they make is Egypt, specifically because of just its centrality to stability of the region through their peace with Israel.

The border of Gaza is one big source of extraction. Just very quickly, when the Biden Administration came to the White House, obviously, they had serious problems with both MBS [Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia] and President Sisi because of authoritarianism, human rights, and so on and so forth. And, President Biden didn’t talk to President Sisi at all after he came to office. The first time ever President Biden picked up the phone and called President Sisi was actually in the Hamas-Israel War of 2021, because then Egypt becomes very important because of their border with Gaza. So, you have also this international level.

Now, with Saudi Arabia, when you’re talking about a state like Saudi Arabia [inaudible 00:30:42] and the Arab Gulf, when they are talking about normalization with Israel, they are playing all of these games at once, but usually their most important extraction is from the United States. Saudi Arabia wanted a civil nuclear program–a nuclear program–

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: F-35s, and so on and so forth. So, the calculus, especially in–there was a moment, sadly, this moment had passed, which is the moment that made the Abraham Accords possible–when it seemed possible to pull out of that game.

So, what I’m saying, by the way, all Arab statesmen understand fully, better than I do, because that’s actually their politics. That’s the game that they have to play the moment that they wake up in the morning.

The UAE [United Arab Emirates] had an extremely daring vision to really pull out of that game. Because, that game is destructive. It makes regional politics extremely difficult. It militates against states’ pursuing their interests transparently and honestly. The UAE obviously has a lot of ambition. It’s a small country that’s extremely wealthy and extremely successful. So they wanted to pull out of the game.

Not just–‘Pull out of the game’ would be actually the wrong term. They wanted to turn the game around. They basically wanted to turn it a different game in which accepting Israel then becomes the main asset that a lot of the Arab states can have when they are dealing with the West, when they are dealing with each other, and so on.

It was really a daring vision, and it seemed possible for a few years. Even Saudi Arabia was going in that direction. What happened is that, after October 7th, given the massive geopolitical shifts that came out of–you had a domino effect. First of all, the gradual weakening of Iran by Israeli military action that ultimately changed the level of the Iranian threat itself. And the Iranian threat was one of the main forces that determined the structure of power in the region, relationship–and relationships in the region. That is, for a long time, every single relationship in the region had to be triangulated through the Iranian threat and calculated against the Iranian threat. So obviously that changes everything–the global salience of Palestine, I think, actually the Saudis and Arab statesmen are actually taking that into consideration. That is, they are actually looking at American domestic politics and wondering about the future of American support of Israel and what does that mean in terms of the asset that Israel represents.

Ultimately, I believe the Saudis recalculated. That, they can actually gain more by pulling back from the path that they were contemplating, along with the UAE, and actually go playing the old game. And, that way, they can have then a comparative advantage over both the Israelis–who are now becoming a formidable military power that is threatening to a lot of Arab states–and even against the Emiratis, who are becoming the most successful Arab state and most successful economy. And playing them against them will allow the Saudis to carve a place for their own regional leadership. I believe that’s what the Saudis recalculated. That is, that they can win more by playing the old game back.

And as you said, you can see–I mean, I’m writing something about this in which I kind of see in the Saudi official statements the gradual changes in the language after October 7th that went through phases: ‘Well, we can’t ignore the Palestinians anymore.’ ‘Well, we need some path towards a Palestinian State.’

And then, it really hardened in 2025 into: ‘A Palestinian State is the only way forward for the region.’ Which is–the Saudis are extremely–Saudi statesmen, and I talked to a few of them–are extremely educated and intelligent people. I believe they actually know that this is not a possibility. Like, they themselves know that a Palestinian State is not really viable at all, given the conditions of the Palestinians themselves, whether in the West Bank or in Gaza; and, of course, the problems of internal Israeli politics. I mean, this is almost an impossible ask.

So I believe they are demanding the impossible because that’s not really what they are demanding. It’s a component in the new calculation that they’re doing, in the game that they’re playing. [More to come, 36:16]

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: I want to say something also I forgot to say: that they’re also trapped. The regime, yes, is using the word symbol, but also is trapped in the game.

Like, let’s say that I mm an Egyptian autocrat and decides tomorrow, ‘This is a terrible game. I just don’t want to play this anymore.’

