A Metacritique of Palestine

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

The Abrahamic Metacritique, May 18, 2026. Read the full essay here.

There is no shortage of writing about Palestine. This small and provincial conflict has generated more commentary, more theory, more denunciation, more advocacy, and more counter-advocacy than any comparable political question of the modern era, and the volume of this commentary has stood in inverse proportion to its analytical value.

The reason for such a lack of value is that what has been written is, with rare exceptions, written from inside the very structure that the writing claims to describe, and the writing therefore serves the structure rather than illuminating it. The liberal who writes about human rights, the leftist who writes about settler colonialism, the realist who writes about regional security, the conservative who writes about the clash of civilizations, the Islamist who writes about Crusaders, the Arab nationalist who writes about Western betrayal, and the post-Christian European who writes about the unbearable irony of Jewish power are not, despite their mutual hostility, engaged in incompatible projects. They are engaged in the same project, which is the conversion of the victimhood, regardless of its details, produced at a particular site into a particular kind of symbolic capital usable within a particular ideological market. They quarrel about the terms of the conversion. They do not quarrel about the conversion itself, because the conversion is what they all live on.

This essay is an attempt to step outside that conversion long enough to describe the system that makes it possible. The attempt is necessarily imperfect, because no one stands fully outside the system, and the writer who claims such a vantage is either lying or mistaken about his own position.

What is possible is the more modest achievement of seeing the Palestine system as a structure rather than as a contest within which one has already chosen a side. This requires the reader to suspend, at least for the duration of the essay, the question of which party is right and to consider instead the question of what kind of arrangement produces the very ground on which the question of rightness gets posed. The reader will recognize, I hope, that this suspension is not a refusal of moral judgment but its precondition. One cannot judge what one has not first understood, and the Palestine word-symbol has been, for at least three generations, a question about which everyone has had opinions, and almost no one has had understanding.…

Continues here. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is an adjunct fellow at the Z3 Institute and editor of The Abrahamic Critique on Substack.

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The Kafkaesque Trial Facing Israel and Its Supporters

Benjamin Kerstein

The Dispatch, May 22, 2026. Read the full essay here.

It is quite common for defenders of Israel to preface their statements with the phrase, “Israel isn’t a perfect country,” which is true, as far as it goes, but rather misses the point. Given the blizzard of defamation and demonization that surrounds the Jewish state, the issue is not whether Israel is perfect, but whether it is as imperfect as its enemies claim.

The answer is self-evident, because no country could be as imperfect as Israel’s enemies claim. Even Nazi Germany, perhaps the one completely uncomplicated case of an outright demonic regime, was only charged (rightly) with wanting to take over the world, whereas Israel is regularly charged with having already taken over the world. Demonization can only be taken so far before it takes on a distinct quality of the ludicrous.

This simple fact was demonstrated once again last week when the New York Times published Nicholas Kristof’s impossibly long opinion column (tellingly, it was not published in the news section), charging that Israel systemically sexually abuses Palestinian prisoners, including through the physical impossibility of trained rape dogs.…

Continues here. Benjamin Kerstein is an associate fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Self-Defense: A Jewish Manifesto (Wicked Son, 2025).

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Open Hiding

Izabella Tabarovsky

Quillette, June 1, 2026. Read the full essay here.

My father’s dissertation adviser emigrated from the USSR on the eve of his postdoctoral defence. In the Soviet Union, emigration was an act of betrayal, and by the time my father appeared before the committee tasked with approving his defence, his fate had already been sealed. Committee members peppered him with questions so far afield from the subject of his dissertation that he—a brilliant 29-year-old geophysicist—never stood a chance.

My father understood immediately what was happening. The year was 1974, and Soviet anti-Zionist hysteria was at a peak, blocking countless Jews from university admissions, academic advancement, professions, and entire career fields. He walked out, returned to his desk, and went on to do work so innovative that, when we landed in America in 1990, a major company grabbed him and never let him go. Shortly before emigrating, he successfully defended a brand new dissertation, but by then he had nothing left to prove to himself—or anybody else.

Twenty-five years after our emigration, as the ghosts of antisemitism we thought we’d left behind reappeared across the West, I asked my father: Were the people on that committee personally antisemitic? “No, no,” he told me. “They just knew what time and country they were living in.”

Antisemitism is often viewed as visceral hatred of Jews. But that’s a limited understanding of the phenomenon.

Antisemitism is also a politics and a zeitgeist; a conspiracy theory that feeds mass hysteria about Jewish power; an underlying culture that teaches people that Jews are different, they don’t belong, they aren’t on our side—and ultimately, that they are our misfortune. It draws an invisible line between Jews and the broader society, step by step normalising their marginalisation and disappearance….

Continues here. Izabella Tabarovsky is a senior fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide (Wicked Son, 2025).

Read "Open Hiding" at Quillette

David H.—I’m thrilled to share with you my latest essay in the journal Sapir. In it I critique the classical Diaspora model of allyship, in which we make allies only with those who share our broader vision of democratic, liberal values. and show how it has failed. I then propose an alternative “Druze model” that more appropriately fits the tumultuous moment we currently live in. As I write:

In the wake of October 7, when Jews around the world find themselves in the thick of an existential battle, arguments of this type no longer seem to make sense. True, we should never partner with outright antisemites, Left or Right. But we should no longer impose broader litmus tests on allyship. We should no longer, to use Hirsh’s formulation, “keep some distance from those who do not share our values.” We have tried this. It has failed us.

Instead, we should ally with whoever helps us win.

Read the essay here.

Read the Essay in Sapir Journal