Well, you do that at your own peril. First of all, your opposition is going to play that game. The Qataris are going to play that game. om their relationship with their own landscape. They don’t find it to be fearful enough

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Right. I think–there are multiple ironies here. I personally find Westerners more ideological than a lot of politicians in the Middle–definitely a lot more than almost every statesman in the Middle East, with the exception, maybe, of Iran–put it aside. But, I found both Israelis and Westerners at large–I mean, because they have all these various belief systems: liberalism and international liberalism, conservatism. And this is why I’m particularly upset at, let’s say, the intellectuals of clash of civilization, because you’re creating these narratives that really obfuscate the reality at all.

Mike Duran from Hudson had that saying that I really liked. He said that the Middle East is a cockpit of power politics. That’s definitely true. The Middle East doesn’t have a regional structure, and that has been its endemic problem. It doesn’t have a regional structure that forces countries to cooperate, and then that regional structure develops its own story. It actually doesn’t have that at all. It’s all unilateral, self-interested, non-democratic regimes that are just fighting ruthlessly and selfishly for power amongst themselves.

So, you’re right. That does not come natural to, I think, a lot of Westerners.

But I want also to emphasize it’s not just a naivete, despite that this is definitely an element. I think it’s a difference between Western liberal political structures that do function many times–I mean, problematically, I have other writings on this issue, that I don’t like–that function as a religion many times. Really, Middle Eastern states that are less ideological and much more self-interested than people think.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Well, it didn’t exist a few decades ago. This is much more difficult to talk about. You get a much more globalized view of events for the past few decades that basically resulted in the globalization of this world[?word?] symbol that now has its own power and its own salience within Western political systems themselves.

No, I think it became also like that. It became also this extractive political economic system, or basically an extension of that system that operated in the Middle East for so long, into Western politics. And this has to do with various reasons: the decline of Western institutional health, in general, that would have helped to protect against this; cultural health; so on and so forth. Desperation of various forms of political meaning-making.

But also, you do have issues of migration, the rise of post-coloniality in the university that then–it started really in the universities, in literature departments, as an academic new reading technique that then developed its own negative canon that displaced the Western canon and gradually took over the humanities out of the literature department, took over a lot of the humanities, including things that have nothing to do with Third World or colonialism, like Women’s Studies.

For example, in Women’s Studies, the hierarchy that successfully was established is that the issues of Third World come first. You find that even in Women’s Studies department. And this might explain why you should support the Hamas fighter more being angry at the Israeli women who are being raped. This actually follows from a lot of these things that was established in the humanities. Massive expansion of higher education gets a lot of people exposed to this.

Now, you have also the issue of Middle Eastern regimes that are running these extractive systems, specifically the more successful ones. Qatar is a big example. The Turks are another. Various other Arab regimes investing in this, in Western societies. They did this because they know that this amplifies the asset of the word symbol that they have in the region. That is, ultimately, it gives them more influence at your own home, at your own region, and this is what they were doing. So you[?] had that element as well, of people investing actively in this.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: It’s not an easy thing to explain. Ultimately, you are not going to pay billions of dollars–the Qatar investment specifically–Qatar is the most egregious case, $20 billion dollars or something in the American higher education system. You are buying something. You are purchasing something. These are non-democratic regimes. Qatar is a tiny state, has enormous wealth. It has no demographic or military weight at all, yet they are very influential. Look at how much we hear about Qatar. They are central to U.S. policy in the region. They host our CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command] headquarter. They’re the main Arab interlocutor with Iran, helped us reach this deal, helped President Trump get the hostages out from Hamas. You watch the World Cup games, you find Qatar Airways pretty much in every game. How come a tiny state of 300,000 people managed to gain this level of influence, access to power, access to–? This is exactly what they are buying.

Actually, people who don’t think that they would do that are the ones who are being irrational. Why wouldn’t you do that? If you have this endless stream of cash, why wouldn’t you try to convert that into a form of power that you lack otherwise?

For example, patronizing Islamists buys Qatar–let’s think about it as an extension arms. They don’t have enough people to send all over as diplomats. They really don’t. It’s a tiny population. They don’t have enough human capital to send them to represent Qatar and try to push Qatari influences in all the capitals of the world. But, once gullible Islamists think of Qatar as the holy patron of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood, they will do that. I mean, you’re buying massive influence by doing this. Again, Palestine issue doesn’t require explanation why they do that; but they managed, by the end of the day, making themselves very influential by virtue of these investments.

Now, the upshot from this is that these investments are leaving now effects on your own societies, on your own elite institutions, and your own elite education.

You see that specifically, for example, in Georgetown. I invite the audience to go to Georgetown University’s website and go to their Arab Studies Department, which is center–which is the largest in the country. Their Islamic Studies–it’s called ACMCU [Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding]–Islamic Studies Center, which is also one of the largest in the world. And go to their websites and see what their websites are talking about. See the faculty. Find one dissenting voice from a clear academic consensus that what they are doing is about Gaza, and about genocide, and about Palestine, and about Israel.

So, obviously, this is indeed happening.

Again, I don’t want to reduce this to ideological reasons, which a lot of people do. Well, it’s because of hate, and ideology, and they’re Muslim, and classic civilization. No, these people are extremely rational, and they know what they are buying, and they are buying interest and influence.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Yes, but it doesn’t necessarily emerge–I want to also be charitable to people. I mean, that would be a really malevolent reading, that everybody’s coming–no, I think a lot of people come to this, which now became a huge–there’s a huge professional class worldwide that is working on this. I mean, this is a massive, massive economic extractive system, as we said–

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Employment machine, peace processes, NGOs [non-government organizations], think about all the EU [European Union] aid. I remember, when I was researching this, just the NGO per capita in the Palestinian territories–the aid per capita–it’s just absolutely insane. The amount of Europeans who go work in Ramallah, and so on. And not just them: You have U.N. mechanisms, you have political machines, and various political systems working on this. Here, in America, in the Jewish community, there are a lot of people employed this. I mean, arguably, I am making my living from this issue. So, as you said, it has its own economic interest.

Now, it is entirely possible–and not possible: I think this is what happens–that when people come to this trying to bring in a solution, they are genuine. Because, they don’t see the system. They don’t understand the problem. They come bringing a solution. But ultimately, what it becomes: it becomes another loop. It joins another loop system. Because it’s so resistant to resolution, so ultimately, you’re just going to join the ranks of everyone who is extracting value from the system. So, I don’t want to be malevolent in this. Also–

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Right.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: But, there is cynicism. I have also a passage in the essay about this. Cynicism goes up as you move up the hierarchy. Right? Like, cynicism increases as you move up leadership.

For example, you go to political leaderships–including the Islamic Republic, I speculate–you’ll find a lot of cynicism about all of this. There is blindness all over. Everybody’s captive of the system. Everybody’s extracting.

The reason that I want to ensure that–like, yeah, I’m trying to produce a systematic analysis of this really enormous problem that we’re having, but I don’t want to be kind of a Marxist analysis in which it’s organized, it’s neat, there’s a structure, there’s a base, there’s some sort of a revolutionary subject that can destroy the system, there is an origination of it. No, there is none of that. You can’t actually point, at any point, and say that this can undo the entire system.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Well, you’re right. The analogy of cancer is not perfect, especially that cancer ultimately is a physiological, is a medical trial. Yeah–

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: This is a massive political problem. There’s a lot of power into this. I mean, people kill a large number of people to maintain power. Think about the Arab states and how much they’re ready to sacrifice with their own populations, or even the Palestinians, in order to just get a little bit–just one concession from Washington. Egypt is willing to close the border, and shut it, and ensure no Gazan passes, no matter what conditions are, just to make sure that they are very important to Washington, have a lot of leverage, and so on and so on. Not just that, but that’s one point of it.

I think the cancer analogy is still good, and the idea that you said we still fight it. I mean, I’ll still do what I’m–if I had a completely fatalist, then writing this essay would have been my very last act, rationally, if I’m engaging with this at all, and then I can just–you know, I’m done. Which many times I do feel like it. But I’m still engaging in this, because, ultimately, we’re humans, and we have a lot of both hubris and faith. And I think the latter is much better than the former. So, I do have faith that this is not–this is not going to continue forever. Nothing continues forever.

There’s a lot of people who are suffering from this. Ultimately, as you said–and I’ve started this–I’m Egyptian. I understand the central role that this plays in Egyptian political dysfunction. I’m from the Arab Spring generation. I saw the Arab Spring failed and become disastrous. And it did start with the very idealistic hopes of a lot of young people. Ultimately, I’m trying to do my part in order to contribute to understanding of a problem: hopefully, we find a way to fix.

Now, you’re right. There’s a lot of people in the Jewish community who are very sincere about this. This is the reason that most of my work with the Jewish community, I believe–I have a lot of critiques about–let me just be clear: I have a lot of critiques about Jews and about Israel.

But by the end of the day, first of all, I find them the most vulnerable position in this entire system because this system operates on their vilification. And, on obfuscating itself.

The primary mechanism–and this is maybe issue of the second I say in the critiques that I received–this whole thing operates through concealing itself by projecting it all on Israel. Israelis are doing this. In the entire conversation–what really drives me nuts in all the conversations about Israel and Palestine, it’s like no one else exists. It’s the Israelis and the Palestinians. Not as if the Turks are heavily involved, the Iranians are heavily involved, the Egyptians are heavily involved, so-and-so are heavily involved. Everybody is playing a role, and everybody is getting something out of it. ‘No, no, no. It’s the Israelis.’ Which is not true at all. The primary mechanism of mystifying itself is making it about Zionism and about Israel, and so on and so forth.

So, I find Jews in–first of all, they are still in a good position. I mean, they are able to protect themselves. That’s actually–the system runs because Israel is so resilient. I mean, if Israel collapses tomorrow, this whole thing comes down. So, they are protected; they have some amount of power.

But at the same times, they are the most vulnerable. And they are the ones who have the most interest in trying to understand it objectively because of just how threatening it is to them. So, they have an incentive–I think, in that system–they have a higher incentive to hear a contrary complex opinion like this than anyone else in the system. And that’s why I am where I am.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Well, I’m glad.

I want to say two things. First of all, about the morality play. The morality play is arguably the primary form of the basic extraction. I mean, yes, I’m trying not to put a center in the system, but there is a basic form of extraction that creates value. I mean, ultimately, okay, if you’re talking about extraction, there is value creation. This Arab autocrat, or Palestinian movement, or post-colonial intellectual in some university, when they are operating within the system, mining it, they are extracting value.

What is that form of value? That form of value is ultimately sentiment. It’s the moral sentiment and the moral enchantment of as many people as possible with this cause. That’s really, really the most fundamental level of extraction that happens. That’s why I have a religious bit at the end that, ultimately, people have to find alternative transcendent sources of meaning because, as long as this is their form of meaning, this is going to be a mining site for politics.

The other thing: I want to talk about the Palestinians. Yeah. You’re right. The system denies at all that they have agency. I actually have a section that I really like in the essay about the Palestinians. The Palestinians also are, of course, part of the system. Now, you can argue that they are in the least-privileged position, but they’re also–you’re going to do the best you can do. Everybody has agency. And they also have their own extraction.

You have a Palestinian militia that extracts, again, consent or power domestically from people, fight rival groups by claims that it is the most authentic representative of Palestine; but then will extract the regional games for resources.

I mean, we’ve seen this. This has been endemic for the Palestinian movement since its start, really, after 1967, when you had every Palestinian militia represented was a proxy of some regional power: Ba’athist Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and so on and so forth. And it’s still the case today. I mean, Hamas is a proxy of Iran. Now the PA [Palestinian Authority] is increasingly becoming a proxy of Saudi Arabia–or that’s what the Saudis actually are trying to do. So here you have two-way extraction–extraction from the bottom, extraction from the top–to get as much as you can.

If you’re talking about the actual Palestinian layman, the problem is that the system is not just exploiting–ultimately, that’s the commodity. It’s the victimhood of that Palestinian. It doesn’t exploit their suffering: it invents it. That is, the system now, in order to keep itself, it has to ensure the value keeps coming. So, it needs to invent the Palestinian victim constantly and ensure that it’s in adequate supply. That’s what UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] had become. Obviously, UNRWA, when it started, did not really–

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Yes, that deals exclusively with the Palestinians. It’s a unique institution. And it does a unique thing, which is: It actually compounds the number of refugees. It doesn’t decrease refugees: it actually increases the number. It makes it a hereditary status. This is basically a perpetuation. It’s a structural feature of the system that is responsible for the perpetuation of this statelessness as an identity because that’s, ultimately, the main currency that allows value extraction.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Well, I already kind of said the main reason. So, yeah. That’s the main critique. The essay, actually, to my surprise, was one of the most popular things I ever wrote. A lot of people read it, including pro-Palestinian activists and scholars. A lot of people had to respond to it because I think it was, indeed–a leftist academic should have done–this is what they do, as you know, this kind of structure analysis. Someone should have tried this a long time ago, but because they are part of the system, they refuse to.

So, I got a lot of pushback that, yeah, exactly what you said: ‘Well, you completely ignored Israel. You’re not saying anything about what the Israelis do, how they are extracting value from this.’

First of all, of course, the Israelis are part of this. The Israelis are extracting various forms of values from this. American Jewish communities are a part of this system. They are also extracting all kinds of value. And you can map it different ways: the left, the right, the right in Israel with its own extraction of ideological fantasies about ultimately annexation of the [?]–and so on and so forth.

Again, the reason that I completely refuse to do this is because the persistent feature–the reason that no one is able to talk about this is because the critique of Israel and Zionism, which obviously comes enhanced with a legacy of two centuries of antisemitic sentiments and propaganda, and so on and so forth, floods the field of vision with which we can actually see what’s going on. So, I purposefully did not want to do this in order to exactly make it an issue, because insisting on Israel the entire time has been the single most destructive element for any understanding or trying to solve this problem.

The second–and this meshes–so people know, I also have my deep critiques on Jews. This actually meshes very well with ethno-narcissism that a lot of Jews have. They like to feel everything’s about them. So, they also play that game, too. When everything made about Jews and Israel, they respond that it’s just–so, I wanted to get out of that entirely.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Right. The second thing is, okay, if you think that this is a valuable analysis and you think it didn’t apply to Israel, well, why didn’t you do it to yourself? Here is the methodology. Here’s my analysis. The methods are transparent. And some people did that, actually, and it was quite interesting. Some people took it and even put it in an LLM mode [large language model], and then it asked that, like, ‘Hey. Extend his analysis.’

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Effortlessly, yes. But, yeah. Basically–ultimately, what I want, force people to have is not new information, is not a new polemic, is not a new talking point that they can use in constant debating. I want to give them a way of seeing things and a way of thinking about them. So, if you’re so passionate about Israel and what Israel is doing, well, go ahead–and, you like my essay–go ahead and try to think about Israel from within that framework.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Well, so, there’s also–I have other parts of writing about this. Generally, it’s a larger thesis that I have about the modern world, in general, that, basically, in summary, that post-Christianity, or the post-Christian condition, having the post-Christian culture, is not really a Western or a Christian civilizational fact. It actually, today, is a universal condition of the modern world. Whether you are in the Middle East, whether you are in Asia, whether you are in Europe, it’s all post-Christianity.

Now, this is obviously very complex for people, and a lot of people find it weird, but I write about it extensively. And this includes a lot of Islamic movements, Muslim Islamic ideologies, and so on and so forth.

The post-Christian condition, by virtue of being post, abolished structures that meant the need for meaning. But it obviously cannot abolish the need. You do need meaning, especially as you go through life and there is suffering. You can be a population-Nietzsche as much as you want, and go left, and just live happy-go-lucky until you meet the first friction in life–the first tragedy–and you’re going to have many of those. And then that becomes a real problem, because what does that mean exactly? And that’s when you feel the wound that we are left with, and that requires explanation and requires a meaning and interpretation and redemption–a story of redemption, ultimately.

Now, that demand is bottomless, because the wound itself is bottomless. That is, the appetite for the symbol–in this case, Palestine–is insatiable, is because it’s a demand for a lost totality. And I think a lot of people understand this somehow intuitively, in a very simplified form. People say Palestine is the Jesus of the modern world. You read the pro-Palestine literature in the West now, and it is a religious devotional literature in which Palestine represents redemption for the planet, redemption for society–

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Just a few years ago. But, Palestine now absorbed that, right?

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Yeah. It became–like, queer–it’s the future of queerness. It absorbed a lot of these, kind of a black hole of modern politics.

And the reason that that has to do, indeed, with the Jewish element or the Jewish presence, center to this, and that’s a complex analysis in the issue. But because the Jew in all post-Christian ideological system was assigned or held in the position of the unresolved question about the wound itself, and about meaning, and about the lack of meaning.

Now, when it comes to that very fundamental level of, let’s say, where I came from–let’s go back to where I came from–to Egypt. You are living in a stable, but dysfunctional, country. You really don’t have economic prospects. You’re worried about your children. It’s really bad. Like, if you’re an Egyptian middle class or lower, which is the majority of the country, you have no political power. You see a policeman in a uniform in the street, and it’s, like, basically, a thug or a mafia. You just don’t know what they’re going to come demand from you, and you have no power to resist. It’s just not really a good condition.

Then you turn on the TV, and you have this crisp image broadcasting from Doha with a very fluent, hijab-wearing, highly educated woman with very eloquent Arabic, probably has a Ph.D. from Georgetown University, and probably even a green card–because the American system loves these people. And then she tells you that this political dysfunction in a country like Egypt–the lack of democracy, the lack of rights, the lack of economic prospects–is because of Israel. Israel did this to you.

There are vulgar forms of this that now happens online in the Western space. Like: ‘This is what the Jews took from you.’ Here you have a bargain. You have the serpent making you a proposition that, basically, you’re going to self-justify, you’re going to justify yourself completely and utterly, and feel good about yourself as a victim, instead of actually trying to face your own reality. And the problem is that most people say yes to this proposition. Ultimately, that’s what creates that false system of meaning that then becomes politically salient, that men who are fighting for power can pick up and try to form into the various weapons that they fight each other with. And that’s, at bottom, the tragedy and the problem of this.

I mean, I don’t want to sound fatalistic, but it sounds like a bigger[?]–who can deal–I remember one of the comments on the essay was, like, ‘Okay, what am I going to do about hundreds of millions of people? This is not anything anyone could do.’ Which is true; but I believe, ultimately, this is the issue.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Yes. And that’s what a–there is a religious–and now I am spoiling the essay to people. There is obviously a religious end to the essay in which, basically, that a real conversion is ultimately what is needed. An inner conversion, a teshuvah in the Hebrew sense, in which man turns from his own self-justification and just faces his reality with sober eyes, honestly, before God.

I do believe that the greatest tragedy of Islam in the 20th century–again, I have a lot of criticism on the clash of civilization thesis and its intellectuals–because multiple things. They obfuscated how politics actually work, what is actually the geopolitical structure in the Middle East. They led people to think about fairytales and fantasies that completely mystified the real power politics and the awfulness of a lot of these powerful men in the Middle East have been doing.

But also, because it completely has hidden one of the largest tragedies of the world of the 20th century, which is that the religious structure of Islam, of pre-modernist[?], completely collapsed under the pressure of a lot of these modern ideologies. And was reconstituted. Muslims started to reinvent–it’s this kind of collapsed civilization that tried to restore itself by trying to assemble its symbolic fragments, tried to express themselves now in all of these new ideologies that they faced from Europe.

That’s how he[?the hypothesized typical individual?–Econlib Ed.] ended up with a weirdly, seemingly uniform understanding of Islam that’s extremely widespread amongst Muslims: that Islam is about liberating Palestine, is about politics, is about civilizational struggle against the West.

None of this existed before the 20th century. It’s one of the greatest tragedy that this could happen.

This story, which I tell in many other essays, the reason I tell is not just to justify, or defend, or explain, actually, what I think had happened, but actually to warn that, if something at this scale could happen, it could happen to you, too. If you’re American, if you’re a Jew, who you are–your very language, you could completely have this amnesia. Your language completely transforms. Who you are is completely lost by these ideologies that completely warp the human mind. And you can become something monstrous and ugly. And you’re completely unaware of it.

Which is sadly–we see some beginnings of this happening in the United States and a lot of American institutions. So even this very large story, I tell now as an American, as a cautionary tale to America, because we are on this path. Palestine now is as much our cause as it is the Middle East’s. Our universities are just as bad as a lot of the universities in Cairo and Lebanon.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Me, too. Thank you. I have children. I hope I’m wrong.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Thank you, Russ.